Analysis Of The Other Side Of Eden By Hugh Brody

If there’s something every country and the whole world has in common it’s that they were all home to native tribes, whether it was the Aztecs, Cherokees, Inuit, Nuer, Hadza or Incas and many more. Hugh Brody, a British anthropologist, writer, director and lecturer, writes about a tribe of hunters in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic of North America, who are known as Inuit. In his piece, “The other Side of Eden”, written in 2001, Brody argues that we still judge hunter-gatherers although we are the ones that dramatically and drastically changed their life because of our modern life styles. Ironically Brody named his piece, “The other Side of Eden”, alluding to The First Book of Moses, Genesis 2, or also known as “Genesis of the Garden of Eden”,

Brody explains and describes how the Inuit, like many other tribes, have survived the margins of the vast, fertile lands occupied by the farming people and their descendants, now the great majority of the world’s population making them the minority in their lands. However, Brody goes on to describe and explain the way of life the Inuit people carried. In my opinion and from what I understood in Brody’s text, the most sharply characteristics that distinguished the Inuit people are, “ Families don't desire more than two small children at a time” (Brody 1010). Or how, “ ..animals have to be given water when they are killed to ensure that some of their numbers are willing to die when they (Inuit) need food” (Brody 99), and one that stood out to me the most, “ ..Parents never chided or disciplined their children (Brody 102). Furthermore, the reason why the lives of the Inuit and many other hunter-gatherers tribes where forced to change their way of living was, because the excessive demand on farming goods such as

In “Zapotec Science”, Gonzales describes how campesino farmers, in the Northern Sierra Oaxaca in Mexico, have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of the centuries. Having spent so much time in Oaxaca, Gonzales got to see first hand the natives way of life and their farming techniques. Gonzales explains how the campesinos rarely use machinery to do their farming but instead us body measurements, for instance, the “length from shoulder to elbow”, (Gonzales 112). Gonzales also describes how farmers and their families have a special attachment to their crops, lands, and animal, stating that, “ Knowledge about farming and food is passed down from parents to their children”, that how they learn about subsistence agriculture (Gonzales 112). Some of the most interesting characteristics of the Zapotec people to me where, how the “campesinos…new more about farming on the Talean soil than agronomists do” (Gonzales 113) and how delicate they are toward their maize. Gonzales shares how many campesinos would frequently state, “Somos pobres pero delicados” meaning we are poor but we are picky, what they meant by this was, “ that the quality of the maize they produce is just as