The Modern Hunter-Gatherer
by Jason GodeskyMichael Pollan is an author who eventually makes it onto any self-respecting primitivist’s reading list. The Botany of Desire tackles the issues of co-evolution and domestication in an engaging (albeit slightly naive) manner, but “Why Mow?” was an article that helped me begin to see the ways in which the civilized mentality seeps into our daily lives. This past weekend’s New York Times Magazine carried a new article by Pollan, “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer,” taken from his new book to be published next month by Penguin Press, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
Pollan confesses freely to come from that liberal section of American society where hunting is treated with disdain. He finds himself embarrassed by his own accounting of his experience:
Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes.
Yet, the experience itself seems to be transformative. Pollan recognizes that there is something more than he has given credit in the past:
Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have.
Pollan talks about the thrill of his hunt, and the disgust and shame that followed in vivid terms. The strength of his language helps the reader to almost feel the conflicting, ambivalent passions he himself experienced. Pollan sickens himself with his own joy in the kill, and it made me consider the hunter’s pride. There is always an understandable sense of pride in a successful hunt, as with any job well-done. The joy of killng, though, seems more to me like a symptom of a long disconnect from reality. To experience reality once more is thrilling; I think that is where the hunter’s joy comes from–for a moment, the hunter is human, no longer trying to “transcend” his animal self. A forager who lives as a human being every day is used to that feeling–for him, a successful hunt is a reason to thank the animal for its sacrifice, and share the bounty of the kill. Of course, in the end, Pollan’s civilization gets the better of him:
So perhaps that’s what the perfect meal is: one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debts outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why, real as it was, there was nothing very realistic about this meal. Yet as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true cost of our food, and that, no matter what we eat, we eat by the grace not of industry but of nature.
In fact, there’s nothing more real. To those of us trapped in what Derrick Jensen called “the culture of make-believe,” we take the imaginary to be real. So, when we do come in contact with reality, we think of it as, “unrealistic.”
Pollan’s account is long, but it is also powerful and provocative. He is a gifted writer, and his prose helps to bring the realities of hunting to life. Any would-be forager who’s never shot an animal should definitely take the time to read Pollan’s account.
Jason Wrote
“Any would-be forager who’s never shot an animal”……..
is no forager at all
Comment by Rory — 28 March 2006 @ 6:37 PM
Isn’t a “would-be forager,” by definition, not yet a forager?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 March 2006 @ 6:41 PM
Freegans seem quite adept at “gathering.”
http://freegan.info/
Comment by Ethan — 28 March 2006 @ 6:41 PM
meh…..yeah.
yeah, i am retarded sometimes
Comment by Rory — 28 March 2006 @ 7:30 PM
As much as people are disconnected and therefore seek the deeper connection found in hunting, there is still something to be said for those little demons nesting in our consciousness that take definite pleasure in killing. Humans are by nature very ambivalent. I don’t think it is at all unusual for people to have many conflicting beliefs and feelings at varying levels of self-consciousness. I say this from the point of view of one who has had experiences of great unity and empathy with nature and others, as well as someone who has hunted enough to know that there is definitely that little part of me that loves killing. Not the connection with nature and all that, believe me, mushrooms do that much more intensely and it is different. There is that little part of me that gets all thrilled and excited when I kill something. Of course there is also the other part that is horrified with my pleasure and tries to ignore or suppress it.
Comment by limukala — 29 March 2006 @ 1:07 AM
I’m not sure how a mushroom could be “much more intense” as a “connection with nature,” but I don’t doubt that many people genuinely enjoy killing. At the same time, I doubt that’s a universal phenomenon, and my guess is that joy is something we learn, not something we’re born with.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 March 2006 @ 10:35 AM
Then again, I can see an evolutionary advantage for carnivores and omnivores that enjoy killing over ones that don’t.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 29 March 2006 @ 11:03 AM
That seems like a quick prescription for over-hunting, and thus, extinction, to me.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 March 2006 @ 11:09 AM
Although ones who were saddened and depressed by it would probably cease to hunt. Over hunting has physical limitations when you aren’t using machine guns from heliocopters.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 29 March 2006 @ 11:52 AM
“I’m not sure how a mushroom could be “much more intense” as a “connection with nature,” ”
I think he might have been referring to -special- mushrooms?
Comment by rob — 29 March 2006 @ 12:05 PM
So I assumed … that might be a much more profound connection with your own brain, or for the religious, the spirits, but I fail to see how it connects one with “nature” more than the most basic, animal act of living at another creature’s expense. If nothing else, killing a mushroom just to feel “connected” is, itself, a fairly significant disconnect, to my mind.
Ben, you’re right, but the easiest thing for evolution to do would be to form a creature that’s neither depressed by nor rejoices in killing. The default state seems to be the optimal one here. Why would evolution push us in either unstable direction?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 March 2006 @ 12:10 PM
I suspect that the joy of killing is the joy of success. It is the same joy that artists get when they finish a work, or that mechanics get when the car starts. The fact that we misread the joy of a succeeding in a hunt as the joy of killing probably has more to do with our cultural lens than anything else. Think about fishing. The thrill in angling is catching the fish, not killing it. The killing of the fish is anticlimactic. It is the finding, hooking and landing that make the excitement.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 29 March 2006 @ 12:19 PM
I think you’re right, Jim.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 March 2006 @ 12:23 PM
Could it be possible that we civilized humans are “neotonous” or whatever that word is that means we are stuck in juvenile form, like how dogs are?
Wouldn’t a first kill in primitive society be part of growing up?
I also wonder if having pets conditions civilized people to view all animals as pets, which prejudices them against hunting.
Hunters have real relationships with animals ones that go beyone having a pet or watching the discovery channel.
Comment by urban_coyote — 29 March 2006 @ 6:33 PM
“the easiest thing for evolution to do would be to form a creature that’s neither depressed by nor rejoices in killing. The default state seems to be the optimal one here.”
Houston, we have a method by which spirituality may have become imprinted in our brains… What if it came about as a way to regulate hunting/grazing while still allowing us the higher intellectual capabilities that have made us so successful?
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 29 March 2006 @ 7:52 PM
To love hunting, and/or the hunters, is to love life. How dare any modern man be so bold to think otherwise. Even in the age of agriculture, hunting has been a necessary ingredient to life for all but the nearest years.
In hunting (as opposed to just shooting and killing), you gain a quality of respect for the quarry (deer is my favorite). Then having invested much time in it’s pursuit, one is committed towards making a clean kill. The skinning and dividing the harvest is the best part of the hunt, as this act, in itself, is a period to pay tribute to the event.
Plus, there is no tastier meat than which is frshly ripped from the inner cavity and lightly seared on an open fire!
Comment by Rick Larson — 29 March 2006 @ 9:23 PM
I had to laugh after reading the Pollan pig story. There isn’t any need to over-intellectualize the process of hunting and killing meat for food.
I can understand the revulsion, I still feel it after decades of hunting. But to attempt to explain it down to the nth nuance of disgusting detail, what was the point? This story didn’t make Pollan a hunter or truly knowledgable about what hunting really is. He tries very hard to convey this new found knowledge but winds up short. I don’t blame him, his lack is simply experience, not words (obviously).
Hunting isn’t the real issue here anyway. The real issue is the disconnect from man and nature, the world he lives in and the world that sustains him. The hunting experience can give you a glimpse of that real world, but in itself is incomplete like the article. In the end, Polland is found at a dinner party of all things. Did he not learn anything?
I think not.
Comment by Survival Acres — 29 March 2006 @ 10:44 PM
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the joy of the kill as something other than that. Every culture has institutionalized the thrill of the kill in some way, whether through animal sacrifice, which restores a spiritual dimension to the everyday chore of slaughtering farm animals, or in human sacrifice, which would serve to intensify the thrill enough to last a longer period of time, or through elaborate rituals in which no animal or person is actually killed but that allows the thrill of the kill to express itself all the same. In our own culture we see it in video games, movies, and other media.
It makes sense to me that something like a “hunting drive” would evolve among a hunting-gathering species like ours. A “hunting drive” would evolve in strength in inverse proportion to the success rate of hunting — just like our sex drive evolved in inverse proportion to successful birth rates. The lower the chance of success, the stronger the drive, in order to increase the success rate.
Comment by Paula — 4 April 2006 @ 11:55 AM
Animal sacrifices are only made by agricultural societies with domesticated animals. Human sacrifice is a rare subset of that. I don’t think video games or movies have much to do with any kind of bloodlust, but I do agree that there is a thrill to seeing what you’re really made of–the way you only can in the intensity of physical engagement. Or, as Tyler Durden put it, “How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
That said, hunting drive, absolutely. But I don’t think a hunting drive necessarily translates directly into bloodlust. I’m noting that our examples are almost all from civilized peoples, and that hunter-gatherer examples are so far lacking.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 12:00 PM
Yes agricultural societies, that was was trying to say. Once the proper place of the hunting drive no longer exists, that drive has to be channeled into something.
I’m not sure I understand how you draw a distinction between a hunting drive and the joy of the kill. That seems like drawing a distinction between sex drive and the joy of hte orgasm. What’s the difference?
Comment by Paula — 4 April 2006 @ 8:30 PM
The kill is not the fulfillment of the hunting drive, the way orgasm is the fulfillment of the sex drive. Eating is. In fact, the “joy of the kill” is something hard to find among foragers. If anything, they usually feel rather ambivalent about the kill itself. Now, eating, that’s another story entirely.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 9:16 PM
Many or most people growing up in civilization are too far removed from the process of procuring their own food to have developed a mature or “healthy” perspective on hunting/killing. For anyone beginning a hunting lifestyle as Pollan did, and I will at some point, surely such emotional reactions are to be expected. Elation, guilt, confusion, perhaps even shame or fetishism among those who have a really hard time adjusting.
Comment by scruff — 5 April 2006 @ 12:36 PM
Exactly what I was suggesting.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 1:19 PM