One suggested that because some Batek people live fairly close to small towns, they wouldn’t be “authentic” enough for her show. I have been contacted by TV producers who want to film the Batek for documentaries or immersive reality shows. Similar tropes are prevalent in popular media. Instead, their lives centre on unthinking, base survival. In one fell swoop, Penan people are denied any trace of humanity, of any joy, desires, hope or even free will. One recent literary review published in the London Review of Books notes of the Penan in Borneo that “they foraged, hunted and ate, and moved through the forest in the only way they knew, and then they died”. This is a derogatory yet persistent belief. The second is the Hobbesian view, that premodern life was “nasty, brutish, and short” – thank God for “civilisation”.Įither way, the assumption is that an amorphous hunter-gatherer past and present represents a less complicated way of existing. The first is Rousseau’s view of primordial man existing in a simple “ state of nature”, happy because he has few desires. I’m becoming increasingly aware that two early modern understandings of hunter-gatherers that emerged during European colonial expansion still endure in the UK. Ultimately, this reveals more about our needs than it does about them. Desiring an antidote, we look to modern-day hunter-gatherers, conflate them with prehistoric relics, and fetishise them as “the noble savage”: an ideal representation of simplicity and happiness. Often, these rely on the assumption that today’s humans are, in essence, prehistoric hunter-gatherers trapped in modern life, and that this mismatch is the source of our ills. Their practices may vary, yet popular expectations of what they should be like are fixed. They are also diverse, for example from the Batek of Malaysia to the Mbendjele of Congo-Brazzaville, and the Agta of the Philippines.
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