The Other Side of Eden

Summary

Anthropologist Hugh Brody begins in the High Arctic of the 1970s, learning Inuktitut among Inuit hunters, then widens into a history of the divide between hunter-gatherers and farmers. He asks why farmers have overwhelmed hunters, finds part of his answer in Genesis, and reverses a stereotype: farmers are the restless ones, hunters stay rooted in lands they know intimately.

Rationale

Brody reads Genesis as a farming people’s creation story. That is a told story tethered to lived practice, the pairing we suspect gives any disposition its grip.