The Other Side of Eden
 Hugh Brody
 (Associate Writer & Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
 2000 North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  ISBN: 0865476101

Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World. In material terms the hunter-gatherers, who survive at the margins of the world's fertile lands, have been all but vanquished by farming peoples yet their choice of how they live is not a lesser way of life, rather it is a rich system of thought, belief & practices.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

Hugh Brody is an anthropologist & documentary filmmaker who has worked & traveled extensively among indigenous peoples. He has spent nearly three decades studying, learning from, crusading for, & thinking about hunter-gatherers, who survive at the margins of the vast, fertile lands occupied by farming peoples & their descendants, now the great majority of the world's population.

In The Other Side of Eden Brody astutely takes the reader all the way back to Genesis to show us the first dichotomy between hunter-gatherer & farmer. He describes how God became angry with Cain's murderous sibling rivalry & declares that the earth where he killed Abel will not yield enough to feed him & his family, & sends him off to wander & discover new lands. Cain goes to Nod & sets up his own city, complete with “tent dwellers with livestock,” while Abel's family remain herders on his land. Brody interprets this story as meaning that God insisted on both farming & roaming in His world, resulting in human beings who are both settled & unsettled. And yet, it seems that man does not always agree with God.

In the last five centuries, farmers have raped, pillaged, stolen from the hunter-gatherers, & “educated” them away from their birthrights until they are all but destroyed. In many parts of the world, agriculturalists still despise hunter-gatherers for being “primitive,” while hunter-gatherers complain that the farmers are “belligerent.” In many ways, hunter-gatherers are not comfortable with farming & herding ways of life. The farmers, who use the hunter-gatherers as cheap labor, complain about their “unreliability.”

The hunters want to hunt & the gatherers want to gather. They don't plan or manage surplus well. They need food & money immediately, not at some future date, & often seem restless to their modern contemporaries. Yet most of us are unaware of the high level of development of many of the hunter-gatherer tribes in ways that differ from the accomplishments of modern man.

The hunter-gatherer has links to the natural world through dreams, & other private forms of insight & intuition that most of us do not have. They believe that material well-being comes from knowing, not changing, the environment. Their main preoccupation is the maintenance of the natural world as it is. Choice & freedom are centered on each person, & not determined by social hierarchy.

The Inuits, for example, are a generous, kindly people. Expression of anger, while understandable in children, is unacceptable to them in adults, a development which has helped to foster the stereotype as people of unfailing good will, good humor, & generosity.

Typically, pieces of meat & fish are stored on a piece of cardboard beside the stove, where family & quests can squat & eat as much as they like. In my opinion, child experts all over the world should note how the Inuits raise their children, who are permitted to learn according to their own needs, rather than on a rigid schedule. These parents trust children to know what they need. Everything is alive for them, worked through dialogues & conversation in what educational theory calls the direct method. While Brody doesn't mention it, I suspect that there are fewer children with learning disabilities above the Arctic Circle.

The author tells us that “The hunter-gatherer is humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition.”(p. 292) While the agricultural mind has an intense, specialized knowledge of specific systems, with exact usages of deductive reasoning, the hunter-gatherer seeks a relationship with all parts of the world, including spirituality, intuition, & the understanding of dreams. Agriculture depends on controlling & remaking the natural world, while the hunter-gatherers survive by getting to know the world, rather than controlling it. If the spiritual & animal worlds are treated with respect, the hunter-gatherers believe all will be well.

Although agricultural peoples are numerous, often wealthy, well-armed, & domineering, in contrast to the few in number of impoverished, self-effacing hunter-gatherers, the latter have much experience & knowledge that must be recognized. This book places the sophistication of the hunter-gatherers alongside that of the farmers. “We are all contemporaries,” Brody says, “whatever lands we live on and whatever heritage we rely on to do so. All human beings have been evolving for the same length of time”(p. 6), & simply have different ways of being in the world.

Brody is at his best when he speaks of the hunter-gatherers he has known & loved. His account of his year with the Inuktituts on Resolute Bay, 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is a joy to read. A wonderful old man named Simon Anviopik became Brody's friend & mentor, teaching him not only his language but how to be an Inuktitut. This reader became so engrossed in the story that she grieved along with Brody when he movingly described the old man's death.

The Other Side of Eden is the kind of book that expands the perimeters of the reader's mind, both geographically & philosophically. I find myself at odd moments thinking about such matters as what it would be like to live on a vast surface of ice for 11 months of the year, to sleep under the midnight sun, & to wonder if I as a mother could have allowed my children to stay up all night, along with the children of the Inuit Indians.

The book is also poetically written in spots, in language that makes one yearn to visit the icy beauty of the land of the Living Arctic. It is an exciting, generally well-written saga of the dreams & accomplishments of a dying culture, & as such should be part of everyone's education.

More from Hugh Brody: Gola: The Life and Last Days of an Island Community (with F. H. A. Aalen); Indians on Skid Row; Inishkillane; The People's Land; Maps and Dreams; Living Arctic & Means of Escape.
Documentary Films:
On Indian Land; People of the Islands; Time Immemorial & The Washing Tears.
with Michael Grigsby: The People's Land.
with Anne Cubitt: Treaty 8 Country.
with Michael Ignatieff: Nineteen Nineteen.
with Anthony Barnett: England's Henry Moore.
with Nigel Markham: Hunters and Bombers.
(12/09/01)

Dr. Alma Bond
2001©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.