Foraging

Discussion

Foraging Psychology

"Contrast the trust, self-reliance and short-term perspective of the forager with the uncertainties, and benefits, of farming. A successful farmer can accumulate resources and buy freedom of labour with it, but every day the entire crop can be destroyed an unpredictable malignant force, nullifying backbreaking labour with a slight of hand, leaving the farmer and his family hungry for at least as long as it takes to grow and harvest the next crop. The forager does not have the deadlines of sow and harvest times. The year moves slowly from one resource opportunity to the next as plants bloom and trees fruit, the rivers swell and reside, the rain come or goes and animals arrive or stay away. You may be unlucky for one day or two days or even three days but there is always something going on and you will find it because the world means you no harm. The relationship of the forager with the landscape starts with what the landscapes gives. Not with what man can take from it as the farmer does. If you are part of a small community living in the depths of an impenetrable forest and if your tool set consists of an axe and a machete, a blowpipe and a curare dart, the idea that nature can be fenced in, dominated, cultivated, domesticated is patently absurd. The landscape is never incorrect. But technology does not explain the forager, the landscape does. The different belief systems of foragers and farmer underlines all this. Farmers have powerful scornful gods that reward and punish, foragers have annoying but relatively harmless tricksters that like to play.

It is true that foraging people are only rarely fully dependant on hunting and gathering alone. Most of the actual food, though not the actual nice bits (meat fat and honey sugar), is produced in gardens. But this does not discredit the idea of a radical psychogeographic distinction between forager and farmer because the gardening techniques of foraging people are incompatible with the crop monocultures that have fed farming communities for the last 10.000 years. The forest garden (to name one of several closely related types of plant cultivation) is a meticulously planned micro-cosmos inside the forest that works by perfectly reproducing forest conditions with a number of desirable species. Gardens are planted to facilitate the interaction between tens of species. To foreigners they look like a total mess but this messiness is the outward sign of its resilience. The traditional view on slash and burn agriculture is that it is hopelessly inefficient as productivity lasts for only two or three years before the weeds take over and the garden has to be abandoned. Research however has shown that former gardens do not fall from grace but remain extremely useful for those who planted them. The weeds are actually desirable, often rare, species and the fallows attracted eagerly hunted animals close to home, the trees would yield fruit for tens of years after being planted. The garden is not liberated by force from the chaos of the surrounding forest, the forest itself is a garden, of a sort.

It is true that the mind of the forager is steeped in taboo, superstition and animistic transference of soul and purpose across the Western way of dividing the human-animal-plant realms. The forager is not a farmer without tools, foraging culture is not a form of backwardness. Superstition does not discredit the forager, it reinforces the argument that peasants are blind to the obvious. Taboos demand constant awareness to the implications of the smallest act, ensuring that no action is ever undertaking lightly. All things that happen are open to interpretation, it may foretell future events, it may bring or take away luck. Everything watches and you better not ignore the signs. You thank the animals you have killed, you say grace to the berries you harvest. No form of impact is allowed to pass unnoticed. The peasant has rationalized the butterfly effect, the forager feels it everyday, crackling on the skin like a chilly breeze of destiny. The taboo itself is empty, the function is in the creation of awareness." (http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/p/what-is-forage-psychogeography-suppress.html)