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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.
Here are a few ways of writing myself as a writer:
As a writer I am like a swarm of bees because lots of buzzing, and eventually a honeycomb.
As a writer, I am like a chameleon because I change my colours according to the environment.
As a writer, I am like the Pieces because part of me seems out of my element, yet remains connected to that other part immersed in writing.
Here are the notes, a very rough draft for what I hope will be a much more polished off one-pager on this week in RMES. Will have to find out from Carl, my writing instructor, whether this creative-juice stirring counts towards my LLED 534 as well as for this course. Feels like I am double-dipping on the assignment, yet Carl may be okay with me trying to write as much and in as many different ways as I can.
HanxWriter cut me off with the final word “a.” = analysis!
Here is the final draft, sent off on Saturday night:
B.D. Sharma, “On Sustainability” in Michael Tobias and Georgianne Cowan, The Soul of Nature (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 271-8.
Can current sustainability problems be solved through more intelligent application of conventional modern ideas about humans, the natural world, and the relationship between them, or are fundamental changes to prevailing basic assumptions and attitudes required?
In his address to the “estate-managers” attending 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Sharma gets very close to defining one of the most important issues with human attempts towards sustainability: how the First World tends to view the Third and Fourth Worlds’ poverty as an issue that needs to be resolved for the sake of all worlds. Contrary to the basic assumption of trickle-down theory that wealth will solve all problems, described here as an economical framework, the First World has done more harm to others with an imposing colonial attitude of taking valuable resources from impoverished countries, yet leaving behind just enough to support their consumptive habits. For instance, tropical forests may be stripped bare by the estate-managers, replaced by faster-growing, non-indigenous trees like pine, and called carbon dioxide sinks for developed and developing countries. Small independent communities like Sharma’s Dhorkatta receive strict policies from their national government based upon a colonial attitude that continue to support the Western economic system, to the point where the only acceptable solution would be Dhorkatta to become a cosmopolitan city and accept modern consumerism that devalues human and non-human life for the sake of the economy. He offers “a more humane, sustainable and equitable” (p. 278) paradigm based upon Gandhi’s belief in village republics.
The challenge Sharma lays out is to think locally about how the environment must be sustained, giving an example of “the tree that fulfills all desires” that must have once provided shelter, food and perhaps medicine for his community. The relationship between human and the natural world, it could be argued, remains the same as the globalized destruction for the First World’s economic scheme, only on a smaller scale. Humans will take what they need from the environment, and once the resources are totally depleted, they move elsewhere. Sharma’s attempt to address his “friends” at an international conference on sustainability come across as either berating “you,” on the one hand, for allowing destructive practices to intensify to the point of threatening “our” way of life, or on the other hand, venting frustration at “they” who establish consumerist habits that appeal to you but not us. How would others have felt to leave their communities and travel to Brazil for the conference only to hear that their way of life conflicts disastrously with another community’s sustainability scheme? There may be the strong urge to do something about such oversights when they return to their homes: petition local governments not to import timber from the Madhya Pradesh or revolt against the economic framework that created a two-caste dualism of extreme poverty and wealth? One would hope that Sharma came to the conference in order to listen to people from other countries, perhaps learn whether or not they truly are friends or foes to the Dhorkattan ecosystem. A teenaged Severin Suzuki gave a speech on similar theme at the same conference, perhaps with B. D. Sharma on the same stage as her. As much as I would like to believe each speaker had a profound impact on the other, Suzuki’s “I” and Sharma’s “we” most likely still remain worlds apart.
My first and perhaps only reflection using the new Hanx Writer app. Read the attached, if you dare…
Thanx formnothing