Limited Wants, Unlimited Means

A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environment

John Gowdy

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781597268745
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

For roughly 99% of their existence on earth, Homo sapiens lived in small bands of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, finding everything they needed to survive and thrive in the biological richness that surrounded them. Most if not all of the problems that threaten our own technologically advanced society -- from depletion of natural capital to the ever-present possibility of global annihilation -- would be inconceivable to these traditional, immediate-return societies. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies appear to have solved problems of production, distribution, and social and environmental sustainability that our own culture seems incapable of addressing.

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means examines the hunter-gatherer society and lifestyle from a variety of perspectives. It provides a brief introduction to the rich anthropological and sociological literature on non-agricultural societies, bringing together in one volume seminal writings on the few remaining hunter-gatherer cultures including, the!Kung, the Hadza, and the Aborigines. It examines the economics of traditional societies, and concludes with a multifaceted investigation of how such societies function and what they can teach us in our own quest for environmental sustainability and social equality.

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is an important work for students of cultural anthropology, economic anthropology, environmental studies, and sustainable development, as well as for professionals, researchers, and anyone interested in prehistoric societies, environmental sustainability, or social justice.

Part I

ORIGINAL AFFLUENT SOCIETIES

The four chapters in Part I are representative of the revolution in the anthropology of hunter-gatherers that began in the 1960s. The information about hunter-gatherers contained therein directly challenges the universality of the myth of economic man. The first conference on hunter-gatherers, titled “Man the Hunter” and held at the University of Chicago in 1966, may be said to mark the beginning of a serious important scientific reassessment of these societies. The first two chapters were derived from papers presented at that conference. Chapter 1, Marshall Sahlins’s “The Original Affluent Society,” captured the imagination of the general public and also the spirit of the new way anthropologists were thinking about hunter-gatherers. In this provocative paper, Sahlins contrasts the traditional view of hunter-gatherer life as “nasty, brutish, and short” with the reality of societies that enjoyed abundant leisure time and whose material needs were easily satisfied. Most important, Sahlins spells out a simple yet revolutionary idea with profound implications for our turbulent times: scarcity is a social construct, not an inevitable condition of human existence.

Chapter 2, “What Hunters Do for a Living,” from a paper presented at that first conference by Richard B. Lee, presents some detailed information about the !Kung, or San, of the southern African desert. Lee’s chapter addresses the simple question, “How do hunters make a living?” The answer is, again, simple yet profound: they do so easily, ingeniously, and sustainably.

Chapter 3, Lorna Marshall’s “Sharing, Talking, and Giving,” first published in 1961, gives more detailed information about the social organization of !Kung society and how “sharing, talking, and giving” reinforce and are integrated with “economic” life. The difference between the possessive rationality of economic man and a society based on sharing, cooperation, and caring is striking. For example, trade with others, the Holy Grail of contemporary capitalism, is considered undignified and socially disruptive and is done only with outsiders.

Chapter 4, James Woodburn’s “Egalitarian Societies,” links social organization and ecological sustainability. Woodburn distinguishes immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, which have a very simple technology, from delayed-return hunter-gatherer societies, which depend on capital equipment such as nets and traps. Woodburn characterizes immediate-return societies as “aggressively egalitarian.” Some anthropologists argue that the differences between immediate-return and delayed return hunter-gatherer societies is more important than that between delayed-return hunter-gatherers and simple agriculturalists (see chapter 8). Apparently, even simple capital equipment can have a compromising effect on the egalitarian social structure of hunter-gatherers. A comparison of Marshall’s account of! Kung social life with that in John E. Yellen’s description of a modern !Kung village in part III clearly illustrates this point.

Even the very limited introduction to hunter-gatherer societies given in part I of this volume shows the tapestry of possibilities of human social organization. The great economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was fond of quoting Rudyard Kipling on this point:

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!

ONE

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 his 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 it, 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 hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means.

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.

Reprinted with permission from: Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine de Gruyter). Copyright @ 1972 by Marshall Sahlins.

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 modern hunters and gatherers, that a successful accommodation is usually made. After taking up the evidence, I 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,” “meager 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.

The aboriginal Australians are a classic example of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest. In many places their habitat is even more severe than that of the Bushmen, although this is perhaps not quite true in the northern portion. . . . A tabulation of the foodstuffs which the aborigines of northwest central Queensland extract from the country they inhabit is instructive. . . . The variety in this list is impressive, but we must not be deceived into thinking that variety indicates plenty, for the available quantities of each element in it are so slight that only the most intense application makes survival possible. (Herskovits 1952:68-69)

Or again, 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 1959:60; cf. Clark 1953:27ff; Haury 1962:113; Hoebel 1958:188; Redfield 1953:5; White 1959)

But the traditional dismal view of the hunters’ fix is also preanthropological 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 Probably it was one of the first distinctly neolithic prejudices, an ideological appreciation of the hunter’s capacity to exploit the earth’s resources most congenial to the historic task of depriving him of the same. We must have inherited it with the seed of Jacob, which “spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north,” to the disadvantage of Esau who was the elder son and cunning hunter, but in a famous scene deprived of his birthright.

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.² 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.)³

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

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.⁵

But still other ideas, these endemic in anthropological theory and ethnographic practice, have conspired to preclude any such understanding.

The anthropological disposition to exaggerate the economic inefficiency of hunters appears notably by way of invidious comparison with neolithic economies. Hunters, as Lowie put it blankly, “must work much harder in order to live than tillers and breeders” (1946:13). On this point evolutionary anthropology in particular found it congenial, even necessary theoretically, to adopt the usual tone of reproach. Ethnologists and archaeologists had become neolithic revolutionaries, and in their enthusiasm for the Revolution spared nothing denouncing the Old (Stone Age) Regime. Including some very old scandal. It was not the first time philosophers would relegate the earliest stage of humanity rather to nature than to culture. (“A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself” [Braidwood 1957:122].) The hunters thus downgraded, anthropology was free to extol the Neolithic Great Leap Forward: a main technological advance that brought about a “general availability of leisure through release from purely food-getting pursuits” (Braidwood 1952:5; cf. Boas 1940:285).

In an influential essay on “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” Leslie White explained that the neolithic generated a “great advance in cultural development ... as a consequence of the great increase in the amount of energy harnessed and controlled per capita per year by means o...