[telluro]

I agree with Potemkin.

Hunter-gatherers were happy - danger and violence do not stand against happiness; in such a lifestyle they might stand FOR it. But if there were a historical principle which occurs necessarily and which destroys the hunter-gatherer sooner or later, it's the occurrence of civilization. It is probable that hunter-gatherers themselves established the first principles of civilisation, by discovering some agricultural tribe, and suddenly finding that it is no longer necessary to hunt dangerous wild animals, since there's this soft people here who will provide them with animal and plant food at the edge of a spear. A couple of centuries later you might find this basic interaction has become a tribal symbiosis, and the first classes appear - warriors above, farmers below - the first principles of civilization.

[Le Rouge]

They also lived under 30 years, faced disease, lacked permanent shelter, and women were treated as property. Romanticizing hunter-gatherers is the stuff of science fiction, not politics. If you want to live in a utopia, turn forward the clock--not back.

[telluro]

They also lived under 30 years, faced disease, lacked permanent shelter, and women were treated as property.

That's WHY they were happy. Shed your modern prejudices.

In any case, it's not a question of turning back the clock. I agreed with Potemkin - as soon as civilization appears, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is doomed, and eventually impossible.

Utopia (the end of history and all that) is, well, the stuff of science fiction, not politics.

[ninurta]

There aren't as many huntergatherers because it is an impractacle lifestyle outside the jungle and into the current population size of the human race. Could it be better than living modern? No doubt. But I wouldn't start romanticizing the whole lifestyle saying all the tribes lived the same way.

[Ichiro]

About the Pawnee:

"They were a well-disciplined people, maintaining public order under many trying circumstances. And yet they had none of the power mechanisms that we consider essential to a well-ordered life. No orders were ever issued...Time after time I tried to find a case of orders given and there were none. Gradually I began to realize that democracy is a very personal thing which like charity, begins at home. Basically it means not being coerced and having no need to coerce anyone else. The Pawnee learned this way of living in the earliest beginning of his life. In the detailed events of every day as a child, he began his development as a disciplined and free man or as a women who felt her dignity and her independence to be inviolate"

---


"The Creeks are just honest, liberal and hospitable to strangers; considerate, loving and affectionate to their wives and relations; fond of their children; industrious, frugal, temperate and persevering; charitable and forbearing. I have been weeks and months among them and in their towns, and never observed the least sign of contention or wrangling: never saw an instance of and Indian beating his wife, or even reproving her in anger. In this case they stand as examples of reproof to the most civilized nations . . . for indeed their wives merit their esteem and the most gentle treatment, they being industrious, frugal, loving and affectionate . . .Their internal police and family economy. . .incontrovertibly place those people in an illustrious point of view: their liberality, intimacy and friendly intercourse with one another, without any restraint of ceremonious formality; as if they were even insensible of the use of necessity of associating the passions of affections of avarice, ambition or covetousness. . . How are we to account for their excellent policy in civil government; it cannot derive its influence from coercive laws, for they have no such artificial system."


From Columbus and Other Cannibals

These should be good explanation for this : Prisoner Exchange

About returning to nature - too many of us. The tribe is not that, it's an organization.

[Suska]

How do you propose we start a hunter gatherer society, without having to resort to genocide?

in a word, the commons

we could stop thinking of our parks as recreational and start thinking of them as resources and even homes for those among us with nothing else. They could be expanded, but not developed - to harbor small ecosystems that produce clean water and food for a small amount of people.

I have two references in mind.

The conclusions in this video from mannahatta project

and

The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the momentously important mediæval institutions of the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The mediævals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists; but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests and the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on the common land, which was[Pg 94] a much more common incident. Mediævalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity. Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediæval men busy upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake.

[Dr House]

They also lived under 30 years

They lived much longer (over 60 years), controlling for infant mortality.

[Suska]

They also lived under 30 years, faced disease, lacked permanent shelter, and women were treated as property

In fact House the entire sentence is wrong.

They had a lower average age, but they did have their old-folks, potentially even 80 or more. Its an old misconception buried deep. People may have had a relatively low life expectancy because of infant mortality (and predators and disease etc), but they could and did sometimes live long lives.

People have been making shelters for a long long time, there's no reason to assume they couldn't, but why build a permanent shelter when you're moving out next season? Plenty old tribes did have permanent shelters anyway. The Iroquois Longhouse etc.

I don't know where you get the idea women were treated as property La Rouge, it doesn't follow from what I've read in the least. Why would a Matriarchy in which men become part of the family they marry into - in which women select the males they want as war chiefs - why, if fact would women (the heart and strategic brain of the tribe) be "treated as property"?

[cathartic moment]

Ichiro has given us several quotes where he recounts how early American settlers often preferred the native American lifestyle to their own. Reading between the lines, I get the impression he's trying to say that if we, citizens of the 21st century, were given a similar experience then we too would choose the hunter gatherer lifestyle.

Would we? I can't help thinking that the lifestyle of the average person in the west is now immeasurably better than those of 17th century settlers. We are far better educated, far healthier, and have far better access to both the basics for life (food, clothes, heating etc) and luxuries that people of that time could hardly dream about.

Very few westerners would choose to revert to the lifestyle of a 17th century settler. So if the point of his post is to influence the choices that we should make today, in our own lives, then I find the choices made by people in the 17th century to be quite irrelevant. They didn't like their lifestyle, and neither would we. So their decision to abandon it tells us nothing.