Status Updates From The Other Side of Eden: Hun...

Making my goodreads return

Shout out anthro for making me read this

Fucking hell this is good.

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.

Faith in progress is itself a kind of religion.

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.