Marshall Sahlins states that the economy of hunting and gathering societies is commonly

perceived as insufficient to lead their lives. After examining these societies, he proposes that
these are the original affluent societies, where all the people’s material wants are easily
satisfied. There are two possible routes to affluence, including either producing more to
satisfy wants (by industrial productivity) or the Zen Road, where human material wants are
finite and few, and this mode describes the hunters too.

Sources of the Misconceptions: 1) Neolithic prejudices: an ideological appreciation of the

hunter’s capacity to exploit the earth’s resource most congenial to the historic task of
depriving him of the same.

2) Bourgeoise ethnocentrism: includes examining hunters and gatherers from vantage point
of bourgeoise. It advocates application of the scare means against alternative ends to derive
the most satisfaction possible under circumstances. It looks down upon primitive societies for
following the zen road (desiring less).

3) Anthropological misconception: includes invidious comparison of these societies with

neolithic economies.

4) Ethnographic misconception: develops in the field, from the context of European

observation of existing hunters and gatherer. The study of hunting and gathering societies is
presided over by “another society” (Europeans) and these Europeans tend to think that these
people have insufficient resources and are starving to death.

A kind of material plenty: Bushmen living in the Kalahari enjoy a kind of material
abundance, except for food and water. They adapt their tools to materials which are free for
anyone to take. They also borrow what they do not own, and the accumulation of objects has
not become associated with status.

Hunter-gatherer production is divided into two spheres: food and water, and non subsistence.
In the non subsistence sphere, people's wants are easily satisfied due to the ease of
production, simplicity of technology, and democracy of property. Products are made of stone,
bone and access to natural resources is usually direct. Labor is divided by sex, and all people
can participate in sharing. The hunter is an uneconomic man who has no sense of possession,
is completely indifferent to any material pressures, and has a lack of interest in developing his
technological equipment. Hunters and gatherers are not restricted in their materialistic
impulses, but rather they have never made an institution of them. They are content with a
mere living, this suggests that hunters and gatherers are not poor, but rather free, as their
limited material possessions relieve them of all cares and allow them to enjoy life.

Subsistence: The 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land published

in 1960 found that hunters and gatherers work less than we do, and there is a greater amount
of leisure in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. The key
research was a temporal study of hunting and gathering by McCarthy and McArthur (1960).
The Arnhem Land data suggests that the people do not work hard and also do not work
continuously. The characteristics of hunting and gathering in the Arnhem Lands are such that
these Australians seem to underuse their economic possibilities, resting frequently and not
spending all the hours of daylight searching for and preparing food. The Arnhem Land
hunters spent much of their spare time resting and sleeping, usually after lunch or after
fishing or hunting. Richard Lee's research studies the Bushmen, particularly the Dobe section
of Kung Bushmen. Lee found a surprising abundance of vegetation in the Dobe area, with
food resources both varied and abundant. His reports on time spent in food-getting are
remarkably close to the Arnhem Land observations. The Arnhem Land and Bushmen reports
suggest that these people do not lead a substandard existence on the edge of starvation.

The Aboriginal people of Southeast Australia had a plentiful supply of fish, so a squatter on
the Victorian scene of the 1840s attempted to estimate the amount of time spent hunting and
gathering by the people of the then Port Phillip's District. Curr found that the food was of
"indifferent quality" and that the six hours a day spent hunting and gathering was sufficient
for the country to support twice the number of Blacks. In Africa, the Hadza reject the
neolithic revolution in order to keep their leisure, rejecting agriculture on the grounds that it
would involve too much hard work (study done by Woodburn).

The hunter seems unwilling to husband supplies and he adopts two complementary economic
inclinations. The first, prodigality: the propensity to eat right through all the food in the camp,
even during objectively difficult times. Second, the failure to put by food surplus, to develop
food storage. Sahlins notes the reasons of their inability of food storage. The potential
drawback of storage is that is engages the contradiction between wealth and mobility. Also,
the food accumulation or storage is considered as “hoarding”. thus, food storage is considered
to be economically undesirable and socially unachievable.

Rethinking Hunters and Gatherers: Hunting-gathering is a practice that reduces food

resources in a particular locale, leading to poverty and abundance. Culture would negate
natural conditions and ecological constraints, leading to dialectics on its relationship to
nature. Utility falls quickly at the margin of portability, leading to low productivity of labor.
The real handicaps of hunting-gathering are not obvious. It has a demographic policy of
debarassment, which includes elimination of infanticide, snilicide, sexual continence, etc.
This policy is an expression of the same ecology as the ascetic economy, and hunters may be
forced to handle people and goods in parallel ways.

Hunting and gathering has both strengths and weaknesses, and mobility and moderation put
hunters' ends within range of their technical means, making an undeveloped mode of
production highly effective. Hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present suggest a mean
of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. The conclusion is
conservatively that hunters and gatherers need not work longer getting food than primitive
cultivators. The neolithic saw no improvement in the amount of time required per capita for
subsistence, but with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder.

Sahlins concludes that the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the
evolution of culture. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low
standard of living but all the people’s material wants usually can be satisfied. Sahlins metions
that 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 and
above all it is a relation between people.

The ethnography of hunters and gatherers is largely a record of incomplete cultures, as ritual
and exchange cycles may have disappeared without trace in the early stages of colonialism
(eroded superstructure). It is not always possible to rescue culture from existing hunters, and
its originality will have to be rethought again.