Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
This sweeping history of hunting is the archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan’s final book, helped into publication by his friend and collaborator Nadia Durrani. Fagan was an extraordinarily prolific writer, and his ability to communicate with popular audiences is much in evidence here, though Fagan emphasises that this was a particularly difficult challenge. To make sense of hunting in a smartly paced survey is a major achievement. This is particularly welcome given that ‘man the hunter’ narratives continue to (mis)shape the popular understanding of hunting and human nature.
Fagan stresses the significance of the Neolithic pivot from hunting to animal husbandry, after which hunting became a leisure pursuit for the powerful, even as it remained a recourse for the hungry poor. Hunting and farming would coexist for millennia, but Fagan structures his book largely around the development of elite hunting practices, such as the royal hunt with its conspicuous display of wealth and martial virtues, and the opportunity for en chasse diplomacy. Fagan does not neglect ‘the humbler chases of regular folk’, and he is eloquent on the continuities linking (for example) Congo hunter-gatherer societies and Australian Aborigines to our ancestral past.
Some of the shifts are inevitably abrupt – we go, for instance, from the Sun King to John Muir in the blink of an eye – and the argument becomes fragmented the closer we come to our own day. The complex politics of hunting are not fully covered, and I could have done with more on so-called poaching and the connections between conservation and hunting. The absence of discussion of contemporary indigenous hunting practices is the biggest omission. The reader learns a lot, however: I had no notion of hunting cheetahs trained to ride on the backs of horses in Islamic Asia, nor Mongol postal relays using gyrfalcons.
Fagan does offer support for the idea that predatory drives are innate in human beings, with humans as ‘the world’s most widespread predator’. The concluding arguments suggest that ‘we humans’ need to change our predatory behaviours. But quite apart from the notion of collective responsibility, relatively few modern humans hunt, and Fagan segues without further comment into acknowledging that ‘hunting no longer plays a dominant role in human behaviour’. Hunting seems never to have been, even in prehistory, the great necessity that the most grandiose versions of the hunting hypothesis claimed, the very thing that made us human.
Some of the controversy that is the meat and drink of academic debates is lost; Fagan’s discrete glimpses and imaginative scenes being knitted into general patterns and summaries, perhaps giving the general reader somewhat too much confidence. Academic reservations are sidestepped by the hopeful promise of ‘we don’t know yet’, sometimes morphing into the impatient ‘we still don’t know’ or the frustrated ‘we may never know’. Indeed, Fagan ends his book with the question, why do people hunt? – and honestly admits that ‘we don’t know’.
This is nevertheless a learned and lively introduction to the history and significance of hunting.
REVIEW BY PHILIP HOWELL
Hunting: the pursuit that shaped humanity
Brian Fagan
Yale University Press, £25
ISBN 978-0300273496
