98 Before Agriculture
industrial developments, to an extreme. They are suppressors rather than exempli-
fiers of the hunter-gatherer. They live by the systems of privilege and organization
that are hallmarks of the agricultural mind.
No: the hunter-gatherers in the heartland of the exiles, living in the nation-
states of farmers and in the cities farmers have built, are opponents of the domi-
nant order. They oppose hierarchy and challenge the need to control both other
people and the land itself. Consciously or not, they are radicals in their own lives.
At the least, they experience the tension in themselves that comes from a longing
not to plan and not to acquiesce in plans; at most, they use a mixture of knowledge
and dreams to express their vision. It is artists, speculative scientists and those
whose journeys in life depend on not quite knowing the destination who are close
to hunter-gatherers, who rely upon a hunter-gatherer mind.
The visionaries in society are always there, and they are perhaps a part of us all.
The agriculturalist mind and its economic order never quite obscure evidence of
the hunters. Many people feel the strain of a way of life and a mindset that disal-
low all forms of improvisation and intuition. The controlling features of a life that
has no place for the hunter-gatherer mind create a longing for spirituality and
underpin many forms of protest, from Quaker ideals of equality to the call for
deschooling society, from New-Age mysticism to concern about rainforests.
There is a common experience of something being wrong that may receive real
illumination from a much more direct acknowledgement of rival forms of mind.
Rival forms of mind are, of course, reducible to rival forms of society – and, in the
end, to the displacement of one kind of economy by another.
Hunter-gatherers may well represent a need in all peoples to experience a pro-
found form of freedom. But they are also within the social universe in a literal way:
there are hunter-gatherer societies, along with other indigenous peoples, whose
demands for cultural survival and actual territories are no less vociferous than they
ever were. In every part of the colonial world, the issue of aboriginal rights is alive
as an issue whose urgency and poignancy are augmented by the prospect of a final
destruction.
In Australia, Aborigines contest government and industrial invasions of their
lands. There have been struggles in the courts, in political campaigns and on the
land itself. Settlers still want to eliminate hunter-gatherer claims to the Australian
outback. Aborigine organizations protest, and in some crucial places win, their
right to their own way of life, their own heritage, their own place on the earth. In
1992, the Australian High Court established a common law principle of native
title to native lands.
In South Africa, the -Khomani San, the remaining Bushmen of the southern
Kalahari, have managed to survive their complete displacement and dispossession,
after 50 years of subsistence at the most destitute margins of South African farms
and townships. With the fall of the apartheid system, these few survivors began a
campaign for the return of their lands and for the right to live in whatever combi-
nation of social and economic systems they choose for themselves. In March 1999,
the South African government accepted their claim and agreed to return some