Mind 101be able to take advantage of employment opportunities arising with new activity on the subarctic
frontier. (Plans of this kind for the most part failed very quickly.)
1 In Frontiers, a book that looks at the web of intergroup conflicts that constitutes the early history
of the southern African Cape, Neil Mostert gives many details about how both settlers and Xhosa
herders thought about and behaved towards Khoihoi and San peoples. The quote I use is from
comments made by John Ovington, master of the Benjamin, on seeing the Khoihoi of the Cape
in 1693. The words of Pyrard de Laval, written in 1610, are also revealing: ‘Of all people they are
the most bestial and sordid... They eat ... as do dogs ... they live ... like animals’ (Frontiers,
p108). The fate of Tasmania’s hunter-gatherers is described in Mark Cocker’s Rivers of Blood. See
p115ff and p127 for the quotes I use.
The literature reveals many voices that concur in their suggestion that the ‘savages’ Europeans
encountered during the early years of exploration and colonization were not quite human. Of
course, many societies and nations dehumanize their enemies and competitors. Yet to say that
men, women and children who have languages, beliefs, clothing, implements and art are nonethe-
less something other than human is both strange and troubling. When aboriginal women are also
the objects of sexual desire and the bearers of colonists’ children, the suggestion that they are not
human appears to be as ridiculous as it is grotesque. All the more striking, therefore, to find it
occurs in so much commentary by settlers and explorers as they arrived in new frontiers.
There are, of course, some counterexamples, among which are the observations in G. F. Lyon’s
Private Journal about the Inuit of the Igloolik area, whom he visited often when icebound in
north Hudson Bay in the 1820s. Lyon was impressed in many ways by the people, whose snow-
houses he visited, and who, in turn, visited Lyon’s ship. Yet even in these sympathetic and seem-
ingly accurate reports, there are troubling descriptions of the Inuit visitors’ taste for sugar and salt
and their reactions to liquor.
2 An account of the Las Casa/Sepulveda debate is given in Lewis Hanke’s Aristotle and the American
Indians. There is also an article on the subject in Thomas Berger’s A Long and Terrible Shadow.
3 Mexica (or Aztec), Maya and Inca societies constituted the ‘high civilizations’ of the Americas.
The Mexica world – including its use of human sacrifice – is described by Inge Clendinnen in her
book Aztecs. Marvin Harris’s Cannibals and Kings documents, and speculates about the rationales
for sacrifice and cannibalism in the region. It is important to emphasize here again that Aztec
society was very distant from hunter-gatherer modes of life.
4 Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum about life being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ comes from his
Leviathan, first published in 1651. For a compelling account of how the philosophical views of
both Hobbes and John Locke related to the development of capitalism, see C. B. Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.
5 Vico, writing in the 1740s, sought to create a philosophy of history and a theory of knowledge in
which the artefacts of humans (from chairs to social and economic events) could be known with
certainty – unlike the creations of God (i.e. the natural world), which could not thus be known.
His speculations about a ‘savage state’ rather surprisingly include a theory about a transition from
hunters to herders, representing a shift from ‘bestial wandering’ to a reliance on pasture. Vico’s
work is cited in Alan Barnard’s essay ‘Images of hunters and gatherers in European thought’.
The idea that human beings are born free and then enslaved by the evils of civilization is associ-
ated with Rousseau and the romantic tradition within the Enlightenment school of philosophy.
But Hugo Grotius, the Dutch theorist of law, noted in the early 1600s that ‘foragers’ lived ‘with-
out toil’, and Engels, writing in the 1880s, saw in hunter-gatherer systems evidence of both
‘primitive communism’ and matriarchy. In this regard, Engels’s Family, Private Property and the
State stands as a fascinating attempt to use anthropology as the basis for a social critique of 19th-
century society. For a review of the history of this issue, see Alan Barnard, op. cit., pp375–383.
Barnard also quotes Montesquieu’s 1748 De l’esprit des lois; Hegel, writing in 1820; and Marx,
writing in 1857 (pp378–379).