Melondrop’s Reviews > The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World > Status Update

An irony of Levi-Strauss’s achievement is that it yields much more insight into his own culture, so centered on binary logic and attempts to create rational order, than into those of the tribes he examined.

The term “land claim” is itself an anomaly, implying that the onus should be on the original occupants to claim their homes, resources, and territories from the colonists. This is a reversal of common sense; the burden of proof should lie with the newcomers.

The stereotype of caveman or hunter-gatherer male chauvinism is easy enough to explain. Those “primitive” people are supposed to be our earliest ancestors – the original versions of ourselves...But as a mythic notion, the caveman is a projection of the modern onto the ancient. The grunting misogynist is a crude and idealized version of modern man. If we were but our natural and real selves, thus it would be.

Farmers have no difficulty answering questions about history: hunter gatherers become farmers because farming is better in every way. There is more food, greater security, longer life, less brutality in both everyday dealings among people in between societies; there is more order...These kinds of claims show themselves to be a mixture of truth and fiction...the “modern” when opposed to the “ancient.”

One set of facts invited me to be in awe of the links between Anaviapik’s way of life – his knowledge, experience, or language - and a remote, essential human past. Another set of facts revealed to me that Anaviapik with as much in the present, a modern human being, as anyone else...Their supposed place in the past, as an example of some earlier stage of evolution, is used to justify extreme inequality.

As a system, overtime, it is farming, not hunting, that generates “nomadism.” Agriculture evokes the curses of Genesis.

Farmers appear to be settled, and hunters to be wanderers. Yet a look at how ways of life take shape across many generations reveals that it is the agriculturalists, with their commitment to specific farms and large numbers of children, who are forced to keep moving, resettling, colonizing new lands. Hunter gatherers, with their reliance on a single area, are profoundly settled.

“When do you think I last came here?” He asked.
I guessed. Three or four years?
“No,” he said. “Not three or four years ago. I was last here in 1938.”
“So how did you know your way through the mountains?” I asked.
“Because Inuit cannot get lost in their own land. If we have done a journey once, then we can always do it again.”

“For she is a baby who carries the atiq, the spirit and name, of her late grandmother, her grandfather’s wife. She is the adored baby;she is also her mothers mother, her grandfathers wife. This means the baby is doubly and trebly loved. And she must be treated with respect.”
I wept, I literally wept, when I read this. I wept for the beauty of it, and for just how much has been lost in our impoverished world.