There’s an interesting post at Quillette on how anthropologists came to romanticize hunter-gather societies:
The picture you get from reading articles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian, or from anthropologists like Douglas Fry and James Suzman, is often quite different from what a deep dive into the ethnographic record reveals. The excessive reliance on a single paper published 50 years ago has contributed to some severe misconceptions about hunter-gatherer ‘affluence,’ and their relative freedom from scarcity and disease. There is a tendency to downplay the benefits of modern medicine, institutions, and infrastructure – as well as the very real costs of not having access to them – in these discussions. And, despite what some may wish to believe, the hunter-gatherer way of life is not a solution to the social problems found in modern nation states.
The gist of it is that the human species has not been engaged in a 10,000 year old mistake. The lives of hunter-gathers tended to be, in Hobbes’s memorable phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short”. The only way in which hunter-gatherer societies could be construed as preferable to a sedentary habit is if you preferred for your children to die in infancy, you’d like to die of old age in your 20s, and you didn’t mind being always watchful for your neighbor trying to murder you.
The practice of a sedentary habit and agriculture was better than being a nomadic hunter-gatherer and industrialization was better than an almost entirely agrarian society. For the last 10,000 years people have successively chosen the better alternative, the one that led to longer, healthier, less precarious lives. Will post-industrialism prove to be better than industrialism? We can only guess.
Lol–just under a month ago you were saying the opposite and agreeing with the James C. Scott book the LRB reviewed:
There are so many handicaps in a sedentary agrarian society by comparison with a hunter-gatherer society it makes one wonder why anyone would adopt one. On average members of hunter-gatherer societies are healthier, live longer, and don’t work as hard as those who live in agrarian societies. Let me provide several explanations for why one would go from something that is better to something that is worse.
For the record, it’s completely impossible to make any meaningful claim. No human being alive now could imagine being a nomad, for example. I believe that the above is right–but romanticizing what happened before is pointless.
That said, the Quillette article is pretty weak. He’s not an anthropologist, merely a ‘student’ of it. The amateur who debunks stuff is really irritating. I have a couple friends on Facebook who are analytic philosophers and who have been happily destroying that stupid Tom Wolfe book about Chomsky’s universal grammar. This article seems equally flawed.
I think it depends. Anthropologists studying scat from cliff dwellings in the American southwest have reported finding evidence of cannibalism common. They didn’t build those high cliff homes because of the view.
On the other hand, life in the Caribbean archipelago may have been pretty good for the young at least before Columbus stopped by looking for precious metals.
Gray Shambler,
Any hunter-gatherer tribe existing alongside actual organized agricultural civilizations is going to be much different than hunter-gatherers prior to agricultural being invented. Humans are very malleable, and there are few encounters in recorded history where two unknowns fail to have some sort of common exchange between them. The few marks of deep time humans that have persisted are completely mysterious to us. Nobody, for example, knows what cave paintings are doing those walls.
Your point being that neither one of us know?
Dave’s right on second thought, I’m now 64, and LIKE being alive. I’m a help, not a burden to my grandchildren. BUT, I’d have been gone 15 years ago without that appendectomy. And my wife? Gone five times over.
Brings me to a thought. How much will the aging of humanity change us? The cowboys buried on Boothill in Ogalalla, Ne., did die in gunfights. But they were mere teenagers.
Julius Caesar, I’ve read, cried when he happened upon a statue of Alexander the Great, because by his age, Alexander had conquered all the known world, and Julius had conquered only half.
Julius was 18 years old.
By comparison, Kim jong-un is in his early thirties and very likely to be less impulsive than Julius at eighteen.
When I become aware of additional evidence, I alter my views. What do you do, MM? I’m not an anthropologist. I was aware of Lee’s study but not of counter-evidence. Actually, I find the counter-evidence reassuring. It’s nice to know that there were reasons for adopting a sedentary habit other than it gave you the ability to brew beer.
The paragraph seems to be arguing from extreme characterizations. I think the romantic view is more based upon the benefits of simple kin-structures, lack of hierarchy, and more personal freedom. There is also some sort of continuum, because most hgs had some forms of agriculture or at least developed means of manipulating the environment to enhance the collection of animals and vegetables. At the point of time where the benefits of a single settlement are deemed advantageous, collective defense becomes more important and roles are assigned and for some people they get the penthouse and others will get the boiler room. So the trade-offs will look different depending on where you look. But the fact that history shows numerous examples of tribal/nomadic types seizing major cities, even founding dynasties, is evidence that the more complex systems are the greater sources of wealth production.
The distinction I’ve seen made by students of early agriculture is between horticulture and agriculture. Horticulture was practiced by hunter-gathers and consisted of improving the ground at favored picking sites or resowing seeds in the sites. Agriculture demanded a sedentary habit and in addition to the activities of horticulture entailed selected breeding and varied seasonal activities in the same areas.
Dave,
He presents a scattering of evidence, all of which he assures that actual anthropologists have never bothered digging into.
Anyway, James C. Scott is a serious writer, and his book prompted all of the articles. And his big question is left unanswered–why did hunter-gatherers turn to agriculture when the immediate results were not at all better? After all, it took thousands of years for city-states to emerge out of agricultural settlement. This isn’t to romanticize hunter-gatherers. It’s a serious question about the human past, one that we probably will never answer.
Some good comments here, so I’ll throw just a little cold water on the original post. For my sins — and maybe some of my good qualities –I was a grad student in anthropology for a few years in the late 1990’s. We read quite a bit about ancient hunter gatherers back then, and even a lot about hunter gatherers who made it into the 20th century, and near-subsistence level agricultural societies. And we did NOT romanticize hunter-gatherers; we were not taught that their lives were so more affluent than early famers or even modern peasants. Anthropology professors tend to be pretty hard nosed individuals who like hard nosed students.