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| The Other Side of Eden |  | |  | | | Nonfiction by Hugh Brody | |
reviewed by Emily Banner | | |
The Other Side of Eden is a puzzle of a book, by turns
engrossing and dull, insightful and preachy. In it, Hugh Brody
examines hunter-gatherer cultures, individually and in general, and
looks at how these societies coexist — and, more often, clash
— with the rest of the world, which can be generally summed up
as agriculturalist. Both an exploration of the condition of
contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, and an historical look at how
agriculturalists came to dominate the world (usually destroying or
assimilating — or at best marginalizing — hunter-gatherers
who stood in their way), the book draws on everything from individual
anecdotes to linguistic theory to make its case.
Brody's most significant achievement here is to upend the
traditional understanding of farmers and nomads. Conventional wisdom
has it that farmers stay in one place and cultivate their lands, while
hunter-gatherers roam over a large territory, taking what they need
without establishing a home-base. Farmers are the stable ones,
according to this theory; they take care of their homes and each
other, while hunter-gatherers are less responsible and more primitive.
But taking a longer view, Brody argues that conventional wisdom has
got it backwards. Hunter-gatherer tribes may roam, but they do so
within a clearly defined area that they know intimately, and they have
a vested interest in seeing that their territory goes undamaged.
Moreover, since food can be scarce, hunter-gatherers tend to have
small families and to foster values of cooperation and generosity, for
the good of the tribe. Farmers, by contrast, have large families for
the sake of dividing labor. The offspring of farmers need their own
land to farm, which leads to a constant cycle of exploring and
developing frontiers — as seen most recently in the westward
expansion of European societies across North and South America. And as
seen in the Americas, when farmers need more land, they have little
compunction about using violence to take it from anyone who got there
first, and then razing and reshaping the earth to suit their needs. As
Brody explains,
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.
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