252       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
of the relationship between Europe's development and Africa's underdevelopment.
3. Since Nietschmann's article was written, the Miskito Indians have gained prominence in the public debate centering on questions of autonomy and place of ethnic communities in Nicaragua today.
References
Bohannan, Paul. 1963. Social Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
BOSERUP, E. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of
Agrarian Change Under Population Pressures. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. Frank, A. G. 1969. Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. New York:
Monthly Review Press. -. 1973. Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment; Dependence, Class, and
Politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Godelier, M. 1978. "Infrastructures, Society and History." Current Anthropology
19:4:763-768.
KEEStNG, Roger. 1981. Cultural Anthropology A Contemporary Perspective. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York:
Academic Press.
13
The Original Affluent Society
MARSHALL SAHLINS
If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting and gathering economies must be its most advanced branch. Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the "leisure" to "build culture." Even so. for all fits efforts, the hunter pulls the lowest grades in thermodynamics-less energy/capita/year than any other mode of production. And in treatises on economic development he is condemned to play the role of bad example: the so-called "subsistence economy."
The traditional wisdom is always refractory. One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically: in fact, this was, when you come to examine tt, the original affluent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at bard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means.
253
254       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society
255
For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way. makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living.
That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behavior: their "prodigality" for example—the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own. Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at least compelled Marx's agreement on the observation that "in poor nations the people are comfortable," whereas in rich nations "they are generally poor."
This is not to deny that a preagricultural economy operates under serious constraints, but only to insist, on the evidence from modem hunters and gatherers, that a successful accommodation is usually made. After taking up the evidence, 1 shall return in the end to the real difficulties of hunting-gathering economy, none of which are correctly specified in current formulas of paleolithic poverty.
Sources of the Misconception
"Mere subsistence economy" "limited leisure save in exceptional circumstances," "incessant quest for food," "meagre and relatively unreliable" natural resources, "absence of an economic surplus," "maximum energy from a maximum number of people"—so runs the fair average anthropological opinion of hunting and gathering. ... In reference to South American hunters:
The nomadic hunters and gatherers barely met minimum subsistence needs and often fell far short of them. Their population of 1 person to 10 or 20 square miles reflects this. Constantly on the move in search of food, they clearly lacked the leisure hours for nonsubsistence activities of any significance, and they could transport little of what they might manufacture in spare moments. To them, adequacy of production meant physical survival, and they rarely had surplus of either products or time (Steward and Faron, 1959, p. 60; cf. Clark, 1953, p. 27 f; Haury, 1962, p. 113; Hoebel, 1958, p. 188; Redfield, 1953, p. 5; White, 1959).
But the traditional dismal view of the hunters' fix is also preanth-ropological and extra-anthropological, at once historical and referable to the larger economic context in which anthropology operates. It goes back to the time Adam Smith was writing, and probably to a time before anyone was writing.1.. .
Current low opinions of the hunting-gathering economy need not be laid to neolithic ethnocentrism, however. Bourgeois ethnocentrism will do as well. The existing business economy, at every turn an ideological trap from which anthropological economics must escape, will promote the same dim conclusions about the hunting life.
Is it so paradoxical to contend that hunters have affluent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding? Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples. The apparent material status of the economy seems to be no clue to its accomplishments; something has to be said for the mode of economic organization (cf. Polanyi, 1947, 1957, 1959; Dalton, 1961).
The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity.-' The entrepreneur is confronted with alternative investments of a finite capital, the worker (hopefully) with alternative choices of remunerative employ, and the consumer. . . . Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labor, the market makes available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man's reach—but never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation, for every purchase of something is a foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some particulars more desirable, that could have been had instead. (The point is that if you buy one automobile, say a Plymouth, you cannot also have the Ford—and I judge from current television commercials that the deprivations entailed would be more than just material.)''
That sentence of "life at hard labor" was passed uniquely upon us. Scarcity is the judgment decreed by our economy-so also the axiom of our Economics: the application of scarce means against alternative ends to derive the most satisfaction possible under the circumstances. And it is precisely from this anxious vantage that we look back upon hunters. But if modern man, with all his technological advantages, still hasn't got the wherewithal, what chance has this naked savage with his puny bow and arrow? Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance.4
256       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society 257
Yet scarcity is not an intrinsic property of technical means. It is a relation between means and ends. We should entertain the empirical possibility that hunters are in business for their health, a finite objective, and that bow and arrow are adequate to that end.
But still other ideas, these endemic in anthropological theory and ethnographic practice, have conspired to preclude any such understanding.
Considering the poverty in which hunters and gatherers live in theory, it comes as a surprise that Bushmen who live in the Kalahari enjoy "a kind of material plenty," at least in the realm of everyday useful things, apart from food and water:
As the /Kung come into more contact with Europeans-and this is already happening-tbey will feel sharply the lack of our things and will need and want more. It makes them feel inferior to be without clothes when they stand among strangers who are clothed. But in their own life and with their own artifacts they were comparatively free from material pressures. Except for food and water (important exceptions!) of which the Nyae Nyae .'Kung have a sufficiency-but barely so, judging from the fact that all are thin though not emaciated-they all had what they needed or could make what they needed, for every man can and does make the things that men make and every woman the things that women make.. . . They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which were free for anyone to take (wood, reeds, bone for weapons and implements, fibers for cordage, grass for shelters), or to materials which were at least sufficient for the
needs of the population____The /Kung could always use more ostrich egg shells
for beads to wear or trade with, but, as it is, enough are found for every woman to have a dozen or more shells for water containers-all she can carry—and a goodly number of bead ornaments. In their nomadic hunting-gathering life, travelling from one source of food to another through the seasons, always going back and forth between food and water, they carry their young children and their belongings. With plenty of most materials at hand to replace artifacts as required, the .'Kung have not developed means of permanent storage and have not needed or wanted to encumber themselves with surpluses or duplicates. They do not even want to carry one of everything. They borrow what they do not own. With this ease, they have not hoarded, and the accumulation of objects has not become associated with status (Marshall, 1961, pp. 243-44, emphasis mine).
Analysis of hunter-gatherer production is usefully divided into two spheres, as Mrs. Marshall has done. Food and water are certainly "important exceptions," best reserved for separate and extended treatment. For the rest, the nonsubsistence sector, what is here said of the Bushmen applies in general and in detail to hunters from the Kalahari to Labrador-or to Tierra del Fuego, where Gusinde reports of the Yahgan that their disinclination to own more than one copy of utensils frequently needed is "an indication of self-confidence." "Our fuegians," he writes, "procure and make their implements with little effort" (1961, p. 213).'
Tn the nonsubsistence sphere, the people's wants are generally easily satisfied. Such "material plenty" depends partly upon the ease of production,
and that upon the simplicity of technology and democracy of property. Products are homespun: of stone, bone, wood, skin-materials such as "lay in abundance around them." As a rule, neither extraction of the raw material nor its working up take strenuous effort. Access to natural resources is typically direct-"free for anyone to take"-even as possession of the necessary tools is general and knowledge of the required skills common. The division of labor is likewise simple, predominantly a division of labor by sex. Add in the liberal customs of sharing, for which hunters are properly famous, and all the people can usually participate in the going prosperity, such as it is.
But, of course, "such as it is": this "prosperity" depends as well upon an objectively low standard of living. It is critical that the customary quota of consumables (as well as the number of consumers) be culturally set at a modest point. A few people are pleased to consider a few easily-made things their good fortune: some meagre pieces of clothing and rather fugitive housing in most climates;' plus a few ornaments, spare flints and sundry other items such as the "pieces of quartz, which native doctors have extracted from their patients" (Grey, 1841, vol. 2, p. 266); and, finally, the skin bags in which the faithful wife carries all this, "the wealth of the Australian savage" (p. 266).
For most hunters, such affluence without abundance in the nonsubsistence sphere need not be long debated. A more interesting question is why they are content with so few possessions-for it is with them a policy, a "matter of principle" as Gusinde says (1961, p. 2), and not a misfortune.
Want not, lack not. But are hunters so undemanding of material goods because they are themselves enslaved by a food quest "demanding maximum energy from a maximum number of people," so that no time or effort remains for the provision of other comforts? Some ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. On the other hand, movement is a condition of this success, more movement in some cases than others, but always enough to rapidly depreciate the satisfactions of property. Of the hunter it is truly said that his wealth is a burden. In his condition of life, goods can become "grievously oppressive," as Gusinde observes, and the more so the longer they are carried around. Certain food collecters do have canoes and a few have dog sleds, but most must carry themselves all the comforts they possess, and so only possess what they can comfortably carry themselves. Or perhaps only what the women can carry: the men are often left free to react to the sudden opportunity of the chase or the sudden necessity of defense. As Owen Lattimore wrote in a not too different context, "the pure nomad is the poor nomad." Mobility and property are in contradiction.
That wealth quickly becomes more of an encumbrance than a good thing is apparent even to the outsider. Laurens van der Post was caught in the contradiction as he prepared to make farewells to his wild Bushmen friends:
This matter of presents gave us many an anxious moment. We were humiliated by
the realization of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost
258       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society
259
everything seemed likely to make lite more difficult for them by adding to the liner and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a lion strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap up in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession (1958. p. 276).
. . . Here then is another economic "peculiarity"—I will not say it is general, and perhaps it is explained as well by faulty toilet training as by a trained disinterest in material accumulation: some hunters, at least, display a notable tendency to be sloppy about their possessions. They have the kind of nonchalance that would be appropriate to a people who have mastered the problems of production, even as it is maddening to a European:
They do not know how to take care of their belongings. No one dreams of putting them in order, folding them, drying or cleaning them, hanging them up, or putting them in a neat pile. If they are looking for some particular thing, they rummage carelessly through the hodgepodge of trifles in the little baskets. Larger objects that are piled up in a heap in the hut are dragged hither and yon with no regard for the damage that might be done them. The European observer has the impression that these [Yahgan] Indians place no value whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took to make them.7 Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is, are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced. . . . The Indian does not even exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious clothing, fresh provisions, and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to their swift destruction by children and dogs. . . . Expensive things that are given them are treasured for a few hours, out of curiousity; after that they thoughtlessly let everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are completely indifferent to anv material possessions (Gusinde, 1961, pp. 86-87).
The hunter, one is tempted to say, is "uneconomic man." At least as concerns nonsubsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalized in any General Principles of Economics, page one. His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he is "comparatively free of material pressures," has "no sense of possession," shows "an undeveloped sense of property," is "completely indifferent to any material pressures," manifests a "lack of interest" in developing his technological equipment.
In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are "restricted," desires "restrained," or even that the notion of wealth is "limited." Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of
an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction—as Marcel Mauss said, "not behind us, but before, like the moral man." It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic "impulses"; they simply never made an institution of them. "Moreover, if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our [Monlagnais] Savages are happy: for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests,-I mean ambition and avarice ... as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth" (LeJeune, 1897, p. 231).
We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. "Their extremely limited material possessions relieve them of all cares with regard to daily necessities and permit them to enjoy life" (Gusinde, 1961. p. 1).
Subsistence
When Herskovits was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as "a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest," so precariously situated that "only the most intense application makes survival possible." Today the "classic" understanding can be fairly reversed—on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.
Some of the substantiating evidence for Australia appears in early sources, but we are fortunate especially to have now the quantitative materials collected by the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Published in 1960. these startling data must provoke some review of the Australian reportage going back for over a century, and perhaps revision of an even longer period of anthropological thought. The key research was a temporal study of hunting and gathering by McCarthy and McArthur (1960), coupled to McArthur's analysis of the nutritional outcome.
Figures 1 and 2 summarize the principal production studies. These were short-run observations taken during nonceremonial periods. The record for Fish Creek (14 days) is longer as well as more detailed than that for Hemple Bay (seven days). Only adults' work has been reported, so far as I can tell. The diagrams incorporate information on hunting, plant collecting, preparing foods, and repairing weapons, as tabulated by the ethnographers. The
ASPECTS OF CULTURE
3    4    5    6    7 8
Day
10   ii    12   13 14
FIGURE 1. Hours per Day in Food-connected Activities: Fish Creek Group (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960)
people in both camps were free-ranging native Australians, living outside mission or other settlements during the period of study, although such was not necessarily their permanent or even their ordinary circumstance/
One must have serious reservations about drawing general or historical inferences from the Arnhem Land data alone. Not only was the context less than pristine and the time of study too brief, but certain elements of the modern situation may have raised productivity above aboriginal levels: metal tools, for example, or the reduction of local pressure on food resources by depopulation. And our uncertainty seems rather doubled than neutralized by other current circumstances that, conversely, would lower economic efficiency: these semi-independent hunters, for instance, are probably not as skilled as their ancestors. For the moment, let us consider the Arnhem Land conclusions as experimental, potentially credible in the measure they are supported by other ethnographic or historic accounts.
The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being, which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be
The Original Affluent Society 261
Day
FIGURE 2. Hours per Day in Food-connected Activities: Hemple Bay Group (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960)
irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic.
In the event, a third characteristic of hunting and gathering unimagined by the received wisdom: rather than straining to the limits of available labor and disposable resources, these Australians seem to underuse their objective economic possibilities.
The quantity of food gathered in one day by any of these groups could in every instance have been increased. Although the search for food was. for the women, a job ihm went on day after day without relief [but see our Figures 1 and 2j. they rested quite frequently, and did not spend all the hours of daylight searching for and preparing food. The nature of the men's food gathering was more sporadic, and if they had a good caich one day they frequently rested the next. .. . Perhaps unconsciously they weigh the benefit of greater supplies of food against the effort
262       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
involved in collecting it, perhaps theyjudge what ihey consider to be enough, and when that is collected they stop (McArthur. 1960, p. 92).
It follows, fourthly, that the economy was not physically demanding. The investigators' daily journal indicates that the people pace themselves: only once is a hunter described as "utterly exhausted" (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, pp. 1501"). Neither did the Arnhem Landers themselves consider the task of subsistence onerous. "They certainly did not approach it as an unpleasant job to be got over as soon as possible, nor as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as possible" (McArthur, 1960, p. 92).y In this connection, and also in relation to their underuse of economic resources, it is noteworthy that the Arnhem Land hunters seem not to have been content with a "bare existence." Like other Australians (cf. Worsley, 1961. p. 173), they become dissatisfied with an unvarying diet; some of their time appears to have gone into the provision of diversity over and above mere sufficiency (McCarthy and McArthur, I960, p. 192).
In any case, the dietary intake of the Arnhem Land hunters was adequate—according to the standards of the National Research Council of America. Mean daily consumption per capita at Hemple Bay was 2,160 calories (only a four-day period of observation), and at Fish Creek 2,130 calories (11 days). Table 1 indicates the main daily consumption of various nutrients, calculated by McArthur in percentages of the NRCA recommended dietary allowances,
TABLE).   Meaii Daily Consumption as Percentage of Recommended Allowances (from McArthur, 1960)
	Calories	Protein	Iron	Calcium	Ascorbic Acid
Hern pie Bay	116	444	80	128	394
Fish Creek	104	544	33	355	47
Finally, what does the Arnhem Land study say about the famous question ofleisure? It seems that hunting and gathering can afford extraordinary relief from economic cares. The Fish Creek group maintained a virtually full-time craftsman, a man 35 or 40 years old, whose true specialty however seems to have been loafing:
He did not go out hunting al all with the men, but one day he netted fish most vigorously. He occasionally went into the bush to get wild bees' nests. Wilira was an expert craftsman who repaired the spears and spear-throwers, made smok-ing-pipes and drone-tubes, and hafted a stone axe (on request} in a skillful manner; apart from these occupations he spent most of his time talking, eating and sleeping (McCarthy and McArthur, I960, p. 148).
The Original Affluent Society 263
Wilira was not altogether exceptional. Much of the time spared by the Arnhem Land hunters was literally spare time, consumed in rest and sleep (see Tables 2 and 3). The main alternative to work, changing off with it in a complementary way, was sleep:
Apart from the time (mostly between definitive activities and during cooking periods) spent in general social intercourse, chatting, gossiping and so on, some hours of the daylight were also spent resting and sleeping. On the average, if the men were in camp, they usually slept after lunch from an hour to an hour and a half, or sometimes even more. Also after returning from fishing or hunting they usually had a sleep, either immediately they arrived or whilst game was being cooked. At Hemple Bay the men slept if they returned early in the day but not if they reached camp after 4.00 p.m. When in camp all day ihey slept at odd times and always after [urtch, The women, when outcoilecting in the forest, appeared ro rest more frequently than the men. If in camp all day, they also slept at odd times, sometimes for long periods (McCarthy and McArthur, 1960, p. 193).
The failure of Arnhem Landers to "build culture" want of time. It is from idle hands.
So much for the plight of hunters and gatherers in Arnhem Land. As for the Bushmen, economically likened to Australian hunters by Herskovits, two excellent recent reports by Richard Lee show their condition to be indeed the same (Lee, 1968; 1969). Lee's research merits a special hearing not only because it concerns Bushmen, but specifically the Dobe section of /Kung
TABLE 2. Daytime Rest and Sleep, Fish Creek Group (data from McCarthy and McArthur, I960)
' is not strictly from
^Average      9 Average
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
T15" 2'45" 1'30" I'O" Most of the day Intermittent Intermittent and most of late afternoon Most of the day Several hours 2'0" TO" 50" 50" Afternoon Afternoon Intermittent, afternoon
3T5"
3T5"
264
ASPECTS OF CULTURE
TABLE 3. Davtime Rest and Sleep, Hemple Bay Group (data from McCarthy and McArthur, 1960)
S Average
Most of the day l'O" Intermittent
Intermittent Intermittent
5 Average 45"
2'45"
Intermittent
1'30" Intermittent Intermittent
Bushmen, adjacent to the Nyae Nyae about whose subsistence—in a context otherwise of "material plenty'"—Mrs. Marshall expressed important reservations. The Dobe occupy an area of Botswana where /(Cung Bushmen have been living for at least a hundred years, but have only just begun to suffer dislocation pressures. (Metal, however, has been available to the Dobe since 1880-90). An intensive study was made of (he subsistence production of a dry season camp with a population (41 people) near the mean of such settlements. The observations extended over four weeks during July and August 1964, a period of transition from more to less favorable seasons of the year, hence fairly representative, it seems, of average subsistence difficulties.
Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to 10 inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a "surprising abundance of vegetation." Food resources were "both varied and abundant,1' particularly the energy-rich mangetti nut—"soabundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking" (all references in Lee, 1969, p. 59),"' His reports on time spent in food-getting are remarkably close to the Arnhem Land observations. Table 4 summarizes Lee's data.
The Bushman figures imply that one man's labor in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken at face value. Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 percent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest. Confessedly, the comparison is misleading, but not as misleading as it is astonishing. In the total population of free-ranging Bushmen contacted by Lee, 61.3 percent (152 of 248) were effective food producers; the remainder were too young or too old to contribute importantly. In the
The Original Affluent Society 265
particular camp under scrutiny, 65 percent were "effectives." Thus the ratio of food producers to the general population is actually 3 ; 5 or 2 ; 3. fii//, these 65 percent of the people "worked 36 percent of the time, and 35 percent of the people did not work at all"! (Lee, 1969, p. 67).
For each adult worker, this comes to about two and one-half days labor per week. ("In other words, each productive individual supported herself or himself and dependents and still had 3-1 /2 to 5-1/2 days available for other activities.") A "day's work" was about six hours; hence the Dobe work week is approximately 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. Even lower than the Arnhem Land norms, this figure however excludes cooking and the preparation of implements. All things considered, Bushmen subsistence labors are probably very close to those of native Australians.
Also like the Australians, the time Bushmen do not work in subsistence they pass in leisure or leisurely activity. One detects again that characteristic paleolithic rhythm of a day or two on. a day or two off—the latter passed desultorily in camp. Although food collecting is the primary productive
TABLE 4.   Summary of Dobe Bushmen Work Diary (from Lee, 1969)
Week
25.6 (23-29)
28.3 123-37)
14.3 (28-40)
4 18.6 (July 27-Aug. 2) (32-40)
4-week totals 30.9
,MlAK Days of      Index or
Group Man-Days or Man-Days Work/ Subsistance Size*   Consumption)   or Work   Week/Adult Effort}
(July 6-12) 2
(July 13-19)
(July 20-26)
Adjusted totalss
31.«
179
198
240
249
866 668
37
2.3
21
178 156
2.2 2,5
24 23
*Group srze shown in average and range There fiuetuation in Bushmen camps.
rildren and aduhs. to give a
iderable short-term population bined lola] of day., of provisioning
flncludes both required/week.
JI^ in-deH C°nStruc,fd ^ Lm 10 illustra" *e reiahon between consumption and Ihe work reared .oprodueen: S - W/C, where W - number of man-days of work and C = mar!
foo^to tie Zp^r^ CalCU'a,i°"S "eCaU" «" »»'"b-d
266       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society 267
activity, Lee writes, "the majority of the people's lime (four 10 five days per week) is spent in other pursuits, such as resting in camp or visiting other camps" (1969, p. 74):
A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her lime resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each Jay at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year. The hunters tend to work more frequently than the women, but their schedule is uneven. It is not unusual for a man to hunt avidly for a week and then do no hunting at all for two or three weeks. Since hunting is an unpredictable business and subject to magical control, hunters sometimes experience a run of bad luck and stop hunting for a month or longer. During these periods, visiting, entertaining, and especially dancing are the primary activities of men (1968, p. 37).
The daily per-capita subsistence yield for the Dobe Bushmen was 2,140 calories. However, taking into account body weight, normal activities, and the age-se.x composition of the Dobe population, Lee estimates the people require only 1,975 calories per capita. Some of the surplus food probably went to the dogs, who ate what the people left over. "The conclusion can be drawn that the Bushmen do not lead a substandard existence on the edge of starvation as has been commonly supposed" (1969, p. 73).
Taken in isolation, the Arnhem Land and Bushmen reports mount a disconcerting if not decisive attack on the entrenched theoretical position. Artificial in construction, the former study in particular is reasonably considered equivocal. But the testimony of the Arnhem Land expedition is echoed al many points by observations made elsewhere in Australia, as well as elsewhere in the hunting-gathering world. Much of the Australian evidence goes back to the nineteenth century, some of it to quite acute observers careful to make exception of the aboriginal come into relation with Europeans, for "his food supply is restricted, and ... he is in many cases warned off from the water/holes which are the centers of his best hunting grounds" (Spencer and Gillen, 1899, p. 50).
Constantly under pressure of want, and yet, by travelling, easily able to supply
their wants, their lives lack neither excitement or pleasure (Smyth, 1878, vol. 1, p. 123).
Clearly, the hunting-gathering economy has to be revaluated, both as to its true accomplishments and its true limitations. The procedural fault of the received wisdom was to read from the material circumstances to the economic structure, deducing the absolute difficulty of such a life from its absolute poverty- But always the cultural design improvises dialectics on its relationship to nature. Without escaping the ecological constraints, culture would negate them, so that at once the system shows the impress of natural
conditions and the originality of a social response—in their poverty, abundance.
What are the real handicaps of the hunting-gathering praxis1} Not "low productivity of labor," if existing examples mean anything. But the economy is seriously afflicted by the imminence of diminishing returns. Beginning in subsistence and spreading from there to every sector, an initial success seems only to develop the probability that further efforts will yield smaller benefits. This describes the typical curve of food-getting within a particular locale. A modest number of people usually sooner tha n later reduce the food resources within convenient range of camp. Thereafter, they may stay on only by absorbing an increase in real costs or a decline in real returns: rise in costs if the people choose to search farther and farther afield, decline in returns if they are satisfied to live on the shorter supplies or inferior foods in easier reach. The solution, of course, is to go somewhere else. Thus the first and decisive contingency of hunting-gathering: it requires movement to maintain production on advantageous terms,
But this movement, more or less frequent in different circumstances, more or less distant, merely transposes to other spheres of production the same diminishing returns of which it is born. The manufacture of tools, clothing, utensils, or ornaments, however easily done, becomes senseless when these begin to be more of a burden than a comfort. Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability. The construction of substantial houses likewise becomes absurd if they must soon be abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic conceptions, of material welfare: an interest only in minimal equipment, if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger: a disinterest in acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure assumes a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross product is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the huniers productivity that is at fault, but his mobility.
Almost the same thing can be said of the demographic constraints of hunting-gathering. The same policy of debarassment is in play on the level of people, describably in similar terms and ascribable to similar causes. The terms are, cold-bloodedly: diminishing returns at the margin of portability, minimum necessary equipment, elimination of duplicates, and so forth—that is to say, infanticide, senilicide, sexual continence for the duration of the nursing period, etc.. practices for which many food-collecting peoples are well known. The presumption that such devices are due to an inability to support more people is probably true—if''support" is understood in the sense of carrying them rather than feeding them. The people eliminated, as hunters sometimes sadly tell, are precisely those who cannot effectively transport themselves, who would hinder the movement of family and camp. Hunters may be obliged to handle people and goods in parallel ways, the draconic population policy an expression of the same ecology as the ascetic economy-More, these tactics of demographic restraint again form part of a larger
268       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society
policy for counteracting diminishing returns in subsistence. A local group becomes vulnerable to diminishing returns—so to a greater velocity of movement, or else to fission—in proportion to its size (other things equal), insofar as the people would keep the advantage in local production, and maintain a certain physical and social stability, their Malthusian practices are just cruelly consistent- Modern hunters and gatherers, working their notably inferior environments, pass most of the year in very small groups widely spaced out. But rather than the sign of underproduction, the wages of poverty, this demographic pattern is better understood as the cost of living well.
Hunting and gathering has all the strengths of its weaknesses. Periodic movement and restraint in wealth and population are at once imperatives of the economic practice and creative adaptations, the kinds of necessities of which virtues are made. Precisely in such a framework, affluence becomes possible. Mobility and moderation put hunters' ends within range of their technical means. An undeveloped mode of production is thus rendered highly effective. The hunter's life is not as difficult as it looks from the outside. In some ways the economy reflects dire ecology, but it is also a complete inversion.
Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present—specifically on those in marginal environments—suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker's hours, notably less than modern industrial workers (unionized), who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week. An interesting comparison is also posed by recent studies of labor costs among agriculturalists of neolithic type. For example, the average adult Hanunoo, man or woman, spends 1,200 hours per year in swidden cultivation (Conklin, 1957. p. 151); which is to say, a mean of three hours twenty minutes per day. Yet this figure does not include food gathering, animal raising, cooking and other direct subsistence efforts of these Philippine tribesmen. Comparable data are beginning to appear in reports on other primitive agriculturalists from many parts of the world. The conclusion is put conservatively when put negatively: hunters and gatherers need not work longer getting food than do'primitive cultivators. Extrapolating from ethnography to prehistory, one may say as much for the neolithic as John Stuart Milí said of all labor-saving devices, that never was one invented that saved anyone a minutes labor. The neolithic saw no particular improvement over the paleolithic in the amount of time required per capita for the production of subsistence; probably, with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder.
There is nothing either to the convention that hunters and gatherers can enjoy little leisure from tasks of sheer survival. By this, the evolutionary inadequacies of the paleolithic are customarily explained, while for the provision of leisure the neolithic is roundly congratulated. But the traditional formulas might be truer if reversed: the amount of work (per capita) in-
creases with the evolution of culture, and the amount of leisure decreases. Hunters' subsistence labors are characteristically intermittent, a day on and a day off, and modern hunters at least tend to employ their time off in such activities as daytime sleep. In the tropical habitats occupied by many of these existing hunters, plant collecting is more reliable than hunting itself. Therefore, the women, who do the collecting, work rather more regularly than the men. and provide the greater part of the food supply. Man's work is often done. On the other hand, it is likely to be highly erratic, unpredictably required; if men lack leisure, it is then in the Enlightenment sense rather than the literal. When Condorcet attributed the hunter's unprogressive condition to want of "the leisure in which he can indulge in thought and enrich his understanding with new combinations of ideas," he also recognized that the economy was a "necessary cycle of extreme activity and total idleness." Apparently what the hunter needed was the assured leisure of an aristocratic philosophe.
Hunters and gatherers maintain a sanguine view of their economic state despite the hardships they sometimes know. It may be that they sometimes know hardships because of the sanguine views they maintain of their economic state. Perhaps their confidence only encourages prodigality to the extent the camp falls casualty to the first untoward circumstance. In alleging this is an affluent economy, therefore, I do not deny that certain hunters have moments of difficulty. Some do find it "almost inconceivable" for a man to die of hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two (Woodburn, 1968, p. 52). But others, especially certain very peripheral hunters spread out in small groups across an environment of extremes, are exposed periodically to the kind of inclemency that interdicts travel or access to game. They suffer—although perhaps only fractionally, the shortage affecting particular immobilized families rather than the society as a whole (cf. Gusinde, 1961, pp. 306-307).
Still, granting this vulnerability, and allowing the most poorly situated modern hunters into comparison, it would be difficult to prove that privation is distinctly characteristic of the hunter-gatherers. Food shortage is not the indicative property of this mode of production as opposed to others; it does not mark off hunters and gatherers as a class or a general evolutionary stage. Lowie asks;
But what of the herders on a simple plane whose maintenance is periodically jeopardized by plagues—who. like some Lapp bands of the nineteenth century were obliged to fall back on fishing? What of the primitive peasants who clear and till without compensation of the soil, exhaust one plot and pass on to the next, and are threatened with famine at every drought? Are they any more in control of misfortune caused by natural conditions than the hunter-gatherer? (1938, p. 286)
Above all, what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the
270       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society
fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.
This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The evolution of economy has known, then, two contradictory movements: enriching but at the same time impoverishing, appropriating in relation to nature but expropriating in relation to man. The progressive aspect is, of course, technological. It has been celebrated in many ways: as an increase in the amount of need-serving goods and services, an increase in the amount of energy harnessed to the service of culture, an increase in productivity, an increase in division of labor, and increased freedom from environmental control. Taken in a certain sense, the last is especially useful for understanding the earliest stages of technical advance. Agriculture not only raised society above the distribution of natural food resources, it allowed neolithic communities to maintain high degrees of social order where the requirements of human existence were absent from the natural order. Enough food could be harvested in some seasons to sustain the people while no food would grow at all; the consequent stability of social life was critical for its material enlargement. Culture went on then from triumph to triumph, in a kind of progressive contravention of the biological law of the minimum, until it proved it could support human life in outer space—where even gravity and oxygen were naturally lacking.
Other men were dying of hunger in the market places of Asia. It has been an evolution of structures as well as technologies, and in that respect like the mythical road where for every step the traveller advances his destination recedes by two. The structures have been political as well as economic, of power as well as property. They developed first within societies, increasingly now between societies. No doubt these structures have been functional, necessary organizations of the technical development, but within the communities they have thus helped to enrich they would discriminate in the distribution of wealth and differentiate in the style of life. The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
All the preceding discussion takes the liberty of reading modern hunters historically, as an evolutionary base line. This liberty should not be lightly granted. Are marginal hunters such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari any
more representative of the paleolithic condition than the Indians of California or the Northwest Coast? Perhaps not. Perhaps also Bushmen of the Kalahari are not even representative of marginal hunters. The great majority of surviving hunter-gatherers lead a life curiously decapitated and extremely lazy by comparison with the other few. The other few are very different. The Murngin, for example: "The first impression that any stranger must receive in a fully functioning group in Eastern Arnhem Land is of industry . ..
And he must be impressed with the fact that with the exception of very young children... there is no idleness" (Thomson, 1949a, pp. 33-34). There is nothing to indicate that the problems of livelihood are more difficult for these people than for other hunters (cf. Thomson, 1949b). The incentives of their unusual industry lie elsewhere: in "an elaborate and exacting ceremonial life," specifically in an elaborate ceremonial exchange cycle that bestows prestige on craftsmanship and trade (Thomson, 1949a, pp. 26, 28, 34 f, 87 passim). Most other hunters have no such concerns. Their existence is comparatively colorless, fixed singularly on eating with gusto and digesting at leisure. The cultural orientation is not Dionysian or Apollonian, but "gastric," as Julian Steward said of the Shoshoni. Then again it may be Dionysian, that is, Bacchanalian: "Eating among the Savages is like drinking among the drunkards of Europe. Those dry and ever-thirsty souls would willingly end their lives in a tub of malmsey, and the Savages in a pot full of meat; those over there talk only of drinking, and these here only of eating" (LeJeune, 1897, p. 249).
It is as if the superstructures of these societies had been eroded, leaving only the bare subsistence rock, and since production itself is readily accomplished, the people have plenty of time to perch there and talk about it. I must raise the possibility that the ethnography of hunters and gatherers is largely a record of incomplete cultures. Fragile cycles of ritual and exchange may have disappeared without trace, lost in the earliest stages of colonialism, when the intergroup relations they mediated were attacked and confounded. If so, the "original" affluent society will have to be rethought again for its originality, and the evolutionary schemes once more revised. Still this much history can always be rescued from existing hunters: the "economic problem" is easily solvable by paleolithic techniques. But then, it was not until culture neared the height of its material achievements that it erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.
Notes
1. At least to the time Lucretius was writing (Harris, 1968, pp. 26-27).
2. On the historically particular requisites of such calculation, see Codere, 1968, [especially pp. 574-575.]
3. For the complementary institutionalization of "scarcity" in the condition of capitalist production, see Gorz, 1967, pp. 37-38.
272       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
The Original Affluent Society 273
4. h deserves mention that contemporary European-Marxist theory is often in accord with bourgeois economics on the poverty of the primitive. Cf. Boukharine, 1967; Man del, 1962, vol. 1; and the economic history manual used at Lumumba University.
5. Turnbull similarly notes of Congo Pygmies: "The materials for the making of shelter, clothing, and all other necessary items of material culture are all at hand at a moment's notice." And he has no reservations either about subsistence; "Throughout the year, without fail, there is an abundant supply of game and vegetable foods" (1965, p. 18).
6. Certain food collectors not lately known for their architectural achievements seem to have built more substantial dwellings before being put on the run by Europeans. Sec Smythe, 187], vol. l.pp. 125-128.
7. But recall Gusinde's comment: "Our Fuegians procure and make their implements with little effort" (1961, p. 213).
8. Fish Creek was an inland camp in western Arnhem Land consisting of six adult males and three adult females. Hem pie Bay was a coastal occupation on Groote Eylandt, there were four adult males, four adult females, and five juveniles and infants in the camp. Fish Creek was investigated at the end of the dry season, when the supply of vegetable foods was low; kangaroo hunting was rewarding, although the animals became increasingly wary under steady stalking. At Hem-pie Bay, vegetable foods were plentiful: the fishing was variable but on the whole good hv comparison with other coastal camps visited by the expedition. The resource base at Hemple Bay was richer than at Fish Creek. The greater time put into food-getting at Hemple Bay may reflect, then, the support of five children. On the other hand, the Fish Creek group did maintain a virtually full-time specialist, and part of the difference in hours worked may represent a normal coastal-inland variation. In inland hunting, good things often come in large packages; hence, one day's work may yield two days' sustenance. A fishing-gathering regime perhaps produces smaller if steadier returns, enjoining somewhat longer and more regular efforts.
9. At least some Australians, the Yir-Yiront, make no linguistic differentiation between work and play (Sharp, 1958. p. 6).
10. This appreciation of Local resources is all the more remarkable considering that Lee's ethnographic work was done in the second and third years of "one of the most severe droughts in South Africa's history" (1968. p. 39; 1969, p. 73 n.).
Bibliography
Boukharine. "N. 1967. La Theorie du materialism historique. Paris: Editions An-
thropos (First Russian edition. 1921). Clark, Graham 1953. From Savagery fo Civilization. New York: Schuman. Codere. Helen. 1968. "Money-Exchange Systems and a Theory of Money," Man,
(n.s.J 3:557-77.
Conklin. Harold C. 1957. Hanunöo Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Da [.ton, George.  1961. "Economic Theory and Primitive Society." American
Anthropologist 63:1-25. Gorz. Andre. 1967. Le socialisme difficile. Paris: Seuil.
GREY, Sir george 1841. Journals of Two Expeditions of Discover in North-West und Western Australia, Daring the Years 1837, 38, and 39. . . . 2 vols. London: Boone. Gusinde, Marlin. 1961. The Yamana. 5 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files. (German edition 1931).
Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Haury, Emil W. 1962. "The Greater American Southwest." in J. Braidwood and G.
R. Wifley (cds.), Courses toward Urban Life. Chicago: Aldine. Hfrskovjis, Melville J. 1952. Economic Anthropology. New York: K nopf. H Oer el. E. Adamson. 1958. Man in the Primitive World. 2nd Ed. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Lee, Richard. 196ÍÍ. "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources," in R. Lee and 1. DeVore (eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine. 1969. ".'Kung Bushman Subsistance: An Input-Output Annlvsis," in A. Vayda (ed.), Environment and Cultural Behavior. Garden Cíly, M.Y.: Natural History Press.
LeJlune, le Pere Paul. 1897. "Relation of What Occurred in New France in the Year 1634." in R. G. Tfiwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Vol. 6. Cleveland: Burrows. (First French edition. 1635.)
Lowie, Robert H. 1938. "Subsistence," in F. Boas (ed.). General Anthropology. Boston: Heath.
McAri hur, Margaret 1960. ''Food Consumption and Dietary Levels of Groups of Aborigines Living on Naturally Occurring Foods," in C. P. Mountlbrd (ed.l, Records of the A ustralian-American Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, Vol 2' Anthropology and Nutrition. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
McCarthy, Frederick D., and Margaret McArthur. I960. "The Food Quest and the Time Factor in Aboriginal Economic Life." in C. P. Mountford (ed.), Records of ihe Australian-American Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, Vol. 2: Anthropology and Nutrition. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Mandel, Ernest. 19b2. Tratte d"economic murxisie. 2 Vols Paris: Julliard.
Marshall, Lorn\. 1961. "Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions Among .'Kung Bushmen," Africa 31:23 I -49.
Mauss, Marcel 1966. "Essai sur le don: Dorme et raison de J'echange dans les sociétés archaiques," in Sociologie et anthropologie. (First published 1923-24 in L'Annee Sociologique.) Paris; Presses Universitäres de France. 1967. Manuel ďetnographie. (First published 1947.) Paris: Payot.
Polanyi. Karl. 1947. "Our Obsolete Market Mentality," Commentary 3:109-17. 1957. '"The Economv as Instituted Process," in K. Polanyi, C. Arcnsberg and H. Pearson (eds,), Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glcncoe: The Free Press. 1959. "Anthropologv and Economic Theory," in M. Fried (ed.), Readings in Anthropology. Vol. 2. New York: Crowell.
274       ASPECTS OF CULTURE
Quimby, George I. 1962. "A Year with a Chippewa Family, 1763-1764," Ethnohis-for>-'9:217-39.
Redfield, Robert. 1953. The Primitive World and its Transformations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Sharp, Lauriston. 1958. "People without Politics," in V. F. Ray (ed.). System of Political Control and Bureaucracy in Human Societies. American Ethnological Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
Smyth. R. BrOL'GH. 1878. The Aborigines of Victoria. 2 vols. Melbourne: Government Printer.
Spencer. Baldwin, and F. j. GilleN'. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan.
1927. The Arunta. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Steward, Julian H., and LOUIS C. Faron. 1959. Native Peoples of South America.
New York: McGraw-Hill. Thomson, Donald F. 1949a. Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange
Cvclein Arnhem Lund. Melbourne: Macmillan.
1949b. "Arnhem Land: Explorations Among an Unknown People," The Geographical Journal 113:1-8, 114, 54-67. Turnbull, Colin. 1965. Wayward Servants. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press.
Van der Post, Laurens. 1958. The Los; World of the Kalahari. New York: Morrow. While, Leslie A. 1949. The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar, Strauss.
1959. 77k- Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill. Woodburn, James. 1968. "An Introduction to Hadza Ecology," in R. Lee and I.
DeVore (eds.). Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine. Woksi-EY, Peter M. 1961. "The Utilization of Food Resources by an Australian
Aboriginal Tribe," Acta Ethnographien 10:153-90.
14
The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy
PAUL BOHANNAN
It has often been claimed that money was to be found in much of the African continent before the impact of the European world and the extension of trade made coinage general. When we examine these claims, however, they tend to evaporate or to emerge as tricks of definition. It is an astounding fact that economists have, for decades, been assigning three or four qualities to money when they discuss it with reference to our own society or to those of the medieval and modern world, yet the moment they have gone to ancient history or to the societies and economies studied by anthropologists they have sought the "real" nature of money by allowing only one of these defining characteristics to dominate their definitions.
All economists learned as students that money serves at least three purposes. It is a means of exchange, it is a mode of payment, it is a standard of value. Depending on the vintage and persuasion of the author of the book one consults, one may find another money use—storage of wealth. In newer books, money is defined as merely the means of unitizing purchasing power, yet behind that definition still lie the standard, the payment, and the exchange uses of money.
It is interesting that on the fairly rare occasions that economists discuss primitive money at all—or at least when they discuss it with any empirical referrent—they have discarded one or more of the money uses in framing
275