Bøger af Hugh Brody

Hugh Brody crystallizes three decades of studying, learning from, crusading for, and thinking about hunter-gatherers in this profound and provocative book. Contrary to stereotype, he says, it is the farmers and their colonizing descendants-ourselves-who are the true nomads, doomed to the geographical and spiritual restlessness embodied in the story of Genesis. By contrast, the hunters have a deep attachment to the place and ways of their ancestors that stems from an enviable sense, distinctively expressed in thought, word, and act, of being part of the fabric of the natural and spiritual worlds.

Hugh Brody is renowned for his work with indigenous peoples.In the 80s he was engaged in a lawsuit brought by the Inuit people of the Arctic against the Canadian government.Brody lived with the Inuit, learned their language, recorded all their stories, which were then used as evidence in the court case - which the Inuit won.In his new book, he returns to the Arctic and is confronted by the deterioration of the situation there.The Inuit now possess the land, but the government has pressured them into living in settlements rather than out on the land.Their children are forced to go to school where they learn to speak English, losing their own language, which is the element that ties them to their land.Sexual abuse by the treachers intimidates the children into a silence that results in widespread suicide among the young.This silence ties in with Brody's own story - a mother hounded out of her home in Vienna by the Nazis, causing her to retreat into the same kind of silence that Tom Stoppard experienced from his mother, who also fled from the Nazis.As a writer and anthropologist, Brody's concern has always been with the human condition, arguing for the need to safeguard the most vulnerable from the depredations of the modern word.

In this account of hunter/gatherer culture gleaned from years of living and hunting with the Inuits of the Arctic and the salmon-fishing tribes in the Canadian Northwest, the author reaches through everyday realities to reflect on the human condition.