Roger Scruton and Hugh Brody’s discussion on hunting and hunters in openDemocracy has opened up to broad consideration a subject often viewed without benefit of historical or international context.

For Roger Scruton, these savage pursuits have the merit of being atavastic – of living out deep-seated emotions. But they do so in a socialised way: the European hunt on horseback has been ritualised. It is sanctioned and sanctified by time, and human habits and disciplines have transformed the merely primitive into the richly traditional.

In this way, the primitive is civilised. This understanding conforms to Roger Scruton’s yearning to root the best of modern Britain (of which he thinks there is little) in something ancient, spiritual and dignified. He doesn’t like the callous rationalism of the Enlightenment, nor its incipient hysteria, in which persons rattle about, unhinged and fancy-free, blown hither and thither by whims of mind and heart, and pre-occupied (even tyrannised) by their viewpoint and rights.

Hugh Brody, in response, is cautious. The European hunter, he notes, does not quite connect to the primitive as Scruton suggests. The modern hunter is a product of the wealth-relations and the power-relations, which robbed the hunter–gatherer of his primordial rights and vested them instead in an aristocracy from whom they have been wrested in turn by more common people. Besides, the truly ‘primitive’ (not his word of course) are cut from a nobler cloth. Their understandings of their natural world, their respect for it, are of a far deeper kind than Scruton’s ‘civilised’ hunters manage. And they do not have the proprietorship that narrows the European mind.

Mapping territories, and minds

Roger Scruton could, if he wanted, maintain that the instinctual urges of the modern European hunter are at least as authentic as the Eskimo’s (hereafter ‘Inuit’) or the forest-dweller’s – they have been routed through various social transformations, as a matter of history, but they are water from the same river.

While Roger Scruton’s approach deserves fuller attention, I want to dive into this discussion mostly because Hugh Brody’s contribution repeats views which I think are widespread, intuitively attractive, and dangerous. I think the primitive world is now facing its Enlightenment future, and – contrary to Scruton – that seems to me a fine thing. In short, I believe that Brody is too soft on where primitive cultures have been, and Scruton is too worried about where they’re going.

Many people hero-worship primitive cultures. Hugh Brody is among the finest of his genre, and a fine and luminous writer. I share his belief in the crucial importance of ‘mapping’ (see the arts section on my webpage). On the one hand, we map reality because we need to know where its components are. On the other hand, we always map it with an agenda. This is partly because we need maps that are true to their uses (a map for walkers is not the same as a map for psephologists). So, maps often betray our own minds as we draw external reality, because we display our hang-ups, preconceptions, wish-lists and fantasies, which we can only half wrestle into submission as we seek objectivity. We read maps to know the mappers’ minds as well as their territory.

Ah, you say, and you’re not wrong: I know where he’s going now – we are in structural analysis terrain where books (maps) are read for what the writer didn’t know he was saying. This is an essentially post-modern interest; one in perception as much as reality. Whereas Roger Scruton, as it happens, loathes the post-modern, I have come to see it as extremely interesting, though often hijacked by the left-liberal, and left-radical, tendencies for their own purposes.

Encounters at the frontier

I do not at all share Hugh Brody’s view of the Inuit understanding of their world. My own talks with Inuit and various North American Indians, and my understanding of their past lives, suggest to me that the ‘respect’ in which he says they hold the natural world is only a part of their feeling about it. This talk of respect is partly a way of rationalising their fear that nature hates them, not least for their predations upon it.

In the Toronto Gallery of Art, where one can reliably expect the politically-correct, white-guilt thing, to be in full play, I was delighted to come across some quotations from Inuit elders which seemed to endorse my views, but also to go where I had not ventured. The elders described their shamans as cruelly manipulative.

This reminds me of how important it is to see that shamanism is at work in the really rather wicked influence witchdoctors wield in the African savannah as they crush any move by younger villagers to advance themselves.

In order to convey my difference with Hugh Brody at its sharpest and clearest, let me note some of my encounters with the frontier between those plucky little indigenous cultures and the hegemony of the modern, with its cash-nexus and its status-seeking (as Brody sees it).

In a small town in the mid-Amazon I met tribal leaders who said what they most needed was knowledge of Portuguese. This was because it was the language in which they could both deal with the people to whom they sell their jungle produce, and talk peaceably with neighbouring tribes whose own language they didn’t share. (What they needed next, they said, was a road to get to town on; the river was far too meandering and disease-laden.)

In a remote northern Philippine village amongst rice terraces, a middle-aged woman (of 40) said she was angry that her generation was the last to be taught English by missionaries and that now political correctness (not her expression) dictated her own young being taught in the local dialect, which robbed them of access to wider world. (And she wanted light to read by at night.)

In a jungle clearing in the western Amazon I met a young rubber-tapper who thought that if only Brazil had not become so obsessed with pandering to green non-governmental organisations (NGOs) he might easily double the land he had under cultivation and stand a better chance of taking his family to the city – better still, abroad – for holidays.

In the backwoods of Manitoba, Canada, I met an Indian who liked to go trapping because though it was economically more or less meaningless, it conferred dignity on him. He couldn’t understand why he had fought as aircrew in the Second World War for the British Empire (for its hegemonic liberalism), only to be told by young whites that trading fur was disgusting. This was, by the way, a story that had features of the movie, Map of the Human Heart, which I recommend to anyone.

In a cafe in Nairobi, Kenya, I was told by a young black conservationist what a disgrace the Masai were – parading the picturesque primitive as virtual beggars whilst so enriching themselves in cattle that their over grazing was an ecological depredation.

In a hotel in Kuching, Borneo, I met a young police superintendent who said that his own family of ex-headhunters and present slash-and-burn farmers were very keen on a dam which had fairly recently flooded their valley. It had meant they could move nearer to schools, and have rather better land. The problem with the relocation had not been the fact of it – but the bureaucracy and political mischief, which had delayed it.

These examples (culled from conversations during brief forays) make me distrust every element of Hugh Brody's discussion of the primitive (now I am using the word as I like, I have reclaimed it, and don’t have to politely distance myself from it). They are reinforced, as I wrote in my book Life On a Modern Planet, by light excursions into the literature of ‘original affluence’ – which fashionably supposed that indigenous hunter–gatherer cultures live in blissful indolence, and which was nicely counter-poised by some other anthropologists who said they didn’t recognise their own subjects in this cheery view.

Hugh Brody seems to me to glorify the primitive and to do so as part of his mission to put the modern at a discount. This seems to be of a piece with quite a wide tendency in anthropology, a lovely discipline prone to feebleness. It is of a piece with a goodly proportion of ‘Anthropology Lite’ – the journalism and books which pour out from travel writers and campaigners.

The illusions of anthropology

Anthropology is attractive because it sees the merit in the human wherever it is, and it is useful because it helps us to understand the great differences of which societies are capable. It has the merit, at its best, of not being mechanistic. It avoids one post-Freudian peril of modern thought: namely to see people and societies as mechanical and manipulable. In other words, the best of anthropology is deliciously at odds with the worst of sociology. Anthropology is a thoroughly post-modern discipline; it is preoccupied with the meanings with which people invest their lives and language.

But both anthropology and Anthropology Lite are subject to producer-capture, and are agenda-ridden. (‘Producer-capture’ is an idea that is used to describe the problem of a social service, which ends up being run for its suppliers, not its customers. It is also used when a regulator finds he cannot properly discipline a service because he is bound up with ensuring its survival.) In this case, it is appropriate to describe the way that anthropologists cannot afford to be rude to their primitive subjects.

It happens like this. A young radical academic, journalist or campaigner, on fire with romanticisms (usually of a Rousseau-esque kind) and deeply desirous of finding a world less suburban, less constricting than his own, is parachuted into the jungle, the savannah, the ice-floes of another world. He (or perhaps she) is an inexperienced youth, looking for a parallel universe.

Lo! He finds one. He is amongst the fag ends of a dying culture on the edge of the world. The people with time to talk with him are deep in their anecdotage. They sense he wants to talk of the past, and they dredge up what remains of the fund of mythology with which their people have whiled away the light-less, book-less nights of their lives.

The youngster is daily at risk. He is in an alien environment, and it is a hostile one. The young man is grateful for the local knowledge and survival skills of his new friends. He falls in love with the whole experience. His knowledge of these people is the only interesting thing in his life – the only thing by which he is marked out from his fellows back home.

What’s more, he discovers the political radicalism he came looking for. He finds societies that are a delightful medley of what he admires most: the anarchist and communist. Private property is unknown, sharing is common. He does not realise that the absence of property rights is not merely what contributes to survival in such unpromising surroundings: it is what ensures perpetual poverty.

And then our young anthropologist spots that in primitive societies young men and maidens are socialised in ways that show both high courage and near universal success. The strikingly illiberal and coercive qualities in the process do not trouble him because he has not yet spotted that freedom of choice is not merely the bedrock of development, it is at the challenging heart of human personality.

Along the way, our youngster will have constructed a firm belief that his new friends are the victims of white Europeans. These will include the early explorers and exploiters, the high colonialists, the resource-plunderers of Empire, the missionaries. No white type or institution escapes censure.

Amongst the most interesting products of the culture shock, which now hits the youngster, is a highly poetic and very moving understanding that people who don’t write things down have vested their lives and surroundings with meanings. Their hostile territory is a dreamscape, a palimpsest, a Valhalla.

Anthropological writings, at their best, help the reader see that objective reality is only the dull bit of our lives, which causes physical bruises when we knock into it. The interesting bit is how our minds order, and disorder, reality. The most interesting globe is between our ears. What is less noted is that what travellers tell us is hugely conditioned by the agenda, the mind-map, they have grafted on to the inhospitable wilderness.

We know it is hostile because everyone who has any means of living anywhere else has long ago abandoned it, and only those who had no choice were ever there in the first place, often driven by their luckier and more forceful neighbours, who mostly got on with the despised agriculture, rationalism and everything else which lifts people out of poverty. That much of the condition of many indigenous people is the result of forcefulness by people of their own colour is ignored.

The young anthropologist is usually also right in the middle of some tricky social changes. He is interested in the past and in the survival of the primitive. The primitives themselves know that they are modern people. The problem for them is whether to turn their back on the outside world, to go away and join it, or to allow the modern into their terrain (or to cease to hope to keep it out). In any case, they face the problem of working out what to do with the primitive that is their unique possession. They have, almost all of them, a condition which is rich in opportunity and fraught with tension. Namely, what they have not had for millennia: choices.

Embrace the modern

The problem is familiar. The European immigrants to the US faced it when they dealt with the melting pot; the woad-wearing Celts faced it when the Romans arrived in their domain. The most successful answer seems to be: go with the flow of the new Empire whilst keeping a degree of ethnicity for the weekends. In other words, get real, get modern, and visit a suitably ethnic restaurant for occasional evenings of maudlin or joyful reminiscences about the Old Country. Everything else seems to run the risk of Balkan horror (or Ulster politics, or Basque politics).

I am not sure whether I more worry about the mythologising of the myth-laden primitive for the damage it can do the primitive as they confront the modern, or for the damage it does the already thoroughly modern as they work out how to handle their condition. We may mess up the primitive as they develop, or mess ourselves up as we resent being developed.

Yet, because I have met some people from indigenous cultures, I don’t worry about the primitive all that much. I don’t think their way of life used to be happy, and so I don’t worry that it cannot survive its inevitable contact with the outside world. As for the modern westerner, our condition seems to be that of spoiled children. It’s not that we’ve had too much, too soon. It’s that we have yet to grow into what we have. But I am pretty sure we shouldn’t look back, except the better to map our route forward, and to be glad we’ve moved on.