96 Before Agriculture
Two ways of being in the world yield two kinds of human condition, each with
its own set of circumstances. History reveals that exponents of the one have made
war on the other, and the world has changed accordingly. Yet these different ways
of thought are, as potential, within everyone. Human beings can reach into them-
selves and find two versions of life, two ways of speaking and knowing. Internally,
many people are torn between these two ways. Individuals are born into one or the
other society, and therefore learn its particular skills and disposition; but nobody
is born to be either. The potential for language, and therefore for thought itself, is
a shared human characteristic. The specifics of the language that are learned – not
language itself – are what embody the intellectual and personal characteristics of
one or another kind of mind and society.
What makes us who we are? Things we inherit, be they aspects of body or the
hard-wiring of the mind. But language means that much of who we are does not
lie within us as individuals so much as between us. The child is shaped by the soci-
ety she lives in as a result of how others speak and behave towards her. All of us
learn and live in relationships with one another: much of our reality lies in how
these relationships take shape, function and maybe fail. Much of who people are
comes from events and processes that are more than just internal and personal.
And this is where we can see a particular importance of hunter-gatherer societies:
they have established and relied upon respect for children, other adults and the
resources on which people depend. If these relationships are not respectful, then
everything will go wrong. The sickness of particular individuals, the failure of the
hunt, the weather itself – these are all expressed in terms of relationship. The
egalitarian individualism of hunter-gatherer societies, arguably their greatest
achievement and their most compelling lesson for other peoples, relies on many
kinds of respect.
The hunter-gatherer achievement, however, is not a matter of mutually exclu-
sive qualities. Every healthy human being has the potential for all human qualities;
nobody develops one kind of strength to the complete exclusion of its opposite. To
this extent we are all hunters and farmers. The differences between one kind of
society and the other are therefore to do with balance. And the imbalance has
arisen because farmers have achieved such complete domination over hunter-
gatherers.
Many hunter-gatherer societies have made accommodations to farmers and
herders. In many parts of southern Africa and South America, hunter-gatherers
have created gardens and become shepherds or farmworkers or suppliers of pots
and spears. In North America, many became cowboys, and some worked as domes-
tic servants. Modern hunter-gatherers have taken advantage of farmers to supple-
ment their own resources, or they have looked to the new wealth of farmers to help
them deal with the loss of land and the destruction of wild animals that the farm-
ers’ arrival has caused.
But in many places, in many ways, hunter-gatherers are not at ease with farming
and herding ways of life. Again and again, the farmers, while using their hunter-
gatherer neighbours as casual and cheap labour, complain about their ‘unreliability’.