My Head A Hunter My Heart A Farmer Understanding Identities and Relationships

My Head A Hunter My Heart A Farmer Understanding Identities And Relationships

Every person, including those who claim to be overwhelmed by the humdrum of daily life, occasionally pause to ponder their identities and wonder about the forces and motives that shape and drive them. Self-knowledge is indeed a necessity. We need it to identify, understand, and justify our beliefs, attitudes, motives, sentiments and behavior. It is also immensely important for knowing others in order to correctly perceive and interpret their behavior and motives, and to establish and maintain meaningful and productive relationships with them.

The objective of this book is to offer a new perspective for viewing and analyzing lifestyles to achieve a better understanding of identities and relationships. The perspective of this book conceives of humans as having two dimensions or clusters of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors labeled as the ‘hunter’ and the ‘farmer’. It is a fact that our ancestors survived first and for a very long time as hunters and then, for the last ten millennia only, as farmers. However, the use of these two types is not an attempt to advance a specific theory of socio-cultural evolution.

     All of us are part-hunter and part-farmer.  How much each of us acquires and assimilates of the two types determines and defines our identities and lifestyles.  The distinguishing characteristics of the hunter in us are his individualism, egoism and pursuit of power while the quintessential trait of the farmer is his propensity to relate to and cooperate with others. Since we are both farmers and hunters, the urge to be independent coexists side by side in us with our pride of belonging to a family, a community and a nation.  Both competition and cooperation govern our behavior at home, school, and the workplace. We compete and cooperate to survive and achieve our objectives.  If we were to compete and never cooperate with each other, group activities would cease and eventually our society or community would weaken and disintegrate. On the other hand, communities whose members cooperate and never compete exist only in the minds and writings of some utopians.  Such a community is thought to be too idealistic and unearthly to be realized in this world.