Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment

Abstract

That nature is a cultural construction is an easy claim to make, and it is one that figures prominently in recent anthropological literature. It is not so easy, however, to ascertain what might be meant by it. One of my principal objectives in this chapter is to demonstrate that this claim is incoherent. To illustrate my argument I shall consider the anthropological treatment of those peoples classically regarded as operating within a natural economy, namely societies of hunters and gatherers. Comparing this treatment with the understandings that people who actually live by hunting and gathering have of themselves and their environments, I shall show that the latter systematically reject the ontological dualism of that tradition of thought and science which – as a kind of shorthand – we call ‘Western’, and of which the dichotomy between nature and culture is the prototypical instance. I propose that we take these hunter-gatherer understandings seriously, and this means that far from regarding them as diverse cultural constructions of reality, alternative to the Western one, we need to think again about our own ways of comprehending human action, perception and cognition, and indeed about our very understanding of the environment and of our relations and responsibilities towards it. Above all, we cannot rest content with the facile identification of the environment – or at least its non-human component – with ‘nature’. For as we saw in Chapter One, the world can only be ‘nature’ for a being that does not inhabit it, yet only through inhabiting can the world be constituted, in relation to a being, as its environment.

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