Time to ditch the harmful myth of the ‘noble’ hunter-gatherer | Alice Rudge
Instead of fetishising them, we should be listening to how environmental destruction is acutely damaging their lives
A boatload of tourists arrives at the homes of Batek hunter-gatherers in Malaysia. At the request of the non-Batek tour guides, Batek people hurriedly hide their televisions, radios and mobile phones. “Tourists don’t like to see these,” they explain.
As an anthropologist who has conducted field research with Batek people for many years, I have become familiar with these common expectations placed on hunter-gatherers.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many hunter-gatherers there are in the world. There is a general lack of demographic data, and the boundary between who is and
