ah, indeed--and by the same token does your overweening com- mentary on (for example) mexican society say more about you, a daydreaming mexican, than it does about mexican society?
aside from the fact that your responses below are nonsequit- urs:
> > This notion that life was always wretched back
> >in the old hunter-gatherer days is bogus. People DID work less.
>
> You are confused. Working less is not the same thing as having leisure.
> Unemployed people do not work at all, but it does not mean that they
> live the life of reilly.
>
> >Its hard to imagine people living in
> >huts on the hillside outside Mexico City are leading better lives than
> >their hunter-gatherer ancestors did.
>
> It's hard for you to imagine it. But you are projecting a one-
> dimensional view of Mexican society as consisting entirely of
> impoverished shanty-town dwellers.
to say nothing of the one-dimensional view you impose on irish society ('reilly'). in any case, sahlins is far too sharp to treat 'work' as a transhistorically, transculturally stable category--not, as you (i won't speak of the others on this list) do, as something whose necessary byproduct is 'leisure.' instead, he makes ~three arguments on parallel planes: (1) in terms of quantitative activity devoted to feeding and equip- ping a society (equipping being salient, because attitudes toward accumulation are decisive), modern quantitative evid- ence of hunter-gatherers, who typically live in desolate areas compared to the verdant areas their predecessors were forced out of, operate more efficiently than does 'modern' society; (2) historical source accounts confirm that explorers and set- tlers again and again commented on this fact, typically in the form of complaints that nomadic natives were 'lazy'; (3) the master narrative wherein technical advance yields the effi- cient production (and, to a lesser extent, distribution) of material abundance is not merely quantitatively false but *qualitatively* false, because, as noted, accumulation is decisive--where hunter-gatherers *take* from a world they tend to perceive as materially abundant, technically advanced societies perceive their lot as one of *producing and main- taining* material abundance.
he does not, however, therefore set forth any programmatic argument that we should 'go native,' or for that matter even evaluate hunter-gatherer societies as 'better' than technic- ally advanced societies. on the contrary, he points out that their evaluative frameworks are as self-justifying and self- valorizing as any other. perhaps you should acquaint yourself with the idea of 'difference' as a potentially neutral way of looking at things.
> > You could make the same argument for
> >a large fraction of the world's population.
>
> What you are saying is so comprehensively rude, it is difficult to
> believe that you cannot hear the vile contempt in your own voice.
that would be the ghost of jonathan edwards traipsing across your keyboard, yes?
> You are really saying that a large fraction of the world's population
> live below the level of hunter-gatherer? Are you really willing to shrug
> off a century in which much of the globe won, for the first time, their
> political freedom from foreign oppression, to struggle to rebuild their
> own economies? Do you say that there has been no progress in India, or
> China since independence? Or that the countries of East Asia have done
> nothing to improve their lives?
i didn't notice that he said that. someone else may have gone off on 'progress' as such, but i don't think he did. but your rebuttals have been rather, um, monologic.
> In message <s7f385ad.095 at mail.ci.detroit.mi.us>, Charles Brown
> <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes
> >I'll take up the defense of my old prof. Jim, don't you also have
> >to have a time and motion study of the same people to prove your
> >side of the argument: that their lives were nasty brutish and short ?
> >What is your evidence that people who lived in such societies didn't
> >have a concept of free time ; or what is any of your evidence of what
> >people did and thought in such societies ? Surely, Marshall Sahlins
> >has more of that evidence than you do.
>
> well, we know from the fossil evidence that their lives were short, and
> that disease and injury were debilitating problems. As to nasty, we know
> that hunter-gatherer societies generally killed their enemies rather
> than enslave them, because additional numbers could not be absorbed into
> the clan.
and, indeed, sahlins explicitly points out this and more--for example, infanticide and senilicide--as necessary traits of the societies he's talking about, and he doesn't much fancy it, neither.
> As to whether they had a concept of free time, I know that they did not
> in the same way that Marx knew that they did not exchange fish and firs
> by consulting prices on the stock exchange: The concept of free-time
> only makes sense in the context of the selling of labour power.
but the objective fact of <time not spent feeding or equip- ping> has no necessary or logical cultural byproduct: *dif- ferent* societies see it in *different* ways. and, as sahl- ins never tires of pointing out (and boy does it need to be pointed out a lot), even huntr-gathering societies are quite cappable of seeing it *differently* over time. i mean, you don't <cough, i mean *do> realize that a vast segment of his work was devoted to the historical morphology of cultures *prior to their encounters with europeans*, yes?
> In message <19990930175423.A15559 at panix.com>, t byfield
> <tbyfield at panix.com> writes
>
> >i'll go out on a limb and say you clearly haven't read _stone
> >age economics_.
>
> You'd be mistaken.
then it's time to break out the SRA kit again and bone up on your reading comprehension skills. remember: reading is fun- damental.
> >and his argument is
> >*not* that they 'had more free time' but, rather, that there
> >is no basis for the claim that technical and economic advances
> >have brought about any quantitative benefits in terms of the
> >time a society devotes to feeding and equipping itself.
>
> Interesting way of putting it. In fact, modern societies clearly devote
it's much like his, actually.
> much less time, proportionately, to feeding itself (I leave aside
> 'equipping' because of the plasticity of the concept). That is because
> one hour of modern man's labour produces a great deal more food than
> that of ancient man's. So, looked at this way, the decreased time spent
> on feeding itself is a liberation for society.
monsanto is hiring. i bet they pay their lobbyists well--you should look into it. but before you do, note that whatever efficiency is allegedly gained in terms of production (leav- ing aside all the road-building, hot-line answering, plastic- coloring, logo-designing, tractor-repairing, chemical-synth- esizing labor your forgot to include in your math) is lost in post-production processing and distribution it takes that food to get to a consumer's mouth. calory for calory, mr. hunter-gatherer picking and eating a raspberry or a crawfish is infinitly more efficient than someone eating bacon, eggs, and toast in a diner, for the simple reason that the energy poured into every aspect of storing, treating, inspecting, carting, cooking, and serving that breakfast needs to be factored into your 'comparison.'
anyway, enough of you. this was for anyone who might be interested in reading sahlins (who's endlessly fascinat- ing), not for you--that'd be 'inefficient.'
cheers, t