Rhetoric, practice and incentive in the face of the changing times

Part of the mythology of late-twentieth-century environmentalism is that certain ‘traditional’ peoples are uniquely adapted in ways which ensure that their material and spiritual resources are held in balance. Such peoples are usually assumed to be in some vague sense—though by no means exclusively—gatherers and hunters, practitioners of animistic ‘natural’ religions, remote and resistant to change. This is recognizably only the latest of a long and ignoble pedigree of views which perpetuate a pemicious dichotomy, which, however much some have tried to disguise it, unmistakenly reproduces the notion of a primitive, exotic Other. It is a view which Edmund Leach described with characteristic forthrightness as ‘sentimental rubbish’ (Leach 1971:166).