czytanie teksty (15)

Tip:

Take no morę than 25 minutes to do this part.

You are going to read a book review. For questions 34-40 choose the answer (A, B, C or D; which you think fits best according to the text. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet.

The Other Side of Eden

Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping

By Hugh Brody

The anthropologist Hugh Brody has spent most of his working life studying, fiłming, łiving among, and campaigning for, hunter-gatherers. He has written a 4 number of books on the subject — including the intriguing Maps and Dreams. He has madę documentaries, and sat on advisory committees established to protect these isolated peoples from the rampant expansion of a morę acquisitive way of łife. The Other Side of Eden (part ethnography. part 5 autobiography, part manifesto) has the sense of distilling ałl that experience and knowiedge. It is a big book in every way, a paean for a vanishing version of ourselves. Brody sets it up as nothing less than a ‘search for what it has meant, and can mean, to be a human being’. Reading such a claim at the beginning of a book, you tend to think ‘uh-huh...’ — and wait for it to fali short. But it does not. It is wonderfuliy persuasive, deeply felt and as exhilarating as an Arctic sky.

Brody’s first brush with hunter-gatherers was with the Inuit of Hudson Bay. Equipped with little morę than caribou skins, some hard biscuits, a burgeoning stock of Inuktitut words and a well-honed relativism, he set off across the ice on week-long expeditions of genuine hardship. His guide and mentor was a man named Anaviapik, who later came to London in his seal-skin boots and was amazed by"The apartment blocks: how, he asked, could people live in cłiffs?

It was Anaviapik who taught 'Brody the early lesson that the word ‘Inuktitut’ is a synonym for the Inuit language from which it comes and also for the ‘way of being’ of the people themselves. In this lay the two themes that have driven his work: the importance of language and the essential integration of hunter-gatherer society. Over the coming years, Brody revisited the Inuit many times, as well as the Nisga’a and Dunne-za of northwestern Canada. If his portrait of them appears at times a little £Osy, he woułd probably claim that that view m ltselFis merely ethnocentric: that looking for the ‘flipside’ is a habit of our own duałistic worldview. Traditionałly, he tełls us, hunter-gatherers live in prosperity, in harmony with their environment, free from infectious disease. They display a calm self-confidence and wisdom. They respect their elders and in their relationships are open and honest. Inuit parents, for instance, openly talk in front of their children about which one of them they love most. Far from creating neurosis, claims Brody, such candour means that hunter-gatherer groups remain largely immune to the kind of mental anguish that arises trom half-truths.

of the World

That all changes when they encounter us. We — the scions 6of agriculturalists—have ridden roughshod over their ?pristine lands. We have plucked their children from them, sent them to residential schools, drummed their language from them. We have ‘settled’ them — and anyone who has witnessed settlements around the areas they once depended on, will know just what that can mean: alcoholism, confusion : and a pathetic lassitude.    —

At the heart of Brody’s ideas about hunter-gatherers is this contrast with agriculturalists. In this, is an inversion of the popular wisdom that hunter-gatherers are nomadic, while herders and grain-growers are settled. In fact, he claims, the opposite is true. Hunter-gatherers always have a profound and dependent relationship with a single area. They tend to ^keep smali families and are demographically stable. It is agriculturalists, on the other hand, who have wandered the earth. With larger families, they have developed the habit of expansion - and in their constant colonising of new land they have left only those hunter-gatherers who inhabit areas unfit for agriculture. HereJies the problem with such theorising. If there was a pre-agricultural period in w'hich all humans w^ere hunters and gatherers, then they must also have occupied much morę favourable land than they do now. Those who do survive may not be typical. Jn better land, for instance, they may have had large families, may also have developed rudimentary ‘agricultural’ techniques independent front each other.

As an anthropologist, Brody shows less respect for his discipline than for the people he studies. This is very welcome. Like most social Sciences, ethnography has been hobbled by an attachment to methodology. In the debates between other theorists, essential questions have often been forgotten. But Brody breaks the rules by waiting well and saying what he thinks. He evokes the landscape of the Inuit with shivering accuracy. He employs a elear aphoristic style ( to equivocate is to refuse absolutes ... words are the beginning of the end of nothingness ... verbal untruth has the power to render us neurotic’). A book that could have been leaden and dry has been transformed by good prose into one that glitters with uftiversal ideas. The Other Side of Eden is a petent elegy to marginalised societies. But in managing to convev the complexities of an alien cosmology, Brody highlights attitudes that, in our post-agricultural society, have a renewed urgency — the importance of knowing naturę, the Integra! power of language and a mystical respect for place.

TEST 4 . PAPER 1