Sublime

omnipresent heretical conspiracy to overthrow all property relations

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look

Humans identified with their cattle and sheep, wrote poetry about them, and used them as a currency in marriage gifts, debt payments, and the calculation of social status. And they were grass processors. They converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone

To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himse

Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves. It’s only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical.

Richard Bradley set the pattern for this exercise in a series of studies which emphasized the novelties, rather than the continuities, which the adoption of farming has commonly brought to attitudes to the land. Farmers exploit nature rather than belonging to it, and enclose and own resources, rather than making paths through them and using them.