The commentary on ancient society says more about the daydreaming Palaeolithics on the list than it does about Palaeolithic societies.
As ever romanticising the past is just a psychological expression of distaste for the present. OK, so you want to live in a cave. Do it.
In message <3.0.1.32.19990930151635.00998ec0 at pop.ma.ultranet.com>, Brett Knowlton <brettk at unica-usa.com> writes
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
>iirc, he quotes this by way of supporting a main argument of
>the book: to wit, that modern assumptions about 'premodern'
>peoples speak *only* of modern anxieties.
But his and your failing is that you do not apply this test to the argument itself - to wit that the retrospective gloss on 'premodern societies' is nothing more than a displaced grumble about the present, which sheds no light on the past.
>
>i'll be polite: he's a bit more reflexive than you are. not
>exactly a herculean feat, imo.
No, that's not polite.
>Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools,
>we judge his situation hopeless in advance. --marshall sahlins
Yes, having equipped him with ... 'free time', no less! Clearly his position is not hopeless, as subsequent events demonstrated.
In message <19990930182434.B15559 at panix.com>, t byfield
<tbyfield at panix.com> writes
>
>unless of course you live past age 25, in which case it shoots
>up more than a single-figure factoid would lead the unwary to
>expect. put simply: your chances of living to be 100 increase
>dramatically after you live to be 1.
Yes, but that also applies to the present. Don't you think it an advance that infant mortality has fallen? Truly you have a heart of stone.
>
>there's no question whatsoever that technical advances have led
>to vast increases in life expectancy for many people (though i'd
>hesitate to say 'for the many').
Your hesitation is mistaken. Life expectancy is rising across the board, more rapidly in the third world than in the first. Those rises, as often discussed on this list, are spread across social classes. There are some parts of the world that have seen a fall, such as sub-Saharan Africa, but they are by no means the majority.
Your ghoulish self-satisfaction in the notion of people starving the third world says more about you than it does about what is really happening.
> yes you should include war casualties, since those guns
>are indeed technically advanced. so: how often is somalia cited
>as an example of the life-prolonging wonders of modern techno-
>logy?
And here's me, naively thinking that it was the US army that engaged in the killing in Somalia, when it was some disembodied 'guns'. How very convenient.
As Michael Maren points out, Somali society would not have collapsed if US aid dumped in Mogadishu had not knocked the bottom out of the farmers prices. It is the limitations that US imperialism placed upon the development of technology that threatened Somalis, not the military hardware they got hold of. -- Jim heartfield