In Defense of Delayed-Return Hunter-Gatherers (III. of III.)
Addressing an unmerited bias in Anarcho-Primitivist circles --- Part Three: Are Shifting Cultivators Anarchists? --- [Estimate reading time: 35 min.]
This is the final Part of a three-part series on delayed-return hunter-gatherers, based on an interview I did with Artxmis for the Uncivilized Podcast. If you didn’t read the previous part yet, click here - or click here to start from the beginning.
Are shifting cultivators anarchists?
After defending slash-and-burn in the previous Part of this series, let us now turn to the second important question we need to answer to determine the relevance of delayed-return foragers to anarcho-primitivism: Are shifting cultivators anarchists?
If by “anarchist” you mean someone who’s opposed to top-down control, coercion and dominance hierarchies, the answer is: yes, most of them are (or were, at least, until the middle of the 20th century). That’s the main reason why they cho(o)se to live on the hills and not in the valley. As long as there were civilizations, some people have always decided that keeping them at an arm’s length might be a better choice, and hence moved to the periphery and joined non-state cultures to avoid taxation, conscription and corvée labor (Scott, 2017). Together with already existing hunter-gatherer cultures, those political refugees from authoritarian societies have, over centuries and millennia, created the diverse array of swiddening cultures of the tropical world.
The resulting ethnogenesis – the creation of new cultures – was based on conscious political decisions: if you don’t like civilization, leave, and keep your distance. And if the empire expands its reach, move. Mobility is one of the main reasons why the shifting cultivators can uphold their egalitarian ethos. In times of peace, or when a less megalomaniac leader was running the local kingdom, they might move closer to its borders to facilitate trade and benefit from it.1 Once the empire descended into tyranny or needed conscripts for the next senseless war, they would just move outside of its reach again. You can clear swiddens pretty much anywhere, so nothing keeps you tied to any particular point in the landscape, and the deeper you live in the mountains, the lower the probability that the state sends its taxmen and thugs to intimidate and rob you.
Mobility is the easiest form of conflict resolution, as you can always just go somewhere else if something (or someone) bothers you. And this is as true for immediate-return hunter-gatherers as it is for delayed-return foragers.2 Even the two notorious Davids described it as the first of their three “fundamental forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations” (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).3
One of my favorite examples of how this works in practice is that of ethnic villagers in Laos, who, when burdened with the additional task of maintaining the road that ran through their village by the French colonial administration, simply decided that that’s a little too much coercion for their taste – the next time the colonial officials came to inspect the state of the road, they found that the people had simply moved their entire village deeper into the mountains, away from the road (Scott, 2009). So much for “when no one obeys, no one can rule.”
Another powerful example (that readers of this blog might already be familiar with) is the extreme form of a ‘leveling mechanism’ practiced historically among the Lisu hill people: whenever a village headmen became overly ambitious and started bossing people around, they killed him in his sleep. Without warning. Now that’s an effective method to keep petty tyrants from emerging and terrorizing the people! If you want to be their leader, you have to be really careful not to overstep your boundaries, and this shows again that ‘leaders’ in such societies are often more like mediators or facilitators – not like rulers (Scott, 2009).
Among the Yanomami in the Amazon, hierarchies are kept flat by the practice of destroying any belongings of a deceased person, thus making the accumulation of material wealth impossible.
“We are different from the white people and our thought is other. Among them, when a father dies, his children are happy to tell each other: ‘We are going to share his merchandise and his money and keep them for ourselves!’ The white people do not destroy their deceased’s goods, for their mind is full of oblivion. As for me, I would not say to my son: ‘When I die, you will keep the axes, pots, and machetes I happen to own!’ I simply tell him: ‘When I am no longer, you will burn my possessions and you will live in your turn in this forest that I am leaving for you. You will hunt and clear gardens to feed your children and grandchildren on this land. Only the forest will never die!’ It is true. We think it is bad to own a dead man’s goods. It fills our thought with sorrow. Our real goods are the things of the forest: its waters, fish, game, trees, and fruit. Not merchandise! This is why as soon as someone dies we make all the objects he kept disappear. We grind up his bead necklaces; we burn his hammock, his arrows, his quiver, his gourds, and his feather ornaments. We crush his pots and throw them in the river. We break his machete against a stone, then hide the pieces in a termite nest. We try to not let any of his traces remain. We scrape the ground where he squatted and the place where he tied his hammock’s ropes to our house’s posts. This is what [the Creator] Omama’s words taught our ancestors, and we follow their path. This is not a recent thing. This is how the living can put an end to the sadness they feel when they see the objects and traces left by those who are no longer.” (Emphasis added; Kopenawa, 2013)4
Moreover, what often looks like a “hierarchy” to outsiders – specialized shamans who lead rituals, for instance – has very little to do with holding political power over others. Among the Yanomami only few people are shamans, but there are always several of them, of all ages, in any given area, and whoever is interested in following this path can easily join them. Shamans are specialists, but they cannot use their position or talents to lord over others.
When it comes to Southeast Asian shifting cultivators, the Meratus Dayak are my favorite example because they resemble the traditional anarchist hill societies of Zomia so much, yet lived in this way until relatively recently (the ethnography I’m citing is from 1993, in which the author recounts her time with the Dayak between 1979 and 1986). Although they are just a single cultural group, the detailed information we have about their culture is characteristic for non-state societies all over the region. It is striking with which accuracy they fit the (often historical and sometimes anecdotal) evidence Scott presents for shifting cultivators throughout Zomia.
The Dayak are anarchists through and through, although they probably have never heard the term and would even deny being one if you described the meaning to them. But that doesn’t change the political reality they are embedded in. Consider the following passage:
“Violence is a key element in both official and shamanic narratives, and it marks the difference between them. In the official narrative, legitimate force defines ‘government’; legitimate force separates order from chaos and divides bureaucrats from terrorists. Yet, central-mountain Meratus leaders insist that there is no difference between legitimate and illegitimate force; violence is a prerogative and necessary aspect of power, and power is not an issue of morality.
The police are terrorists because terror is the appropriate job of the police.” (Emphasis added; Tsing 1993)
Those statements alone are, fascinatingly enough, as close to actual anarchist theory as you get. The Dayak have a clear and realistic understanding of power structures and the inherent relationship between power and violence, and are able to express this in a more sophisticated fashion than any mainstream political commentator I’ve ever heard talking about the issue. They have a deeper understanding of the fundamental underlying currents that drive politics than most contemporary politicians. While modern society tries its best to paint the state as a benevolent entity existing primarily for the benefit of its subjects, it is in fact nothing more than a really complex version of a primate dominance hierarchy with some fancy window dressing.
Same with notions of order and chaos. In civilization, order is maintained through violence, either directly or through the mere threat. Nature is chaotic, undomesticated, and thus scary and threatening to the civilized mind. “Order” is high on the agenda of every state, and, as a guiding principle, must be criticized by anyone calling themselves an anarchist.
“Whereas the state labels order the antithesis of violence, the Meratus know order as the prerogative of the most violent. The imposition of state-endorsed order can be one of the state's most terrifying threats.” (Emphasis added; Tsing, 1993)
Those threats are all too real for the Dayak, as the government had long planned to resettle them in neat villages to stop their (in the government’s eyes) chaotic subsistence routine and ‘civilize’ them.
According to the Dayak, development is not being done for the sake of the rural people. Quite the contrary, it’s the rural people who most work to please “development” – not vice versa – otherwise the state will come and enforce its definition of “order.”
What this means in practice is that the Dayak went as far as to built “model clusters” of villages to please the government, to show their “commitment to order” and so that they would “look good” if government officials would come to visit.
At one point, a government official actually shows up, but ends up visiting not the model cluster, but a traditional umbun in a swidden, and is accordingly unsatisfied. The Dayak are always intent on appeasing agents of the state to avoid conflict, and a leader called “The Bear” gets angry at the residents of the umbun for not living a model village. When Anna Tsing points out that he himself doesn’t live in such a settlement and asks him why he thinks dense settlements are such a good idea, The Bear is taken aback by the critical undertone of her question. Slightly aggrieved, he asks if it isn’t true that everyone in America lives in “crowded groups,” and when Tsing responds that it varies, The Bear retorts that “in America everyone may be clever, but here, we’re chickens of the government.”
Tsing initially took this to be a statement of submission, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized the complexities this expression entails. Sure, chickens are easy sacrifices, require little attention, and are quite obviously not equals to their keepers. But, as she realized later, this comparison also involves pride, especially if you consider how the chickens of the Dayak are living: they are uncooped and thus relatively independent, they are free to forage all day, occasionally steal a bit of rice when nobody looks, sleep on the rooftops, and, most importantly, they are strong, resilient animals – and good fighters.
Being “chickens of the government” surely seems like an acceptable (temporary) compromise for any anarchist community in the real world.
Anarchism necessitates egalitarianism, and cultural diversity and fluidity – as opposed to uniformity – enables and reinforces egalitarianism among shifting cultivators. Sure, some cultural uniformity is required for a coherent group identity, but when compared to the civilizations cultivating the valleys, diversity and egalitarianism are inextricably connected and belong firmly to the domain of the swiddeners.
“Monoculture fosters uniformity at many different levels. In the case of irrigated rice, cultivators were bound to roughly the same rhythm of production. They depended on the same, or comparable, sources of water; they planted and transplanted, weeded, cut, and threshed their crop at roughly the same time and in roughly the same way. For the maker of a cadastral survey, a tax map, the situation was nearly ideal. Most land values could be calibrated to a single metric; each harvest both was compressed in time and involved a single commodity; the mapping of open fields demarcated by bunds was relatively straightforward […]. The uniformity in the field, in turn, produced a social and cultural uniformity expressed in family structure, the value of child labor and fertility, diet, building styles, agricultural ritual, and market exchange. A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.” (Emphasis added; Scott, 2009)
Among the Dayak, diversity is highly valued, both in the swidden and within society. Diversely planted swiddens mirror broad social ties (and thus respect and status), since cuttings, seedlings and seeds of a great number of species and cultivars are exchanged and gifted over large areas. They “signal the farmers' self-sufficiency and freedom of action” (Tsing, 1993).5
Another important aspect of anarchist theory is the critique and discussion of appropriation of labor, ownership and private property. As pointed out in the previous Part, land is seldomly owned, but crops and fruit trees are, at least seasonally. Work and food is often shared, as is evident from the following paragraph:
“The rice-planting party is an exceptional moment for creating umbun agricultural units [a Dayak household, the smallest social unit]. Unlike other aspects of swidden-making—such as felling and weeding, during which labor groups that cross umbun lines may form quite casually—umbun exchange labor reciprocally at rice-planting parties (that is, an umbun expects to see the same number of representatives from umbun A at its own planting party as it sent to umbun A’s party).
Consciousness of umbun form and separation is especially well developed at these parties; in other contexts, cross-cutting ties of kinship and neighborhood may be more relevant. Even the growing of swidden vegetables erodes neatly drawn umbun boundaries, for household and swidden cluster members often share vegetables in a relaxed way across umbun lines. Furthermore, umbun are not the key units of forest use. Rights to trees, for example, are shared by common descendants of the planter; anyone who attends a group fruit or honey harvest gets a share.
Forest use involves constant inspecting and exploring that are not tied to a predictable seasonality. Individuals connect their fortunes with short-term changes and long-term developments in claimed trees and familiar territories rather than with an annual cycle in a bounded plot.”
One of the most important of all anarchist principles is autonomy. As I hope I have made clear in the previous Part, autonomy is a main goal (and an inevitable result) of shifting cultivation as a subsistence strategy. Because the subsistence mode of a society is usually a pretty good indicator of its social dynamics, it is not surprising that the concept of autonomy is highly esteemed in Dayak culture as well.
“Umbun are proud of their autonomy; part of this autonomy is their ability to affiliate freely with other umbun. Many umbun choose to form a common household with one to five other umbun; they may also choose (with or without a common household) to farm contiguous swiddens in a small ‘swidden cluster.’ In these households and clusters, sharing and cooperation across umbun boundaries is daily and informal. As new farms and houses are constructed, however, umbun may join or form an entirely different group.
Umbun also affiliate more widely, forming propinquitous groups of scattered households (I call them ‘neighborhoods’) in which neighbors often share game, fruit, and honey, attend each other's work parties, and sponsor festivals together in a balai, a neighborhood-maintained ritual hall. There are no unambiguous Meratus terms with which to designate ‘neighborhood’ or ‘swidden cluster’ or ‘household’ units; in each case, locational labels are used to refer to the people living and farming in such-and-such place. These terms can be broadly or loosely interpreted; similarly, the boundaries of cluster and neighborhood units are always under negotiation. Umbun can choose among festivals forming in different directions; they can attend work parties with neighborhood groups of their own choosing.” (Emphasis added; Tsing, 1993)
Discussion of Dayak umbun leads to another important issue: the role of gender equality. On the one hand, primitivism teaches, there are immediate-return hunter-gatherers in which the two genders are relatively equal in status and power (if not in daily chores, which tend to be divided quite clearly); on the other hand, there is patriarchal agricultural civilization, with the man being the ‘head of the household.’ According to this unilateral logic, delayed-return foragers would be ‘somewhere in the middle,’ meaning that women would be ‘somewhat oppressed.’
This is most definitely not the case among the Dayak. Men and women are as close to equal as in any immediate-return society: umbun (Dayak households) are always formed around one man and one woman, who can be husband and wife (the most common combination), brother and sister, mother and son, uncle and niece, or any other combination – as long as both genders are present. Both male and female talents, energies and responsibilities are needed for a successful umbun, and Dayak marriage is not based on female obedience, but on the mutual goal of tending to crops and having children together - men and women even do their own laundry!
Being a feminist herself, Anna Tsing provides many colorful examples for the relative equality of women among the Meratus Dayak. When, for instance, a male shaman explained that women are “empty buckets” in which babies grow from the men’s semen, the women sitting around the scene interrupted and protested that this is not true, since the women provide the “water” in the bucket, and thus provide at least half of what will become a baby.6
Another time, Uma Adang, a female leader and shaman, recounts her interpretation of the Christian creation myth of Adam and Eve: The woman was not “made from the man’s rib,” she explains, but the cut on the chest was just the opening for a much larger surgery, one in which Adam’s heart was split in half so that Eve may have one as well.7
And while female shamans are definitely not the norm among delayed-return foragers, they are certainly not unheard of. Even among groups that are often characterized as ‘patriarchal,’ like the Yanomami, there are occasionally women who become shamans (Kopenawa, 2013).
Sure, Dayak women still complain, but without wanting to sound like a boomer – that’s pretty much what women do anyways, or not?8 The same is certainly true for immediate-return societies like the !Kung, in which women frequently complain about a great number of things, among them the unfairness of having to bear children – because this means it is much harder for women to have lovers, since they have to hide affairs from their children. Men, on the other hand, can simply claim they go hunting and easily meet in secret with whomever they want. (Shostak, 2000)
Yet free women are stubborn, and among the Dayak, even respected leaders “could not instruct the men as ‘heads of families’ nor could [they] expect the women to obey their husbands,” even if that was what government agents demanded (Tsing, 1993).
In most cases, men do seem to have more obvious and superficial political power and influence, but this is as true of many delayed-return societies as it is of immediate-return forager cultures like the !Kung (Shostak, 2000). But women often exert their influence in a more concealed, calculated and coordinated way (akin to ‘lobbying’), and thus seem to have less of a preference for the often impulsive, heated debates (what we might call ‘politics’) that men seemingly enjoy so much.9
What we can be certain of is that in any of the delayed-return foraging cultures I’ve described here, women generally have more inherent autonomy, respect, influence and power than in historical or contemporary agrarian societies (which, of course, includes industrial civilization).
Another interesting aspect of Meratus Dayak political identity is their origin myth: according to them, there were two brothers: the older one became the ancestor of the Dayak and the younger one, whose name translates to “Big Voice” (i.e. a good speaker, an attribute he used to his advantage), became the Banjar, the local Muslim agricultural kingdom and “antithesis” to the culture of the Dayak themselves.
Whereas the younger brother was disciplined and clever, the older brother had no discipline whatsoever, and while the younger brother was successful, the older one never achieved power due to his laid-back attitude. The creator bestowed both of them with equal gifts: a holy book and some animals. The younger brother successfully domesticated the animals – the older brother, on the other hand, failed to take care of them, so the animals escaped and became the ancestors of all the wild animals the Dayak encounter in the forest. The other gift of the creator, the holy book, was devotedly studied by the younger brother, while the older brother simply ate it.10
There is a good deal of healthy self-criticism in their origin myth, and although they don’t immediately seem to be the hero of the story, it does contain an unshaken calmness and carefreeness – and a certain pride that comes with it.11
Contrast that to the thoroughly domesticated common stories told among the Banjar, which are usually typical rags-to-riches-style tales like, for instance, a poor boy who through some twist of fate manages to become a king.
Similarly, a key figure in Akha legends is a man who was about to become the king of the Akha, and after instituting a census (which is a clear symbol for intended tax policies and other state-making processes), is violently killed by his own people. His son is similar to the Greek mythological figure Icarus – he rides a shamanic horse equipped with wings that are glued together with beeswax, flies too close to the sun, and consequently falls, crashes and dies. As Scott points out, “both stories are cautionary tales about hierarchy and state formation” (Scott, 2009).
The Akha, quite literally, don’t even bow their head to anyone.
“It would be hard to imagine a people whose oral history, practices, and cosmology represented a more comprehensive rejection of states and permanent hierarchies.” (Scott, 2009)
Just as the shifting cultivators readily and eagerly incorporated New World crops into their malleable cultures, they incorporate new myths and stories they encounter. They don’t use written language, and maintain, as all other hill societies historically, a strictly oral culture. This is yet another cultural mechanism with which egalitarianism is ensured. If no written records are kept, people perceive things to always stay more or less the same, thus negating any notion of ‘progress’ or ‘heritage.’ Furthermore, there are very few historical ‘heroes,’ as nobody will be remembered for his or her great deeds, thus curtailing the ambition to strive for more.
Originally, all shifting cultivators were Animists, just like immediate-return hunter-gatherers. Since Animism is inherently inspired by the diverse ecosystems it arises from, it negates any concepts of strict hierarchies – that’s just not how Nature works. The countless different versions of Animism practiced by indigenous people worldwide can’t be used to justify dominance hierarchies, which is why those ‘original religions’ were suppressed, assimilated, and (ultimately) often exterminated by the civilizations that encountered them.12 Telling is also the shifting cultivators’ attitude towards ‘civilized’ (i.e. revealed) religion, as is best exemplified by the following passage:
“Banjar [a neighboring Muslim and agricultural lowland culture] do not accept food-oriented hospitality from Meratus, nor do they offer food to them, because Meratus eat pork, which is forbidden to Muslims. Meratus provide travelling Banjar with raw vegetables and rice for the latter to cook in their own pots; but they receive no reciprocal generosity in Banjar villages and towns. Yet Meratus sometimes laugh at Banjar prejudice, reversing its barbs. Here, for example, a Meratus boy mocks the Islamic declaration of faith (La-illaha ilia-Allah, wa Muhamada rasul-Allah):
Illah-illah illallah
Makan bayi buruk disabalah.Illah-illah illallah
Eating rotten pork on the other side.”
This deep aversion towards civilized religions is not uncommon among hill societies. Belief in Buddhism, Islam or Christianity was often only feigned – when nobody else was around, their own spirits were worshipped and their own rituals held. And, as Scott points out, “where, as occasionally happens, they do come to embrace the ‘world religion’ of their valley neighbors, they are likely to do so with a degree of heterodoxy and millennarian fervor that valley elites find more threatening than reassuring.”13 Among the Akha, during “shamanic curing rituals intended to restore a wandering soul to its body” the shaman has to ritually travel down into the valley and confront civilization: “A journey to this [spirit] world with nine layers is described as a descent from the mountains to the lowlands, where the person’s soul has been captured in the ‘labyrinth of the dragon’ and condemned to perform corvée or slave labor for life.” (Scott, 2009)
Concluding, we can be sure that Southeast Asian shifting cultivators were opposed to civilization, because they literally overlooked the bright green plains on which it rose and fell repeatedly. If they would have preferred life as a state subject, nothing would have stopped them from packing their things and moving down into the valley.
But they didn’t. They also didn’t try to become like the valley civilizations. They made a continuous and conscious choice to do something fundamentally different from what the civilizations were busying themselves with – namely warfare, conquest and slavery; for king, country and honor. Quite the contrary: what we can observe among the various non-state societies is an example of schismogenesis, or, as Scott calls it, dissimilation. Schismogenesis or dissimilation
“refers to the more or less purposeful creation of cultural distance between societies. It may involve the adoption and maintenance of linguistic differences, of distinctive histories, of differences in attire, burial and marriage rites, housing styles, forms of cultivation, and altitude. And since all such cultural markers are meant to distinguish a group from one or more others, they are necessarily relational. Dissimilation can have the effect of staking a claim to a particular niche in the overall hill-valley economy—for example, ‘We are foragers in the forest; we do not touch the plough.’ Pursued over time and elaborated, such dissimilation, of course, leads to ethnogenesis.” (Emphasis added; Scott, 2009)
And here we arrive at a very important conclusion. What happens when egalitarian people are confronted with authoritarian cultures in their vicinity, what results is ethnogenesis: the creation of new cultures – cultures defining themselves as the opposite of civilization.
As we anarcho-primitivists know, people are attached to civilization to differing degrees. Some just can’t imagine a life outside of the city, others would be alright with a simpler life if they still had access to some of the conveniences that come with civilization, like electricity, hospitals or certain machines and tools. Still others hate civilization enough to withdraw even further, and some value their personal freedom so much that they are fine with doing their own thing entirely, even if that means possible compromises in temporary well-being, comfort, security, and longevity. Theoretically, there would be a place among the various hill cultures for anyone on the spectrum. As long as you oppose civilization and hate being somebody’s subject, you’re one of them.14
Some anthropologists believe that most Yanomami are descendants of former agriculturalists: ‘civilized folk.’ Similarly, the cultures that we now know as “hill tribes” or, more generally, delayed-return foragers are usually only a part of the original culture – those who, when threatened with state power, chose to abandon the “security” and “comfort” provided by the state and fled to remain their autonomy. The Hmong were once living on the Chinese side of Zomia as state subjects of the Han Empire, where they incited more than forty rebellions around the sixth century (Scott, 2009). If that’s not anarchist, I don’t know what is. But since horticulturalists ultimately can’t outbreed, outmuscle or outinnovate farmers, they were ultimately defeated – and were consequently either absorbed, or simply dispersed. Those that took to the hills, together with more recent refugees from various states (and probably a few assimilated immediate-return hunter-gatherers), are now whom we know as “the Hmong”. And this is a consistent theme for shifting cultivators: some of them descend from hunter-gatherers, freedom-loving people, others’ ancestors were full-time agriculturalists, many times former slaves, freedom-seeking people. Both groups decided, for one reason or another, to change their lifestyle and subsistence mode. Some hunter-gatherers liked the semi-sedentary lifestyle, or the idea of actively participating in your ecology to a larger extent. Many of the others were once state subjects, but decided that life in a stateless society that could be shaped by cultural, spiritual and social factors was more attractive.
I hope it is obvious by now why anarcho-primitivism as a critique, an ideology, a ‘movement’ – call it what you want – has to leave behind its ‘immediate-return bias’ and expand the scope of subsistence strategies it considers, contemplates, examines, and (ultimately) practices. This means that if immediate-return hunter-gatherer life is still a tad too big of a step for you, do not fret: you can still cultivate plants without inevitably condemning your descendants to a life of eternal drudgery and oppression. You just have to stick to a few guidelines, cultural values and spiritual beliefs, dutifully practice leveling mechanisms, stay (at least somewhat) mobile, invent (or adopt) myths in which all this wisdom and knowledge is encoded for long-term storage in cultural memory, and you’re good to go!
If the only ideal we primitivists uphold is the fully nomadic life of immediate-return hunter-gatherers, I have bad news for you: we won’t be able to acquire the skills needed for this lifestyle in our own lifetime – and even if we did, we would find ourselves inhabiting an empty land with increasingly scarce resources (at least compared with the pre-historical habitats we humans inhabited). What is needed right now is the restoration and rewilding of large swathes of the landscape, and this can best be accomplished not merely by leaving the land alone, but by embracing horticultural and permacultural techniques: by going out there and doing what needs to be done, what the land wants us to do – by restoring at least some of the damage that the last millennia of civilizations metastasizing and ravaging place after place have inflicted. During this process, we can slowly wean ourselves off the industrial consumer economy we’ve become so dependent upon – hopefully just in time before its inevitable collapse. As the late Joe Hollis has pointed out in his brilliant essay Paradise Gardening, “exactly where we are on a line that has Paradise [or Nature] at one end and money [or Civilization] at the other is less relevant than what direction we are moving in.”
As I said in the interview, we can’t just run into a National Park and become foragers. Years, decades, lifetimes – no, generations of lost knowledge and skills need to be restored in order for us to stand a chance. Life in the forest is easy enough if you were born into it – but if you weren’t, you’ll need some acclimatization. Moving towards the other side of the spectrum also involves weaning ourselves off the “pleasures,” “comforts” and “luxuries” that civilization constantly tries to tempt us with. It means getting comfortable with the occasional discomfort, pain and suffering we’ve been so busily trying to exclude from our lives. It means accepting life as it is, with all its highs and lows. It means getting to know plants and animals intimately, reconnecting to the rest of the Community of Life, and recreating regenerative human communities that are based on those values.
My wife and I are trying to do exactly that, and we’ve coined the term “Primitive Permaculture” to describe what we’re doing.15 This allows us to explore the vast middle ground between Civilization and the Forest, and slowly reduce our dependence on the former while increasing our dependence on the latter. Just like the many hill cultures, we don’t deny that there are at least some benefits to be derived from having at least some contact or exchange with civilization. It’s not a binary, and it never was. Civilization still exists, and merely ignoring that reality doesn’t change it. Ultimately, each one of us has to decide how high upon the mountainside we want to settle, and for most of us the exact location of our personal “comfort zone” will only become obvious once we leave behind the familiar plains and start ascending the foothills. But the most difficult thing is the first step.
After a decade of living with the land, we are still far away from the lifestyle of traditional hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists (we would need a community for that, which proves exceedingly difficult in Durian Country – and we’d need more land), but we’re getting there. Slowly. We have one foot in Civilization and the other one in the Forest, and we slowly shift our weight onto the latter.
Although most of us today have forgotten our destined role as Stewards of the Land, we humans are a keystone species, crucial to the overall health of the environment – this is the life we evolved to live, and our role hasn’t changed over the many millennia we were led astray. The Land needs us, now more than ever. Consciously or subconsciously, all of us crave this connection, the sense of belonging that comes with being cradled in this vast, more-than-human web of relationships. We are the Land, and the Land is us. It awaits us eagerly.
The diverse cultures of delayed-return hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists provide us with inspiration for how to form relationships, both with each other and with the ecosystem we inhabit. We have entered the chaotic transitional phase between industrial civilization and whatever comes next, and uncertainty looms over our future like the sword of Damocles. The dominant culture will be stopped eventually, if not by an outright revolution, then simply by the biophysical limits it has ignored for too long. We are living through the collapse of the biggest and most complex empire in history, and it won’t be a walk in the park. Not soon, anyway.
But, as James C. Scott has pointed out repeatedly, the so-called “Dark Ages” that followed the demise of earlier civilizations were, contrary to popular belief, not only doom and gloom – they “may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare.” As hierarchies collapsed, life actually got a lot easier for many, especially for the rural peasants who suddenly found themselves free of oppression and obligations, and the cultures on the periphery who were now no longer threatened by war, conquest and slavery. It was common for populations to shrink and disperse during “Dark Ages,” and societal collapse was accompanied by an urban exodus, as people moved further away from the hopelessly overpopulated and literally un-sustainable core of the crumbling empire.
“The decentralization that arises may not only lessen the state-imposed burdens but may even usher in a modest degree of egalitarianism.” (Scott, 2017)
Call me hopelessly optimistic,16 but I can’t be the only one seeing opportunity here. Sure, our situation is a lot worse – we have a much, much higher population, most agricultural land is severely degraded, rainfall patterns have shifted, extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity, most forests are gone, wildlife numbers are at the lowest point since the last Mass Extinction, and the entire biosphere is saturated with toxins.
But entering the New Dark Age also means that there will be much less pollution and large-scale industrial activity, a rapid increase in insect and (eventually) many other wildlife numbers, a renaturalization and rewilding of large tracts of land, and an associated drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. For us humans, there will be no more pointless jobs, no more distraction from social media and entertainment (and hence less alienation), and, maybe most importantly, no more debt – which also means no more perverse profit incentive. We will be forced to slow down and scale down.
To be frank: statistically speaking, many of us won’t make it through the transition. A drastic decline in population levels has been inevitable since the “Green Revolution” made agriculture dependent on non-renewable resources to increase surpluses, and perhaps since agriculture made people dependent on fertile topsoil and a stable climate for their food. Overshoot begets collapse.
Yet those of us who make it through the current bottleneck will find themselves in a world with many new opportunities for creative subsistence modes and social forms. And those new modes of subsistence and social organization might look a lot like what delayed-return hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists are doing – this shift is pretty much inevitable. Conventional agriculture is already being heavily impacted by climate change and a number of other problems resulting from the collapse of the biosphere due to modern human activity. And despite its exorbitant resource requirements,17 industrial farming continuously fails to provide adequate nourishment for the majority of world, so it should be clear that we either adapt – or die out.
Fusing the core concepts of anarcho-primitivism and permaculture offered me exactly the vision of a possible transition I was looking for, and the study of delayed-return hunter-gatherers provided me with experience, techniques and ancient wisdom.
As the Lahu say:
“The old saw the sun and the moon first; the old sowed the grain first; the old found mountain flowers and wild fruits first; and the old know the most about the world.”
I hope that this essay series will inspire at least some comments and correspondence, and maybe even ignite a debate within the wider anarcho-primitivist community. For anyone who’s a primitivist, a sympathizer, or just interested in the topic, I highly recommend the following list of Works Cited for more details and inspiration.
If you have any further questions or objections, please feel free to comment or contact me personally.
Works cited:
Broennimann, Peter; (1981) Auca on the Cononaco – Indians of the Ecuadorian Rainforest; Birkhäuser/Springer Basel
Descola, Philippe; (1996) The Spears of Twilight – Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, The New Press
Ford, Anabel & Nigh, Ronald; (2015) The Maya Forest Garden – Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands; Left Coast Press
Graeber, David & Wengrow, David; (2021) The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity; Penguin Books
Kopenawa, Davi & Albert, Bruce; (2013) The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman; Belknap Press/Harvard University Press
Manser, Bruno; (2004) Bruno Manser – Tagebücher aus dem Regenwald 1984-1990, Christoph Merian Verlag
Scott, James C.; (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed – An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press
Scott, James C.; (2017) Against the Grain – A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press
Shostak, Majorie; (2000) Nisa – The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Harvard University Press
Tsing, Anna L.; (1993) In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, Princeton University Press
I write stuff like the above in my free time, when I’m not tending the piece of land we’re rewilding here at Feun Foo. As a subsistence farmer by profession I don’t have a regular income, so if you have a few bucks to spare please consider supporting my work with a small donation:
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Valley states in Southeast Asia were reliant on many products from the hills, and thus paid good prices for them. “Even quite large kingdoms in precolonial Southeast Asia were strikingly dependent for their prosperity on export goods from the hills. The first Thai trade mission to Beijing of Rama I (Chulalongkorn), in 1784, calculated to dazzle the Chinese, included luxury products that were almost entirely provided by the hill-dwelling Karen: elephants, eaglewood, ebony, rhinoceros horn, elephant tusks, bastard cardamom, long peppers, amber, sandalwood, peacock feathers, kingfisher feathers, rubies, sapphires, cutch, gamboges (a gum resin), sappanwood, dammar, krabao seeds, and a variety of spices.” (Scott, 2009)
This is another aspect in which the tribes of the North American Pacific Northwest that influence primitivist thought so much are outliers – they were pretty much sedentary, depending on a geographically bound main food source. Hierarchies are established much easier if the people can’t run away.
And yet , somewhat curiously, in their entire book they didn’t even mention hill cultures as an example for successful anarchist societies a single time. Probably because they try to justify sedentary life in agrarian civilizations, not the undomesticated, chaotic, earthbound and fiercely egalitarian Nature of shifting cultivators.
Notice how Davi Kopenawa doesn’t even mention that one of the main functions of this custom is to act as a leveling mechanism. To him, it’s first and foremost to deal with grief.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a society in which social status is tied to the diversity in your garden?? (Admittedly, I just say this because this would automatically make me “alpha male” of the entire province.)
It is likely that the comments by the women in this situation might have been overlooked (or better overheard) by a male anthropologist of the era, who might have easily been satisfied with having his male bias validated by the shaman. This is one of the reasons why it’s so refreshing and insightful to read the work of a female anthropologist.
It also makes me think how many snide remarks and sarcastic comments by women have been overheard, and how much the ‘proto-patriarchal’ image of delayed-return hunter-gatherers was influenced by this.
The Dayak see no contradiction in appropriating and adjusting myths and stories of other cultures, and they don’t see them as contradicting their own traditional beliefs.
I’m being intentionally provocative – please have a little humor. The anthropological literature also abounds with examples of men complaining that their women chase them out into the rain to go hunting, when they really feel much more like staying in their hammock close to the fire. Yes, being a man can be hard as well…
Amusingly, I almost made this joke during the interview, but thankfully changed my mind mid-sentence. I always have to remember that most people don’t know me personally, and thus tend to take everything I say seriously– big mistake! For instance, in a recent article I used the phrase “build back better” and sarcastically thanked Joe Biden for the inspiration in the footnotes – only to have a random reader comment on the apparent discrepancy of writing an essay like that while at the same time being a supporter of Joe Biden. Dude.
Dear reader: if you ever hear me say (or see me write) something that seems a little off, that most likely means that I’m not being serious! I maintain that humor doesn’t always have to abide by whatever goes as political correctness these days. When using questionable turns of phrase like “known to man-kind” while sounding like a 1950s radio announcer, I am not being patriarchial – I’m mocking idiots who talk like that.
I am by far no expert on the matter, but it seems likely that men strive to hold visible positions of leadership more than women because we have higher testosterone levels (I know this sounds like a cliché but hear me out), which gives us a stronger incentive towards achieving status – not, as is commonly assumed, a greater potential for aggression. The reason people still think testosterone is responsible for aggression is the fact that aggression is most often the way in which status can be achieved and secured. But in a society in which status is connected to generosity (like with the Pacific Northwesterners and their potlatch tradition), testosterone-fueled men will outcompete each other in displays of selflessness to attain higher status. Since it seems blatantly obvious that men have a stronger innate desire to strive for apparent positions of high status (such as leadership) than women, I think that in an ideal society women don’t even necessarily have to be leaders 50 percent of the time (or hold 50 percent of leadership positions), but should simply have the opportunity to become a leader or take on a role of responsibility if they wish so. Forcing women into positions of leadership that may feel uncomfortable or pretentious to some should not be the goal. But (hopefully) needless to say, women should never, ever be excluded from the decision making process. We tried letting men call the shots for the last few millennia, and look where it has brought us.
This relates to the fact that Meratus Dayak look for spiritual inspiration within the body, not in some stinky old book.
Which I can empathize with a lot!
One of the main reasons why World Religions are World Religions is the fact that they can be (ab)used and (mis)interpreted to justify inequality and dominance hierarchies. That’s one thing they all have in common – even Buddhism.
This passage makes me laugh out loud each time I read it.
As is summarized by Scott in this paragraph:
“The hill populations of Zomia have actively resisted incorporation into the framework of the classical state, the colonial state, and the independent nation-state. Beyond merely taking advantage of their geographical isolation from centers of state power, much of Zomia has ‘resisted the projects of nation-building and state-making of the states to which it belonged.’ This resistance came especially to light after the creation of independent states after World War II, when Zomia became the site of secessionist movements, indigenous rights struggles, millennial rebellions, regionalist agitation, and armed opposition to lowland states. But it is a resistance with deeper roots. In the precolonial period, the resistance can be seen in a cultural refusal of lowland patterns and in the flight of lowlanders seeking refuge in the hills.” (Scott, 2009)
I recently gave an interview explaining the concept in a bit more detail.
Now that I think about it, this is a rather apt description: I have very little hope, but I am still optimistic. Life will prevail – only the Earth lasts forever!
According to Nate Hagens, it’s roughly ten to fourteen fossil fuel calories for each food calorie, presumably for the US. In our garden, it’s zero fossil fuel calories for most meals.
absolutely jaw dropping stuff. thank you
Loved reading this series. Brought so many threads together and gave me a much deeper insight into your regional history and your own perspectives. Makes me more excited to help you find out if a system like inga alley farming as a substitute for swiddening might help in the transition ahead.