The Nomadic Alternative – Page 138

Tacitus is often accused of over-idolizing the barbarous Germans so as to shame his own decadent countrymen. But his account of the Fenni, though based on hearsay, is a more accurate piece of ethnography than Darwin's prejudiced comments on the Yaghan. The Fenni have no arms - they do not fight each other; no horses - they walk; no houses - they are always walking. They have no metal - therefore no industry involving 'magical' transformations. They build rough shelters and that is all. The women follow the men everywhere; this suggests the complete equivalence of the sexes. They have no agriculture, no forced labour, no employment. They take no unnecessary risks, since life itself is a risk. They are free from religion; having nothing to ask of religion, the community and its activities may be said to be its own religion. They are free of anxiety and rely with confidence on the capacity of their lands to support them.

Until in recent years men preached civilization to the savages - usually at gunpoint - what was true of the Fenni in the time of Tacitus was - and in a few cases still is - true of the Kalahari Bushmen, the Hadza of Tanzania, the Eskimos, the Ahionoes of Western North America, the Shoshoneans of the Great Basin, the Andaman Islanders, many hunting tribes in Siberia and Southern Asia, and the Australian Aborigines. Such are our modern equivalents of the legendary peoples who inhabited the margins of ancient maps - the peaceful Hyperboreans, the matriarchal Hebrideans, the undefended Atavantes, the Hylophagi, and the dancing Spermatophagi. Or the inhabitants of the Land of the Far North whom the Chinese imagined to live in a pre-property idyll perpetually sniffing perfumes "more delicious than orchid and pepper"; or the Parossits, another people of the north known to mediaeval cartographers, whose bodies were so delicate that they absorbed nutrition from the steam of the stewpot alone.