"the entire continent, sheathed in intricate
webs of knowledge. Taken as a whole,
this composed a vast intellectual legacy,
born of intimacy with the natural world."
This is my favorite line from any of the readings, and it really portrays how I feel about foraging societies, especially compared to our own. It also connects to why anthropologists study these people. For as long as people have existed (until the boom of agriculture) we have been foragers, hunters, people that must know and love the land in order to survive. These people, even though they worked incredibly hard and were put in danger often, they were healthy and happy. If they could see our culture/society they might just feel bad for us. Even though we have all of these wonderful technological gadgets designed to make our lives easier, many of us are miserable. Depression, obesity, suicide, and little to no connection with the world we live in are just a few things that plague our so called advanced society. Also I don't mean everyone in our society, just generally speaking. I believe this is why it is so important for anthropologists to study these people, so we can attempt to use some of their ideas about life and harness them.
The book talks about human adaption, through which we have the technologies to feed and sustain ourselves without hunting and gathering. However, our population has outgrown the number of crops we can produce to feed all the people of the world. We continue to make more and more farmland to cultivate more food for the growing number of people on earth, but we won't catch up unless some kind of large global catastrophe occurs. The article by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins mentions the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and its use for cultivation of rice fields. I just recently watched a documentary on this beautiful environment and what the agriculture had done to the surrounding wildlife. The Mekong Delta has incredibly diverse wildlife, which has been slowly fading, partly due to the use of the surrounding lands for rice patties. Basically, we need to take a lesson from the people who knew what was up, foragers.
We really should appreciate the influence of the foraging societies since they pretty much gave us the foundation to build on. Also, since they are so wide spread and found across the world, it's much easier for anthropologists to compare or contrast the societies. Our traditions and technology came from foraging societies, so we must understand where we came from before we can go forward.
ReplyDeleteI had to read your post a couple of times and have to say that I love the way you put things in perspective. You made me understand the chapter a little more. I have been a vegetarian for more than a decade and although I will never eat meat I get an understanding of the way foragers were and still are. They don't waste food as we do in today's society. Watching and reading about hunting has been tough for me but, it is part of our history and for some our present.
ReplyDeleteL.A,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you liked my wording, sometimes I feel like it becomes a little more like rambling than actually explaining. It's cool that you are a vegetarian, but even cooler that you have the choice to be. No foraging societies have that choice, they (probably) never even considered not eating meat. It all comes back to how lucky we are to live in a society where we can pick and choose what we want to eat rather than just taking what the land gives you. : )