Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Affluent Society” in Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), pp. 1-39.
Does an examination of what we know about hunting and gathering societies suggest that humans are innately selfish?
One of the major points of discussion Sahlins establishes early in his book is that much of what anthropologists and ethnographers claim to know about hunter-gatherer societies is a refraction of the social scientist’s culture rather than the Palaeolithic ages in question. To impose the question of whether or not humans in this prehistoric stage of development are selfish becomes more of an attempt use a modern framework for finding the answer: economic notions of supply and demand, for instance, suggest that hunter-gatherers continually struggled to find sustenance and therefore selfishness is a necessary survival skill. Even with the chapter title suggesting the hunter-gatherers as affluent belies the lack of material wealth this “original society” would have possessed. By researching the ethnography of present-day hunter-gatherer societies as well as historic account from earlier centuries, Sahlins demonstrates that the demands on such societies were less: there were not as many hours each day devoted to the hunt for food, less chattels or stockpiles of food to establish the society in one location and fewer instances of hunger when compared to postindustrial, supposedly wealthier civilizations. The account of a Jesuit priest among the natives of New France, reported by le Père Paul LeJeune, the courage called upon in times of scarcity reveals a less selfish, more affluent society that can “trust in the abundance of nature’s resources rather than despair at the inadequacy of human means” (Sahlins, p. 29).
If there is a period in the long span of human development where selfishness becomes a necessary means of survival, it comes in later stages such as the Neolithic and in agricultural-based civilizations. As soon as the supply of a society’s food production gets regulated, Sahlins concludes in his opening chapter, the society civilizes itself into having more of everything and creates wealth along with the poverty determined by the imbalance of resources; a selfish instinct begins to emerge. There is no longer the free time hunter-gatherers had in abundance, but instead a continual struggle either to maintain the food supply (growing crops, storing surplus) or to manage slave labour which ensures the wealthy few do not need to work so hard for finer foods. Selfishness gets normalized in these later periods with the advent of history, with oral and literate record-keeping develops mostly out of the food production practices and spawns a narrative account of civilization’s progress. There is no such narrative of hunter-gatherers’ history, other than what could be glanced at through cave paintings with their multiple interpretations by later cultures. Instead, it seems like the knowledge gap gets filled by later civilizations as they superimpose humanity’s selfish tendencies onto the earlier communities and contradict the image of hunter-gatherers as presented in Sahlins’ research. He mentions that much of his theory developed throughout Stone Age Economics is a substantivist argument about what might have happened in more primitive and prehistoric communities. Far from being innately selfish, the strengths of hunter-gatherer societies seem to be simply their ability to find food and adapt to a natural environment. With agriculture practices comes both cultivation and nurture, often seen in opposition to nature. Even the ant, Sahlins notes (p. 29, n. 22), may not be as industrious as humans would like to believe. If the folk tales about the hard-working ant can be called into question, it may also benefit humans to think deeply about how much our selfish behaviour seems naturalized but is more likely to be part of the culturing process for hunters and gatherers.