It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting,
pastoral and agricultural formations, as states _preliminary_ to our
present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of
civilisation. This view, still too commonly surviving, is rather of
hindrance than help; what we need is to see our existing civilisation as
the complex struggle and resultant of all these types and their
developments to-day. So far, therefore, from leaving, as at present,
these simple occupational types to the anthropologist, or at best giving
him some scant hospitality within our city museum, we are learning to
see how it is at one time the eager miner, or the conservative shepherd,
or at another the adventurous fisher or hunter who comes concretely upon
the first plane of national, imperial or international politics, and who
awakens new strife among these. We not only begin to see, but the
soldier frankly tells us, how the current sports of youth, and the
unprecedented militarism of the past century, are alike profoundly
connected with the hunting world. Hence the hope of peace lies not only,
as most at present think in the civilised and civilising development of
international law, or of culture intercourse, excellent though these
are, but also in a fuller and complete return to nature than has been
this recent and persistent obsession of our governing classes with the
hunter world almost alone; in short, in adding the gentler, yet wider,
experiences of the naturalist, the sterner experiences of other
occupations also. Nor does such elementary recognition of these main
social formations content us; their local differentiations must be noted
and compared--a comprehensive regional survey, therefore, which does
justice to each local variety of these great types; speaking henceforth
of no mere abstract "hunter," but of the specific hunting types of each
climate, and distinguishing these as clearly as do our own milder
sportsmen of deer-forest and the turnip field from themselves and from
each other. After such needed surveys in detail, we may, indeed must,
compare and generalise them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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