ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have long viewed hunter-gatherers and farmers in mutually exclusive terms. They have contrasted the ‘relations of sacred companionship between men and animals’ of hunter-gatherers with the dualistic view of nature among farmers (Sinclair 1977: 20). As Sinclair argues, in the shift from hunter to farmer, ‘[t]he psychology of the forest man gave way to the psychology of the field man, as timber retreated before the ax’ (ibid.). Nurit Bird-David states that cultivators ‘see themselves as living not in [the forest] or by it, only despite it … opposing it with fear, mistrust and occasional hate’ (Bird-David 1990: 190). According to Peter Boomgaard, ‘peasants and farmers throughout history, in whatever part of the world … feared and often hated ‘wild nature’ (Boomgaard et al. 1997: 17).
