Crushed by the harrow

The notion of agriculture as an advance in society is wrong - 'potato growers' are more aggressive but no more superior than hunter-gatherers, Hugh Brody tells Chris Bunting.

Hugh Brody has friends in communities across the high Arctic and the thousands of miles of forest that lie between the tundra of Canada's far north and the wide prairies of its cultivated south. But few of his friends have made as much of an impression on him as a Dunne-za Indian called Jimmy Field. In his house in Highgate, Brody tells the story of a man who "was a kind of genius of that territory and way of life".

"He was one of the men at the Halfway River Reserve in northeast British Columbia, in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I lived with his family for about 18 months as part of a project mapping the land use of his community, the hunter-gathering Indians of that area.

"Even his peers in his community were in awe of his extraordinary ability as a hunter. His ability to read tracks and his knowledge of the whole territory was incredible."

On riding treks with Brody, Jimmy would read the land. "He would say: 'two moose are heading westI Oh, there is a lynx here.' You would go all over this immense territory and he would always know there was some trail up here or some way of getting down a hillside there. There was this immense amount of learning carried in his brain. Yet he was quiet and modest about it all, always fun to be with, always teasing."

That was more than 20 years ago. About two years ago, as Brody began preparing his latest book, The Other Side of Eden , he got a telephone call from a friend of Jimmy's family. Jimmy had disappeared.

Three weeks later, another call. "A young man had gone into the police station to say he couldn't live with his conscience. He and two others had beaten and killed Jimmy.

"You need to imagine what was going through these people's minds. Jimmy was standing on the roadside. They see a slim guy in tattered clothing. He always wore a denim jacket and a tattered cowboy hat. It was winter, so he was probably wearing gumboots. And he always wore cloth trousers, not jeans. He would have looked a bit tramp-like.

"They see this person who is inferior, stupid - just another Indian. They think of themselves as completely superior and completely informed and with all the rights, and they put him in the back of a pickup and they drive him around and around, trying to bounce him out of the truck. They stop the pickup and beat him to unconsciousness. Then they just dump him in the river. The body will never be found. It was swept away under the ice, out towards the Arctic Ocean.

"In one sense, it was arbitrary. But when you think about it, it seems to stand for so much more because of what these boys see when they see Jimmy - and what they don't see. I think of these boys, these redneck lads who had drunk too much, these frontier thugs who think they know it all but know nothing, and certainly don't know about this land they think is theirs by some colonial right. They destroy this man who is full of the reality of the place, a genius of this way of life, and think he is nothing.

"One way of life is attacking and aggressively thinking itself superior to another way of life." This last statement and the logical consequences of it seem to sum up much of the force behind Brody's work.

Brody, one of the most celebrated anthropologists of his generation, was the product of "a dual education" at Uppingham public school and the Hebrew study classes his immigrant family sent him to from early childhood. He left school for accountancy because he was told it was a good thing to do, but it was not for him.

After a few months, he got a place at Oxford University to read philosophy, politics and economics. It was not until a year of postgraduate study in Oxford that he "discovered fieldwork" and started to move into anthropology, first among peasant farmers in the west of Ireland and later on skid row in Edmonton, Canada. There, in the early 1970s, he accepted the offer of travel farther north and lived with the Inuit.

"After being there for about six months to a year, I began to see this division in the world between what I called somewhat jokingly 'HGs' and 'PGs' - hunter-gatherers and potato growers. The basic idea is that hunter-gathering and agriculture are completely different ways of living. One is not superior or any kind of progress from the other," he says.

The distinction was first used as a private joke to tease friends and family about their "HG tendencies" (such as their inability to keep to a schedule) or their "PG tendencies" (anal retentiveness). But in The Other Side of Eden , Brody deploys its logic to attack our fondly held preconceptions. Ideas of progress are violently shaken, and concepts of human nature are turned upside down.

Brody says humans did not start as hunter-gatherers and progress to farming. Analysis of the archaeological record and the fact that large parts of the world are dominated by a few relatively recently dispersed language groups suggests the extermination of old hunter-gatherer peoples by aggressive farming civilisations. Hunter-gatherers do not appear to have adopted farming, their societies seem to have been annihilated in a manner similar to the destruction of American Indian and other aboriginal societies.

Although we normally think of hunter-gatherers as nomadic, it is farmers who have engaged in a breakneck push across the globe, grabbing new land for the large populations their technology tends to encourage - and often producing militaristic states in the process. Hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, have tended not to stray from the territories that they know through their languages and traditions.

But farmers live a more comfortable life than hunter-gatherers, don't they? No, says Brody. Historically, farmers have raised large populations on rather limited sources of nutrition, maximised by agriculture's genius for clearing and intensively cultivating land. Brody talks of large groups of people working like ants in monotonous, often highly specialised work. Disease has thrived in agricultural societies' dense populations, which live close to tightly packed domestic animals. Disease has also cut swaths through relatively unresistant hunter-gatherer populations that come into contact with the host. Hunter-gatherer societies' relatively sparse populations, when not oppressed by farmers' insatiable demands for land, have tended to enjoy varied, high protein diets and much less specialised work.

Brody's work is full of such assaults on factual ignorance, but the heart of his argument goes much further. It insists on a deep appreciation of the hunter-gatherer mind as no less sophisticated or "modern" than our own. Brody acknowledges the genius of agriculture's demand for highly analytical minds, able to bring order to a chaotic world, capable of clearing land and cultivating with a few types of seed.

But he has spent much of his career - working as an academic anthropologist, documentary film-maker and researcher for hunter-gatherer societies in land-claim cases - confronting farming societies' almost universal denigration of hunter-gatherer ways.

Brody paints the hunter-gatherer mind as "humanity's most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition", able to accommodate the bewildering scale and uncertainty of nature; able to name the world in minute detail and yet live with its ambiguities and not reduce them to simplified categories.

This highly egalitarian mind exists in a society that dispenses with concepts of exclusive ownership of land and property but is also respectful of individual autonomy. Children and adults are typically valued for their ability to act as autonomous agents rather than their willingness to learn and abide by the strictures of farming societies.

"There is so much to learn from hunter-gatherer societies, and yet we are always trying to teach them how to become like us," Brody says. "If we could respect them more, we might be able to look into this mirror and understand more about what being human is. If only those boys had been able to see who Jimmy Field really was."

The Other Side of Eden is published by Faber and Faber, priced £20.00. Brody will discuss the urge to explore with novelist Beryl Bainbridge at London's Royal Festival Hall on February 19, 7.30pm.