Hugh Brody, born in 1943, is a British anthropologist, writer and film-maker who has worked since the late 1960s with hunting peoples of the Canadian Arctic and Subarctic, often on their land claims. His book The Other Side of Eden (2000) rests on the claim that the usual picture of wandering hunters and settled farmers “has it the wrong way round”: over many generations it is farming peoples, with their large families and hunger for new land, who keep moving on and colonising, whilst hunter-gatherers stay rooted in one territory. In his phrase, the real divide of the agricultural era runs between “the settled hunters and the nomadic farmers”.
Who is Hugh Brody? #
A British anthropologist born in 1943, who worked as an accountant in Sheffield before studying at Trinity College, Oxford, and later taught social philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. In the early 1970s he became a research officer with the Northern Science Research Group of Canada’s Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, leaving the Canadian civil service in 1975. He worked on Justice Thomas Berger’s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, held a Canada Research Chair at the University of the Fraser Valley from 2004 to 2018, and is an Honorary Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.1
His books include The People’s Land (1975), Maps and Dreams (1981), Living Arctic (1987) and The Other Side of Eden (2000). He has also made many documentary films, among them Hunters and Bombers (1990), Time Immemorial (1991) and Tracks Across Sand (2012), and co-wrote the feature film Nineteen Nineteen (1985).1 He describes his work with hunter-gatherer communities as that of anthropologist, land-claims researcher, film-maker and, twice, expert witness in land-rights court cases.2
Who are the peoples he has worked with? #
Hunting peoples of northern Canada, all of them living through great change by the time he met them. He first went to the Arctic in 1971. By the early 1970s almost all Inuit in Canada, including the people of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, where he worked, had been brought into government settlements, and life there had become a blend of wage labour and hunting.3 In the Subarctic he hunted moose with the Dunne-za, an Athabaskan people, from the Halfway River Reserve in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.4 The Innu were urged by missionaries to stay near the coast, yet went on spending much of the year in the interior hunting caribou.5 So these are hunter-gatherer peoples in transition, not untouched bands, and Brody says so himself: hunter-gatherers use guns, engines and bought food like anyone else, and “we are all contemporaries”.6
Why does he call farmers the true nomads? #
Because of what happens over generations. Looked at from day to day, hunters move about and farmers stay put. But “the stereotype has it the wrong way round. It is agricultural societies that tend to be on the move; hunting peoples are far more firmly settled.” This shows when we watch “the movie of human history” instead of relying on a photograph.7
The reason is the shape of each way of life. Hunter-gatherers rely on one area and on knowing how to find and use what is already there; they do not try to remake the land, and they do not aim to have large numbers of children. Farming families tie themselves to particular fields and raise many children, so each generation needs more land, and the children or grandchildren must move on and clear new ground. The result, across history, is a more or less relentless colonial frontier. Farmers love home and also love leaving it: “Not two Edens, but no Eden at all.”8
Colonists have long used the supposed “nomadism” of native peoples to justify taking their land, arguing that people without villages and monuments had no settled society and so no rights to the land. He calls this “a great and terrible paradox”, since the real divide is “between the settled hunters and the nomadic farmers”.9
What does he say about Eden? #
That the opening chapters of Genesis are farming’s own story of itself. Taken at their word, the curses on Adam and Eve, toil for bread and the ground that must be worked, describe the life of agriculture; Cain, the tiller of the soil, kills Abel, the keeper of flocks; and the command to go forth and multiply fits a people who must keep spreading. Hunter-gatherers do not share this story. “Everything about the hunter-gatherer system is founded on the conviction that home is already Eden, and exile must be avoided.”10
What is the hunter-gatherer mind? #
Brody’s name for a way of knowing that he thinks is humanity’s “most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition”, where direct experience and metaphor work together, and where the spirits are “the evidence and the metaphors” for a right relationship with every part of the world.11 He does not see it as belonging only to a few peoples far away. Every healthy human being has the potential for all human qualities, so “to this extent we are all hunters and farmers”; the difference is one of balance, and the imbalance has come from farmers’ domination of hunter-gatherers.11 He finds the hunter-gatherer mind breaking out in the farmers’ world, in art and in protest against repressive order and inequality.11
The voices of the people themselves are there too. An Innu elder, asked how Innu beliefs and the missionaries’ hymns could both be true, told him: “The Innu religion is the religion of life. Christianity is the religion of death.”12
Is the divide between hunters and farmers too sharp? #
Some would say so. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), describe the move from wild foods to farming in the Middle East as taking some three thousand years, during which people were “trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will”, moving back and forth between ways of life, which makes any clean split between two kinds of people harder to draw.13 See Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
Brody’s contrast is about how two systems behave over long stretches of time, not a claim that every group fits neatly on one side. He warns against treating hunter-gatherers as relics of an earlier stage, notes that most people of hunter-gatherer heritage today live some blend of the two, and holds that each way of life is the centre of its own universe.14
How does Brody’s work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Close to its account of 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, reached by another route. In Therapeutic Shamanism the move from hunting and gathering to what Daniel Quinn called totalitarian agriculture was the move from being part of the land to owning it, the stance of “this is our land”, justified by a god who tells humans to rule over every creature (Genesis 1:26).15 The Garden of Eden is read as the twisted, burnt-out remains of a healthy golden-age story, turned into a story of the Fall and 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.16 Brody, an anthropologist reading Genesis, also links Eden with the coming of farming, though in his reading the story is farming’s own account of itself. Both see the farming way of life as the one that keeps pushing outwards onto other peoples’ lands. See What is the Fall? and Who was Daniel Quinn, and what did Ishmael teach?
On movement, the two accounts use the word “nomadic” on different time scales. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, notes that the few animist nomadic peoples left are usually herders, and describes the rare complex hunter-gatherers as becoming settled and no longer nomadic.17 Brody agrees that hunting peoples move a great deal within their lands; his point is that over many generations they stay rooted in one territory, whilst farming peoples spread. Both readings are left standing here.
Brody’s hunter-gatherer mind, a potential he sees in everyone, sits near what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Wild Mind, though the two are not the same idea. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
