The Nomadic Alternative – Page 22

clothes, and has enjoyed a career of two million years or more, hunting in a state of Adamic nakedness. Life in the office, the cornfield, or the saddle has made no significant inroads on his genetic constitution. Our appetites, our aversions and our manners remain those of the hunting field. They constantly re-express themselves in new and startling ways.

But there are two drastically different kinds of hunter, the big-timers and the small minimal bands. The big-timers – sons, perhaps, of Nimrod the “mighty hunter” – habitually return to caves or settlement sites, store surplus and defend it. And excavators of such habitations have concluded that Palaeolithic man knew something of the rudimentary comforts of settlement. But the archaeologist could find no trace of the minimal bands however hard he looked. They pass through their lands on a perpetual migration. They never store food for more than a day or two, and decline to possess anything they cannot carry. Only at such a level of human society, reduced to its absolute minimum, do we find the dream of every idealist thinker – the non-violent Society of Equals. The hunting of animals has nothing to do with the hunting of men – rather the reverse. Members of these societies are not all identical, in influence or ability. That is impossible. But they share equally and the differences between individuals are effectively nullified with each generation. Their migrations are “wandering to live”.

Incidentally ‘nomadic hunter’ is an expression sometimes used in the literature of anthropology, but is a contradiction in terms. And despite French roadsigns reading “Interdit aux Nomades”, gipsies are, by their own confession, Hunters with hunters’ privileges. The wide world is their hunting ground, which they partition into territories and lease to each other. Sedentary populations are sitting game, to be milked and exploited at all times. Gipsies show the hunter’s frivolous disregard for owned property and surplus. All a gipsy’s personal possessions are burned on his death. These wanderers who cast themselves loose in the world, to be buffeted around like a cloud, replace the security of an anchor of