"Compare this with the economic realities of hunter–gatherers, with their relationship to the means of production. Different hunter–gatherer societies have different ways of managing and using territories. But it appears that each of these societies, despite their differences, has institutions and customs that ensure that everyone lives at more or less the same material level. If there is an abundance of food, everyone eats well; if there is a dearth of food, everyone is hungry. Land and animals are not owned by individuals. Distribution is not a function of variable riches. And where use rights give privileged access to one group of families rather than others, there are systems in place (from the famous potlatch of the North Pacific Coast to the routine sharing of all meat among Arctic hunters) to ensure that benefits are distributed through the population."

Hugh Brody seems to have mistaken his own views for those of his subjects. The bane of anthropology has been that field workers, peering through what they think is a window looking onto another culture, discover after long and diligent work sketching the images they see, a passable likeness to their own minds, and that the window was a looking glass.

I suspect that the concept of 'costly signaling' both better describes the behavior of hunter-gatherer societies and reveals connecting patterns between seemingly diverse cultures.

See this paper that discusses costly signaling. Briefly, costly signaling involves "cooperation among unrelated members of a social group, in which providing group benefits evolves because it constitutes an honest signal of the member’s quality as a mate, coalition partner or competitor, and therefore results in advantageous alliances for those signaling in this manner."

Brody's idea that "This way of life, which I have tried to evoke with the term ‘egalitarian individualism’, is different from indeed, opposite to the way of life of European agriculturalists. In our systems, we are hierarchical individualists, with ranking that is allied to wealth..." creates a false distinction by not recognizing the way that H-G societies measure status, rank and hierarchy. In a culture that has few preservation methods and at any rate often needs to carry its possessions about the landscape, neither material possessions nor control of the means of production offer useful methods for distinguishing quality.

Seen in this way all human societies, and even non-human societies, do have rank and hierarchy though they measure it differently. This is comforting in a way since we not only see the patterns that connect farming with H-G societies, we even see our connection to other primates, birds, fishes and insects. We are not deeply different, not opposite, but instead have various methods, appropriate to our circumstances, to conduct our societies.

Circumstances certainly do differ and specific skills are learned to deal with them. The way that H-G societies "surf" their moment to moment circumstances, seizing opportunities more than imposing structure, is charming though seemingly inappropriate for farmers. Better knowledge of farming reveals that farmers also "read the wind" in making decisions about what and when to plant, cultivate and harvest. Farmers, like CEOs of corporations, have long range plans that are updated frequently.

Brody notes that "Before I understood this absence of plans [in H-G societies], I would seek to establish what we would be doing when. And I would be confounded, again and again, by being assured of one thing today and its opposite tomorrow. This was not bad planning so much as good judgement. The hunter waits on events..."

So does everyone else. With good knowledge of disparate cultures and an open mind, similarities become readily apparent. The "patterns that connect" always exist and we are rewarded by insight when we perceive them. This might be seen as lending slight and tangential support to Scruton's position though he may find it obscure.