The Nomadic Alternative – Page 139

II

The hunters and gatherers who live at the minimal level of material culture in bands of twenty-five to fifty, bound up within a kinship structure of five hundred or so all speaking the same dialect, are usually to be distinguished from all others by their complete freedom of movement. For our purpose they are the right sort of savage. In a remarkable paper, the American anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, asserted that they are the last living representatives of the "Original Affluent Society". Recent research by him and others suggests the continued validity of Rousseau's famous anti-Hobbesian assessment of the Savage State in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men.

So long as men remained content with their rustic huts, so long as they were satisfied with clothes made of the skins of animals and sewn together with thorns and fishbones, adorned themselves with only feathers and shells, and continued to paint their bodies different colours, to improve and beautify their bows and arrows and to make with sharp-edged stones fishing-boats or clumsy musical instruments; in a word so long as they undertook what a single man could accomplish and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to enjoy the pleasures of independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous for any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling (or appalling) fields, which man had to water, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate with the crops ... Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution ... It is iron and corn which first civilized man and ruined humanity.

Rousseau believed that man had no nature, but at least he had the sense to put the blame for the human predicament where it plainly belongs - on human shoulders; men had misunderstood their needs and misdirected their activities. But some five hundred years before a Mediaeval author had accurately prefigured his account of the Neolithic Revolution, the subsequent invention of metallurgy, and their disrupting effects of the equality of man. Jean le Meun's Roman de la Rose analysed the present ills of society with reference to a better time in the past. Agriculture and mineral wealth, dragged