From: andie nachgeborenen
Bill's description of the hard, driven life of the hunter-gather is, typically, totally wrong. Marshall Sahlinds estanlished over a generation ago, and his results have never been seriously challenged, that the hunter-gatherer societies were the "first affluent societies," where people spent 4-5 hours a day working, often in a way hard to distinguish from playing (after all, people today go on walks and hunt for fun!), and the rest of their time sitting around, pigging out, and telling stories. See his Stone Age Economics and other writings. Charles B can tell you more. Our lives are far more driven and less leisured. We have (if we have money or social democracy) more security and better health care, but defibitely less leisure. jks
^^^^^^^^^^^^ CB: This is one of those recurrent threads here, and Justin references me because I had Sahlins as a teacher when I was an anthropology student.
Justin gives the basic idea of Sahlins' critique of the generally held idea that the life of hunters and gatherers is always nasty, brutish and short. Having thought about this issue many times over the years, I would suggest that Sahlins's study, which has as its empirical basis much of modern ethnography on foragers, stands for the proposition that many of the people who lived in this mode of production had more leisure than many people under the capitalist mode of production. There is probably some real historical basis for the myth of the Garden of Eden.
I think that because starting from say 200,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago all human socieities were hunters and gatherers, there have been lots of them. So, some of them may have run into some rough times. In fact the ones that had problems were the ones likely to have evolved into the subsequent modes of production ( necessity is the mother of invention). Take it away ,Carrol ,on punctated equilibrium, stability and dynamism, etc.
Since this thread is the materialist basis of religion, the a, b, c materialist comment on that is ancient religion arose in part to explain amazing natural phenomena etc. I think Bill had some very important coments on ancestor worship as passing on the social order. I think transgenerational social messages defines our species fundamentally.
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