The Nature Of The And Hunter Gatherer Societies

1758 Words8 Pages
Throughout history, humanities encounters with ‘the other’ inhabitants of our planet have provoked many questions and assumptions about the ‘natural’ state of our being and our relationship with the the world in which we live. A reflection from Sahlins on this relationship poses that ‘Nature is to culture as the constituted is to the constituting’ (1976: 209). Whereby nature as it exists in itself is the raw material provided by the hand of God, waiting to be given meaningful shape and content by the mind of man, culture provides a building plan for society with nature as the building materials (ibid:210). The fate of nature once culturalized is its new mode of existence is then bound by the benefits of exploitation by strongest of men. Through the well documented period of European colonialism in Jahoda 2008 & Wolf 2010, we can see how the assumptions of intellectual supremacy fed a negative construction of ‘the other’, underpinning waves of colonial expansion and facilitating the domination of pastoralist and hunter gatherer societies, ultimately serving to perpetuate economically exploitative relationships. Fortunately for mankind, the remedial element of time and the critical thinking of the enlightenment age has encouraged a more sympathetic consideration of radically different social systems and cultural practices (Mason 1990 in Jahoda), and has inspired some thinkers (Locke 1689 & Rousseau 1750) to envisage a more ethical, freer race of mankind. This essay
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