BOOK REPORT: THE OTHER SIDE OF EDEN by HUGH BRODY

 

“Imagine the crystal darkness of an Arctic night. A canopy of stars and a glowing arc of aurora, the northern lights. A vast astral flickering and dancing; yet a sense of eternal, unmoving space. Under the moonlight, the surface of the world shines and fades into the distance. The sky is cloudless, open, with clearness that is like a sound, a crackling of frozen silence that many Arctic travellers claim to be able to hear. And there is a wind, strong enough to blow the snow across the ice.” (3)

 

SO BEGINS ANTHROPOLOGIST HUGH BRODY’S ENGAGING MEMOIR of his experiences living among contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, from his time spent with the Inuit of Pond Inlet in the High Arctic, and later with the Dunne-za or Beaver Tribe of the Halfway River Reserve in the forests and foothills of northern British Columbia. Hugh writes with passion and understanding about ways of life—ways of being—in the world that, while endangered by ever-encroaching modernity—both in its urban and rural forms—nevertheless, they continue to exist on the margins of so-called “civilization”, and remain cultures which are vibrant, rich, historied, and foundational to our understanding of who we are as a species, while demonstrating through their skilful lifestyles the modes of existence that are available to us still. 

HUGH BEGINS his book by describing how he learned the language of the Inuit people of the Eastern Arctic, "Inuktitut", a dialect of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. Hugh relates his time at Baffin Island’s “Pond” with Simon Anaviapik and his family, and how he laboured to understand both the language and life-ways of a traditional hunter-gatherer culture during the 1970s. Hugh came to realize how intimately connected indigenous languages were to the land and how, “this whole landscape…had been given a set of complete human shapes—names and purposes and meaning—by Inuktitut,” the language of the land and the people who live there. 

AND LATER, IN DESCRIBING the loss of native languages through decades of colonial administration and Residential School attendance, Hugh writes movingly of a land where now:

 

“[t]here is…a silence that marks the loss of the words that give this place—like many such places— its fullest and richest expression. The loss of the people’s own names for their hills, rivers, lakes, bays, peaks, slopes, islands, trails; and of their ways of evoking the origins, significance, humour and poignancy of the landscape. The loss of those meanings, as George Gosnell [Nisga’a artist, residential school survivor, and elder] put it, “come out crystal clear when you are speaking.” (180)

 

TODAY, WE LAMENT the loss of so many indigenous languages and how many are spoken now only by a handful of elders, a trend found throughout the world. As with concerns over the loss of biodiversity on our ever-warming planet, the loss of “linguistic-diversity” is also a problem. Hugh suggests it is important to understand other languages, particularly indigenous ones. His study of Inuktitut, for instance, allowed him greater access and appreciation for the world of Anaviapik’s people; to understand, through their words how the land of the far north had shaped them and how they, in turn, shaped it. Or, perhaps, it is better to say how they “mapped” it through their words, until speaking about the land was the same thing as speaking about themselves.

 

BRODY’S BOOK is divided thematically into chapters: “Inuktitut”, “Creation”, “Time”, “Words”, “Gods” and “Mind”.  In his first chapter, he reminds us that humans have been hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, and that 90% of our ancestral lineage was formed within the nomadic lifestyle of hunting game and gathering fruit, nuts, berries, and wild grains. It is only recently, after the last Ice Age, that humanity’s second, great life-way of agriculture came to be.

 

   Çatalhöyük

IN EUROPE the earliest known instance of cultivating grains and domesticating animals occurs in Greece around 6000BC. In the Levant and “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East, in what are now Iraq, Iran and southern Turkey, there is evidence of earlier agricultural settlements whose practitioners no doubt exported or migrated their agrarian culture westward into the European sub-continent. 

HUGH MAKES THE INTERESTING POINT that, except for remnant hunter-gatherer societies existing in the harshest hinterlands, our world today consists of agricultural societies, a framing somewhat at odds, I think, with many of us who live in industrialized nations or even so-called “post-industrial” societies. Most people think in terms of progress, of having moved beyond the neolithic tribalism of nomadic hunter-gatherers, and beyond, again, the rural agrarianism that advancing science and technology has apparently freed many societies from. 

TODAY, less than two percent of the population of most modern economies work as farmers. (In the 1800s, 80 to 90 percent lived on farms.) We see ourselves as inhabitants of technological societies and, as such, we have become skilled technicians, able to transform our lands scientifically and to make them do our bidding. Some suggest we will eventually abandon “dirt farming” altogether in favour of manufacturing our food in vats and laboratories, “industrial agriculture’s” next great step. 

 
BUT REALLY, SAYS BRODY, WE REMAIN agricultural societies, through and through. Our shared cultures, histories, our beliefs and languages and our stories, worldwide, prove it. He makes notable a fascinating interpretation of Western civilization’s great creation story, the Book of Genesis, which he re-imagines as a tale about a world changing from one inhabited by hunter-gatherers to one of farmers and herders. In his chapter, “Creation” he asks: “What is Eden”? “Where is it?” “Who lived there?” and “Who roams in the post-Edenic world?” 

  

EDEN, IN BRODY’S INTERPRETATION IS NOT A PLACE, but places. It is not somewhere we move towards or have been banished from, though most have left it willingly to live a different way on the land. Eden remains the place, the land, we inhabit. (Perhaps share is a better word.) And those lands are not something we change but, rather, something we change with. For the restless farmers and their societies, theirs is the constant need to alter 'Eden' until it is all but unrecognizable. This, he says, is the fundamental difference between hunter-gather culture and that of the farmer—the root cause of their millennia-long contest. 

 

Agriculture—farming, herding—seeks to alter the land, to make it conform to the shapes, soils, plant life, hydrology, the types of animals and where they live and move across the landscape that it deems most useful and productive. Agriculture seeks to dictate where people live and move, as well. Farmers and herders change the landscape to suit their various agrarian technologies. Whereas hunters and gatherers adapt themselves and their societies to the lands they live upon; they adapt to what the land and its plants and animals, its waters and resources can provide for them—no more and no less. 

 

LIKE MOST OF US, I SUPPOSE, I think of farmers, and of farming culture in general, as rather staid, settled, rooted in the land, and having a rather “stick-in-the-mud” sort of lifestyle, to be flippant. But when looked at through indigenous eyes (if such is possible, or at least the attempt might be forgivable), when seen through the perspective of hunter-gatherer peoples, be they from the Arctic and sub-Arctic, to Amazonia and sub-Saharan Africa, wherever hunter-gatherer cultures remain, it is the farmer who restlessly roams and the hunter-gatherer who “adapts-in-place” within their lands, taking what they need and leaving the rest for the future. For me, this is a topsy-turvy concept. I’ve always viewed cultures like the Innuit or the San people (“Bushmen”) of Africa, or the Sámi (“Laplanders”) of Scandinavia, as wandering tribes, migratory, and unsettled. It’s true they move through landscapes, sometimes for great distances, but this is their home. Their journeys may be annual or in multi-year cycles, moving from one resource base to another on lands they know intimately, lands they have named and identified and come to understand.

 

THIS IS WHERE THEY LIVE and this is where they stay—for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. And they will migrate to new lands only after much consideration and with great trepidation. They are conservative by inclination and adopt new ways of doing things only reluctantly, because their lives, their lifestyles and livelihoods depend upon the knowledge they have gleaned over centuries of learning about their homelands.

FARMERS AND HERDERS TILL THE SOIL, plant crops, raise and ranch domestic animals, and when their lands are depleted, when crop yields decline, they move on. If we stop and think for a moment, and take a broad, historical view of the rise and fall of farming cultures through time, we see it is true that the transformative needs associated with agriculture will often (usually?) require that new lands regularly be sought, to feed growing populations in the core regions of society. Thus, lands further and further afield are acquired or stolen. New farms and ranches are established. And populations wax or wane based on how productive the fields remain.

With their ability to produce food surpluses, coupled with more sedentary lifestyles and the need for large numbers of farmhands to work the fields, one thing agricultural societies do reasonably well is breed.* (Seven billion and counting!) Much of human history since the last ice age can be seen as the movement of farming peoples in their restless search for ever-more productive farmland. Thus, it is farmers, and not hunter-gatherers who are the world’s true nomads. 

 

ACROSS MILLENNIA, AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES worldwide have extended their lands and bloated populations to the limits of where farming is possible and, in the process, displaced and destroyed countless indigenous cultures, their languages, life-ways, and understandings of the world. Only the harshest of hinterlands are without the agrarian's presence. Today, these inhospitable lands: the frozen tundra, scorching deserts or rocky uplands remain in the hands of hunter-gatherers, along with the rump territories, reservations and tribal enclaves left to them by the dominant cultures' legislatures and judiciaries. But even these holdings are tentative because of the ever-encroaching processes of resource extraction for the ores, minerals, fossil fuels, water, timber, etc., so coveted by agriculturalists, which are also “harvests”, made imperatives, by their sedentary lifestyles and materialistic compulsions. These processes continue to impact the remaining lands of hunter-gatherer cultures. 

 

FARMING SOCIETIES ARE LIKE A HANDFUL of stones tossed into a pond, where ripples spread outward from the initial splashes, overlapping and cascading against one another until they reach and are repelled by the banks, then returning in smaller and smaller pulses that are increasingly complex and mingled, finally back to where the stones first broke the surface. And even as the energy from their initial impact begins to dissipate, each stone’s rippling wave has had some effect on the floating plants, algae, diatoms, the grazing snails and clams, and the insects, fish, and birds that live there. And no matter how small-seeming their effects appear to our eyes, the stones actions have affected the pond’s entire biome. And only time and the natural processes of the world, and our respectful care, will restore the water’s tranquility.

 

A FINAL POINT on agriculturalist societies: When the ever-expanding fields of harvests reach their outer limits, be they limitations of ecology or physical space, then the Four Horsemen” (Famine, Disease, War, or Death) are the usual results. When such limits are reached, their "waves" refract back to their centres, to their core region, sometimes resulting in new “waves” of internal harvesting. For example, when new sources of fertilizer were discovered, such as South American offshore island guano deposits during the Nineteenth Century, these increased crop yields of the worked out and depleted core regions of the Middle East and Europe, whose colonial empires¹ temporarily increased crop yields until population pressures once more reached their ecological limits. Then, during the post-WWII years, when advancements in petrochemical science brought into large-scale use artificial fertilizers and pesticides, based on (non-renewable) fossil fuels, these resulted in the much touted “Green Revolution” of the 1960s. In turn, these technological advances ushered in another, albeit temporary, wave of agrarian expansion from the core regions outward. And coupled with new biotech and gene-editing technologies that are being added to this century's agricultural mix, the global population, the combined total of the world's agricultural societies and cultures, has ballooned from 3.3 billion in 1960 to an extraordinary 7.8 billion today! And everywhere we are seeing the limits to our current use of agriculture and the way of life it has fostered.

 

WHEN I READ ABOUT the "culturcide" of marginalized peoples, the loss of their knowledge, language and history, I feel, like most people, sorrow and a sense of emptiness. With the death of the last native speaker of an indigenous tongue, the absorption of traditional lands into the larger project of a nation or province, or the breaking of treaty obligations, the pillaging of resources, the abuse of individuals or groups, I feel, again like most people, a sense of helplessness. Fatalism. An acceptance that things can't change and it's just more of the same, down the road for them.

IN HIS MEMOIR, BRODY RECORDS his own anger and frustration over the wider world's inability to appreciate and understand that the rights of indigenous cultures must be respected and their societies allowed to co-exist alongside the world's agrarian majorities. If not for their sake, then for ours. He makes the following observations:

 

o  IN THE PAST, people from traditional hunter-gatherer societies were seen as less than human, or of a lower, inferior order than those belonging to the more populous agricultural societies they encountered. That their "minds" were considered not only inferior, but were assumed to be fundamentally different from the minds of farmers and herders, more akin to animal than human, was another racist trope that proved destructive to indigenous cultures.

o  HUMAN LANGUAGE, the clearest example of a thinking mind, may have started as the result of a mutation or abrupt genetic shift, many anthropologists believe. Genetic analysis of language traits in the human genome, along with anthropological speculations suggest that early humans first started using complex speech a few hundred thousand years ago:

 

"The evidence that does suggest language, where the tool kit is complex and changing and where the physiology of the upper body, [breathing capacity that would facilitate the production of a range of vocal sounds] is consistent with the use of speech, comes from about 800,000 years ago." (293)

 

THE HUMAN FAMILY seems to have developed language at a specific moment in time, and all of us today are their descendants—agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers alike. We all have language and therefore we all have "mind". To divorce one group of humans from the family we all share is racist, pure and simple, of which the settler-colonial dominion in North America (and Australia) is probably the clearest example.² 

If, indeed, we humans all share the same “mind” and have the same capabilities for thought that comes from our unique facility with language, then our societies, each “build[s] its particular array of knowledge, skills and norms,” (295) and from which we have much to learn from the other.

o  BRODY REMINDS US that hunter-gatherer societies have met, co-existed alongside, succumbed to, retreated from, and partially lived inside agricultural societies for millennia. We are not as distinct from each other as we usually assume.

o  HE MAKES THE INTERESTING observation that marginalized people living in today’s urban centres or on the margins of (agricultural) society, have thought patterns and skill sets that are comparable to those of hunter-gatherers. In a sense they “live off the land” of modern-day agriculture societies the way hunter-gatherers live off their land.

o  FINALLY, the many positive attributes, skill-sets and customs Brody found in the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures he met, and their ways of understanding and being in the world, are inherent to our species. They exist as potentials in all of us. We’re human, after all.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

______________________________________________________

 

* Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, reproduce at much slower rates to facilitate their migrations across their land. That’s another reason (sheer numbers) why farming societies were able to dominate and destroy so many indigenous cultures over the millennia—that, and novel diseases, of course. Disease is another thing farming culture has going for it. By lodging together humans and animals in close quarters, zoonotic diseases become transmissible from animal to human, then from human to human, like tuberculosis (from cattle) or flu (from pigs and ducks), or our favourite corona viruses (labs or bats; take your pick!) 

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: the osteological (study of bones) record shows a general decline in health and longevity for cultures that leave behind their hunter-gatherer lifestyles to become farmers. And it takes some time for them to catch up to their previous, pre-agrarian robustness. Hunter-gatherers typically have a diet high in protein with a wide variety of wild produce, compared to the more limited grains and meats of agriculturalists.  

 

     ^1. Brody reminds us that agriculturalism is a global phenomenon and has been for millennia. It occurred at different times and places. It did not happen in a single pulse or wave but in multiple events. For example, when European colonialists first made contact with African societies, many of them were farming cultures already, with hunter-gathering cultures displaced by regional actors. In a sense, Brody says, the European farmers and African farmers "spoke the same language," notwithstanding the gross power imbalance between the two. Both peoples were farmers, making colonization a shoe that was a little easier to fit. It was the same story with much of South America: hunter-gatherers had been displaced over time by the more settled and agrarian civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incas.

       HE MAKES THE INTERESTING OBSERVATION that British colonial practices in Africa encouraged local languages and dialects be spoken alongside English, French and patois dialects acting as lingua franca to facilitate communication and colonial administration (Of course, the British used the various language groups in the tried and true method of “divide and conquer” to maintain control of their colonial populations.)

IN NORTH AMERICA AND AUSTRALIA, vast continents where agriculturalists existed along with powerful hunter-gatherer societies, conflict between indigenous peoples and Europeans was greater, more widespread, and the temperate-zone farmlands were too vast and tempting for the white settlers to adopt a piecemeal approach to colonization. And so, they established harsher regimes of colonial control, with the now-notorious “Residential School” system in both Canada and the United States (and Australia) as a prime example. Its explicit purpose was assimilation of the First Nations and indigenous peoples into  settler-colonial societies, and to destroy their languages, cultures, and life-ways.  And, for the most part, they succeeded.

 

^2. Fun fact: The number of vocalizations humans can make is roughly 140. Such sounds are used to make speech. The Bushmen of sub-Saharan Africa utilize about 120 sounds for their speech. English uses about 40; Inuktitut, about 50. Which does not mean that San or Inuit people are more intelligent than other language users, because of their language's complexity, but neither are they less.

 

 

Brody, Hugh. The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World. Douglas & McIntyre Ltd. 2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201, Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 4S7. 2000. Print.

 

 

 

 

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