“The hunter-gatherer mind is humanity’s most sophisticated combination of detailed knowledge and intuition. It is where direct experience and metaphor unite in a joint concern to know and use the truth. The agricultural mind is a result of specialised, intense development of specific systems of intellectual order, with many kinds of analytical category and exacting uses of deductive reasoning. The hunter-gatherer seeks a relationship with all parts of the world that will be in both personal and material balance. The spirits are the evidence and the metaphors of this relationship. If they are treated well, and are known in the right way, and are therefore at peace with human beings, then people will find the things they need. The farmer has the task of controlling and shaping the world, making it yield the produce upon which agricultural life depends. If this is done well, then crops will grow. Discovery by discovery, change by change, field by field, control is increased and produce is more secure. The dichotomies of good and evil, right and wrong express this farmer project: control comes with separating manipulable resources form the rest of the environment and working with determination and consistency against all that might undermine this endeavor” (Brody 2001, p. 306-7).
The starkest differences between hunter-gatherers and farmers, as described by Hugh Brody. Brody also stresses the importance of not seeing hunter-gatherer : farmer as a clear-cut dichotomy, but instead realizing that there is a spectrum of possible livelihood strategies between these two lifestyles.
References:
Brody, H. 2002 [2001]. The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-Gatherers, Farmer and the Shaping of the World. London: Faber and Faber Limited
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 