Marshall Sahlins (1930 to 2021) was an American anthropologist who said, in a famous essay first given in 1966, that hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society”: rich not because they had a lot, but because they wanted little and could meet those wants easily, with plenty of time left over. His working-hours figures have since been revised upwards, but his deeper point, that poverty and endless want are products of civilisation, not of the human condition, sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s picture of the Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer that took only what they needed.
Who was Marshall Sahlins? #
One of the best-known anthropologists of his generation. He was born in Chicago in 1930, studied at the University of Michigan and took his doctorate at Columbia University in 1954. He taught at Michigan and then, from 1973, at the University of Chicago, where he stayed for the rest of his career. His own fieldwork was in the Pacific, above all in Fiji, on the island of Moala, among farming and fishing villagers, and he wrote widely on Hawaii.
He was also a public figure. During the protests against the Vietnam War he coined the term ‘teach-in’. His long argument with the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere over how the Hawaiians saw Captain Cook became one of the great debates of the field. In 2013 he resigned from the US National Academy of Sciences, in protest at the Academy’s military research projects, including studies meant to improve the combat performance of small military units, and at its election of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. His books include Stone Age Economics (1972), Islands of History (1985), How “Natives” Think (1995), What Kinship Is, And Is Not (2013) and, with David Graeber, On Kings (2017). He died in Chicago in April 2021, aged ninety.
What is “the original affluent society”? #
A new way of looking at hunter-gatherer life, first presented at the Man the Hunter conference in 1966 and published in full as the opening chapter of Stone Age Economics. The usual view, then as now, was that hunter-gatherers lived a desperate hand-to-mouth existence, always one step ahead of starvation. Sahlins turned it round. In his words, “this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society.”1
His key was a simple idea. “There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little.” Modern economies take the first road, assuming that our wants are great, even infinite, and our means limited, so the gap can only be closed by producing more. “But there is also a Zen road to affluence”, starting from the premise that human material wants are “finite and few”. On that road, “a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty, with a low standard of living.”2
Hunter-gatherers carried little because they moved often, and they could afford to own little because the things they needed lay all around them, “free for anyone to take”, and everyone had the tools and the skills to use them.3
How much did he say hunter-gatherers worked? #
Far less than we do. Drawing chiefly on the anthropologist Richard Lee’s measurements among the !Kung of the Kalahari, then living mainly by foraging alongside herding neighbours, and on McCarthy and McArthur’s two-week study of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia (1948, published 1960), using the figures for two small groups, he estimated that hunter-gatherers spent “a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker’s hours”.4
From this he drew a reversal of the usual story of progress. The amount of work for each person rises as cultures ‘advance’, and the amount of leisure falls. And he drew a sharper conclusion still. “Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods”; it is “a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.”5 See What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the difference between Leaver and Taker culturesTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer. The pre-agricultural cultures “took what they needed at any given time, and left the rest”, and many of them had “the concept of leaving a share for the other creatures”, whereas Taker culture “is wholly orientated towards building up a surplus. It takes everything that it possibly can”.6 Sahlins’s Zen road is the Leaver way seen from the side of economics, where enough is enough and wanting little is a kind of wealth.
The same goes for how hunter-gatherers spent their time. They could sleep and wake when they wanted, with “no alarm clock to shock them out of sleep”, no boss, relatively few rules, “No bills to pay, no tax returns to do.”7 And sharing was not a nicety but a mark of being grown up. In a band that depended on everyone, sharing fairly so that everyone got what they needed was an essential trait of the true Adult, and “Keeping surplus for oneself was to behave like a child.”8 Therapeutic Shamanism adds what Sahlins, writing about economics, left out, that this was a way of life lived in relationship with the whole of the living world, not only with other people. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Have his figures held up? #
Not as they stood. The anthropologist David Kaplan, in an article titled “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society’” (2000), questioned what counted as ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, whether the diets were really adequate, and how far the short studies behind the figures could be trusted, since they covered small groups over short periods, without allowing for the seasons. Others pointed out that the early figures left out the time spent preparing food, making tools and fetching firewood. Counting everything, later work, including a recalculation by Lee himself, puts the whole working week nearer forty hours.9
On the other side, Lee has said that even the fuller figure compares well with Western working hours once our own housework is added. And the anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who has worked since 1978 with the Nayaka, hunter-gatherers of the forests of South India, suggested that the real source of hunter-gatherer ‘affluence’ was not the hours at all. In a reworking of Sahlins’s idea (1992), she suggested that such peoples are confident because they experience their forest as a giving parent, which shares with them as kin share with one another.10 Her later work on how the Nayaka relate to the world as a community of persons helped to open the new anthropology of animism. See What is animism?
What did Sahlins say later about spirits and the living world? #
That for most of human history, people have lived in a world full of persons who are not human. In On Kings (2017), written with David Graeber, he wrote that even hunting peoples such as the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians live in what he called “cosmic polities”, ordered by “divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such metapersons endowed with life-and-death powers”.11 In his last book, the first volume of a planned series, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (2022), published after his death, he described these spirits as present in everyday life, active partners in hunting, gardening and every other human project, not beings in some separate heaven.
This overlaps with animism’s world of other-than-human persons, though Sahlins wrote as an anthropologist describing other peoples’ worlds, not as an animist. It also leads somewhere Therapeutic Shamanism does not go. Sahlins and Graeber wrote that “There are no egalitarian human societies”, because even hunters are “ordered and dominated” by these powers, whilst adding that the hunters’ famous refusal to give or take orders between adults made them “pioneers of human freedom.”12 Therapeutic Shamanism holds that hunter-gatherer cultures “generally have little interest in gods and goddesses”, understanding that such huge beings would take little interest in creatures as small as us, and that the meddling, demanding gods arrive with the city-states.13 The two pictures stand side by side.
