A hunter-gatherer society lives on wild foods, hunting, gathering and fishing, usually in small, mobile, egalitarian bands that take what they need and leave the rest; an agricultural society grows crops and keeps domesticated animals, settles in one place, stores a surplus and grows in numbers. In Therapeutic Shamanism the difference is not only economic: farming brought a new relationship with the land and the other Peoples, one of ownership and control instead of kinship, and with it the beginning of the break from animism that the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer later accelerated.
What is a hunter-gatherer society? #
A people who live by hunting, gathering and fishing wild foods, without farming crops or herding animals. For most of the history of our species, humans lived this way. Hunter-gatherer cultures show “an incredible richness of diversity”, but they tend to share certain features: different roles for men and women, though how strictly varies enormously, with equality and mutual respect between them; children treated with great respect; the old, ill and disabled cared for; and decisions taken by the band as a whole.1
Anthropologists also distinguish kinds of foragers. The anthropologist James Woodburn called the small mobile bands that eat what they find soon after finding it, and store little, ‘immediate-return’ societies; the Hadza of Tanzania, some San groups of southern Africa and some Pygmy peoples of the Congo Basin are among the few left. Hunter-gatherers who store food, like farmers and herders, belong to his ‘delayed-return’ kind.2 And where wild food was so plentiful that people could settle, as on the Pacific North-West coast of America, complex hunter-gatherers developed chiefs, inequality and slavery without farming at all. These were extremely rare, which is why “hunter-gatherers” unqualified means the egalitarian band peoples.3
What is an agricultural society? #
A people who grow most of their food and keep domesticated animals. Farming began in the Neolithic, from around 11,000 to 10,000 BC, in the Middle East; what Daniel Quinn calls ‘totalitarian agriculture’ probably started with a group of tribes known as the Natufians, who lived in the Levant. Farming then arose separately in a few other parts of the world, including the Americas and China.4 Farming peoples range from small horticultural villages, who garden with hoes and shift their plots, through herders and pastoralists who live with their animals, to the grain farmers of the plough on whom the first cities and states were built.
What they share is that their way of life is wholly oriented towards building up a surplus. A surplus lets the land support more people than hunting and gathering can, so farming populations grow, and growing populations need more land.4 See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
What are the main differences? #
Food, to begin with. The hunter-gatherer diet was rich and varied, often running to around two hundred different foods, whilst early farmers lived on one or two staple foods, usually a carbohydrate such as wheat, with a few vegetables and some meat.5 The political scientist James C. Scott adds the skeletons of early grain farmers, deformed by years of grinding grain, and the crowd diseases that come with settled villages, standing water and animals kept close, which mobile foragers largely escaped.6
Flexibility, too. Hunter-gatherers know hundreds of possible foods, including the ones to fall back on in a famine, and they can move on when food becomes scarce. Farming depends on a handful of crops and on the land that has been cleared for them. In good years it buffers people against the natural rise and fall of numbers, but when the crops fail, a large population can face starvation with no way back, because the wild land and the old skills have gone.7
Then there is conflict. A hunter-gatherer band that felt threatened by its neighbours could usually move on. A farming people that has put enormous effort into clearing and working its land has much more to lose, so its first response is to stand and fight, and sometimes to wipe out troublesome neighbours first.8 Hunter-gatherers had no permanent leaders, and order came by discussion and consensus; the picture of tribes ruled by chiefs mostly comes from farming peoples, and lumping the two together is a common mistake.9 See What was hunter-gatherer life really like? and What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain?
Is the difference only about food? #
No. In Therapeutic Shamanism the deepest difference is in how people stand towards the land and the other Peoples. Hunter-gatherers experienced the world shamanically: the wolves and bears, jaguars and foxes were brothers and sisters, everything had its place and its right to exist, and the land belonged to all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, or rather the Peoples belonged to the land.10 They were what the writer Daniel Quinn called Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer, taking what they needed and leaving the rest, often deliberately leaving a share for the other creatures.11
The adoption of farming involved a profound shift in the human psyche. Rather than being children of the earth sharing the land with our non-human kin, we decided that we owned the land and would decide who lived on it: the goats became ours, the wolves were to die, and every plant except the wheat was to be killed. In doing so “We elevated ourselves to gods, deciding what lives and what dies”.12 Quinn’s name for this is ‘totalitarian agriculture’, and its first act is to eradicate the competitor species, something a pride of lions, or a band of hunter-gatherers, does not do.10 There are reports of Native Americans weeping at the slaughter of the buffalo, and of indigenous people weeping when they first saw ploughs tearing the skin of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.13 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Was early farming already the Fall? #
It was the beginning of the break, not yet its worst. In Therapeutic Shamanism the break from animism starts with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the Neolithic, from around 11,000 to 10,000 BC, and then accelerates with the Fall, the rise of the first city-state cultures from around 4000 BC. Early farming villages, on the evidence the writer Steve Taylor gathers, were still relatively egalitarian and showed remarkably little sign of mass violence; it was with the city-states that warfare, slavery, patriarchy and gross inequality took hold.14 So early farmers are not an unbroken animist world, and nor are they yet the full Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer. See What is the Fall?
Why does the distinction matter? #
Because confusing the two distorts everything that follows. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon presented the Yanomami of the Amazon as typical violent hunter-gatherers, although most of their food came from farming and they had been raided by colonists for centuries.15 And virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural; even the few animist nomadic peoples left are usually herders, not hunter-gatherers. So even where they are still animist, they are to some degree affected by domestication and Taker thinking, and practise a different shamanism from their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The same goes for Celtic or Norse mythology and Druidry, all products of farming societies.16 Therapeutic Shamanism looks to hunter-gatherers, not to farming peoples, as the template for animist living. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism?
Is the line between foragers and farmers really so sharp? #
Not everywhere, and some anthropologists and archaeologists stress how blurred it can be. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow argue in The Dawn of Everything that farming did not spread as one triumphant ‘Agricultural Revolution’ but as a patchwork of starts, reversals and long-delayed adoptions.17 Scott, too, points out that the first small, walled, tax-collecting states appeared in the Tigris and Euphrates valley only around 3100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and settled living.18
On the other side, the books set the line not at touching a plant but at ‘totalitarian agriculture’, agriculture based on the belief in the supremacy of human beings and the idea of owning the land, which clears forests for fields, replaces complex ecosystems with monocultures and eradicates competitor species. The shift was probably less a decision than something people slid into over a few hundred years, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests, and there is evidence that some early farming societies probably went back to hunting and gathering when their crops failed; by the great crop failures around 4000 BC, though, so much wild land and knowledge had been lost that going back was no longer an option.19 See What did Jared Diamond mean by calling farming “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”? and Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
