ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the Hai//om case study helps to develop a wider notion of culture as ‘cultivation’: Cultivation in this sense clearly not only applies to the land or to challenges provided by external natural changes such as climate change. The Hai//om notion of ‘environment’ prototypically includes elements of the man-made environment and seamlessly merges with elements that elsewhere are considered to be part of the natural environment. For Hai//om there is no reason for separating two categorical domains from the start, in that they are interwoven. The chapter explores the Hai//om case defies an image of the environment as abstract and passive substance ‘out there’ upon which humans act. Humans have to relate to animals and plants independently of whether they are ‘wild’ or ‘domesticated’; they have to deal with an environment that is at the same time beyond control as well as a product of previous actions by humans.
