Chapter 8: In Search of the Primitivists Part II: Primitive Affluence

According to the Dean, the notion of primitive affluence is some silliness the hippies smoked up and put over on the anthropologists in the ‘60s:

Much of [George Bradford’s] “critical anthropology” appears to derive from ideas propounded at the “Man the Hunter” symposium, convened in April 1966 at the University of Chicago. Although most of the papers contributed to this symposium were immensely valuable, a number of them conformed to the naive mystification of “primitivity” that was percolating through the 1960s counter-culture — and that lingers on to this day. The hippie culture, which influenced quite a few anthropologists of the time, averred that hunting-gathering peoples today had been bypassed by the social and economic forces at work in the rest of the world and still lived in a pristine state, as isolated remnants of Neolithic and Paleolithic lifeways. Further, as hunter-gatherers, their lives were notably healthy and peaceful, living then as now on an ample natural largess (37).

The chief villain of the piece was anthropologist Richard B. Lee, who had “estimated that the caloric intake of ‘primitive’ peoples was quite high and their food supply abundant, making for a kind of virginal ‘affluence’ in which people needed to forage only a few hours each day” (37–38).

In the above-quoted passage, “it would take a full-sized essay in itself to unscramble, let alone refute, this absurd balderdash, in which a few truths are either mixed with or coated in sheer fantasy” (37). The Dean refers to a passage he quotes from Bradford, but might have been referring to his favorite subject — himself — except that there aren’t even a few truths in his passage, not even mixed or coated with fantasy.

The revision of the Hobbesian postulate that primitive life is nasty, brutish and short commenced, not at the “Man the Hunter” symposium in 1966 (Lee & DeVore 1968), but at the symposium on band societies in Ottawa in 1965 (Damas 1969). The Chicago symposium only extended the theses of the pioneering Ottawa gathering (Renouf 1991: 89–90). April 1965 and even April 1966 (Lee & DeVore 1968: vii) are implausibly early dates to assume much hippie influence on academic scholarship, and the Dean adduces no evidence in support of his self-serving conjecture. There’s no trace of counterculture influence, for instance, in Bookchin’s 1965 book Crisis in Our Cities (Herber 1965) or his 1965 essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (Bookchin 1971: 55- 82). Indeed, back when his memories were more recent and his memory perhaps better, Bookchin wrote that “the hippie movement was just getting underway in New York when ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ was published” (ibid.: 29). In contrast, the hippie movement bulks large in his 1970 essay opportunistically lauding youth culture (Bookchin 1970: 51–63). The times they were a-changin’. To Bookchin’s annoyance, they still are.

If there is any relationship between ‘60s hippie culture and the anti-Hobbesian turn in anthropology, it is of the sort the statisticians call a spurious relationship. That is, the variables are associated with each other, not as cause and effect, but as consequences of a common cause (Babbie 1992: 416). The common cause would have been the general climate of distrust of authority and orthodoxy.

If you read the Dean’s passage with more care than it was written with, it’s noticeable that he attributes most of the malign influence on the primitivists, not to the anthropologists, but to the hippies. I am drawing on my own distant memories here, but my recollection is that what the hippies romanticized was tribal society on the model, usually ill-understood, of certain pacific Native American tribes like the Hopi and the Navajo. At the time, Bookchin apparently thought so too. “In its demands for tribalism,” among others, “the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society” (Bookchin 1970: 59). Unless they were attending graduate school, few hippies would have been acquainted with what Bookchin calls the “‘Man the Hunter’ timewarp” (39), which was expressly and only about revising the Hobbesian view of hunter-gatherers.

For the most part, hunter-gatherers don’t even live in tribes, they live in bands (Lee & DeVore 1968b: 7–8). In contrast, tribal peoples — horticulturalists or herders — occupy a social space “between bands and states” (Gregg 1991). Many of their societies are also anarchist and as such are also interesting, as well as interesting in their own right, but necessarily there are not as many valid generalizations about primitives as there are about foragers. All foragers are primitives, but not all primitives are foragers.

In a way, it’s Bradford’s fault for inviting the Dean to foment confusion. If the Dean quotes him correctly — always a big if where the Dean is concerned — Bradford wrote in 1991 that the “official” anthropological view of foragers is the Hobbesian one. That was already changing even when Marshall Sahlins made the same point in his 1968 essay “The Original Affluent Society” (Sahlins 1971: ch. 1). Today the “current model” (Renouf 1991: 89–90) is the one advanced at the Ottawa and Chicago conferences: “although the more idealized aspects of the Lee and DeVore model are commonly acknowledged, I think it is fair to say that no fundamental revision of it has been made” (ibid.: 90). Similarly, another anthropologist refers to the continuing prevalence of “the revised general version of hunter-gatherers of the mid- 1960s” (Conkey 1984: 257). John Zerzan, not George Bradford, is correct in saying that “a nearly complete reversal in anthropological orthodoxy has come about, with important implications” (1994: 16). Bradford’s failure to update the opinions he’s expressed since the 1970s — which is typical of the Fifth Estate — afforded the Dean an undeserved opportunity to claim scientific respectability for a viewpoint long since discredited.

Bradford’s other mistake, eagerly exploited by the Dean, is that he allegedly wrote that the revisionist view is based on “greater access to the views of primal people and their native descendants” (37). That gave the Dean his chance to dismiss primitive affluence as the “edenic” myth of nostalgic natives (36) feeding their fantasies, and perhaps their peyote, to credulous white hippies.

This is all wrong. It was the earliest studies of hunter-gatherers, including classic accounts by Kroeber, Boas and Radcliffe-Brown, which relied on older informants’ memories of conditions 25–50 years before, on “ethnographic reconstructions of situations which were no longer intact” (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 5–6). The Man the Hunter symposium, far from overlooking this method’s shortcomings, made that a “central theme” (ibid.: 6). Contemporary anthropologists have lesser, not greater access to the views of so-called primal people. In the first place, primal people are disappearing almost as rapidly as leftists are. And secondly, Western anthropologists no longer enjoy as much “access” as they did when the people they studied were subject to Western colonial rule. Most indigenous peoples now have more power to determine whether and on what terms they will receive resident and even visiting ethnographers. Some exclude them entirely. And the national governments of some former colonial possessions which are now independent states restrict or exclude foreign anthropologists for a variety of reasons (Beals 1969: 20–27).

More important, the affluence thesis is based on observation and measurement, not myth and memory. Richard B. Lee concluded that the !Kung San/Bushmen did remarkably little work compared to us — not by sitting at the feet of the Old Wise Man like they do at Goddard College — but by following the San around to see what they were doing and for how long. He based his conclusions as to the sufficiency of their diet on measuring the calories they ingested and expended (Lee 1969, 1979), something rarely done previously. One of the resulting articles was titled “!Kung Bushmen Subsistence: An Input-Output Analysis” (Lee 1969). This is science at its most muscular, not free-form fantasy.

It doesn’t necessarily follow, of course, that if San society is in a very tangible, measurable sense leisurely and affluent, then so are all or most other foraging societies. But on the Hobbesian new, the San as they lived in the 1960s were impossible, so the Hobbesian view in the muscular form espoused by the Dean has to be qualified or, as the social scientists say, “specified” (the scope of its validity narrowed) (Babbie 1992: 421–422) or else rejected altogether. And what’s so intriguing is that the San live their affluence in the arid Kalahari Desert, not someplace approximating the Garden of Eden (Zerzan 1994: 29). If foraging life could be affluent there, it might have been affluent almost everywhere — and almost everywhere is where prehistoric humans lived, as foragers, for 99% of human existence (Lee & DeVore 1968c: 5). The civilized, in contrast, find it very difficult to sustain an affluent lifestyle in the desert outside of a few special locations like Palm Springs and Kuwait (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962: 5 [quoted in Feyerabend (1987): 112 n. 14)]).

These implications have not only reoriented fieldwork, they have also occasioned the reinterpretation of already available accounts of hunter-gatherers, both historical sources and formal ethnographies. Sahlins (1971: ch. 1) did some of both in “The Original Affluent Society,” whose conclusions he’d previewed as a discussant at the Man the Hunter symposium (Lee & DeVore 1968: 85–89). The abundant historical accounts of the Australian aborigines, for all their misperceptions, if carefully read, confirm the affluence thesis. And the earlier ethnographers of hunter-gatherers, although they had often announced as their conclusions the Hobbesian party line, report ample data which contradict those conclusions. Anthropologists who once slighted written, historical sources relating to foragers such as the San are now combing them very carefully (e.g., Parkington 1984).

Unlike Bradford, the Man the Hunter anthropologists were not interested in primitive animism, harmony with nature, or “ecstatic techniques,” a phrase the Dean attributes to Bradford (36). Anthropologists had long since documented beyond any reasonable possibility of refutation all these aspects of many primitive cultures. What the Man-the-Hunter revisionists added was precisely what the Dean claims is missing, the social dimension: “Egalitarianism, sharing, and low work effort were stressed, as was the importance of gathering foods and, by extension, women’s direct role in the economy” (Renouf 1991: 89). The Dean’s entire rhetorical strategy is as misdirected as it is malicious. Primitivists contrast the orderly anarchy and the generous egalitarianism of foragers with the chaotic statism and class hierarchy of urban civilization. The Dean dredges up one foraging society, the Yuqui of Bolivia, which, he claims, includes the institution of hereditary slavery — although he has to admit that “this feature is now regarded as a feature of former horticultural lifeways” (45).

You could hardly ask for a better example of the exception that proves the rule. There were only 43 Yuqui at contact in the 1950s, far below the minimum — usually put at about 500 — for social viability. They are probably descended from a Guaraní raiding party of the late pre-Columbian period which was unable to find its way back to Paraguay. Remarkably, they maintained vestiges of slavery, something “difficult to imagine, but it did exist.” The Dean neglects to mention that upon falling into the clutches of the missionaries, this social splinter abandoned both foraging and slavery (Stearman 1989). This example proves, at the most, that foraging societies are not always anarchist and egalitarian, leaving untouched the conclusion, which even the Dean doesn’t deny, that they are almost always anarchist and egalitarian.

On the other hand, in thirty years of celebrating urbanism, the Dean has yet to identify a stable, anarchic, egalitarian urban society. Perhaps revolutionary Barcelona approximated one for a few months in 1936–1937, and Paris in 1968 for several weeks. But at best these are only blips on a social screen of almost unrelieved urban statism and class stratification. These “outliers,” as the statisticians refer to rare values of variables, far outside the range of all others, do remind us — as do the Yuqui — of the human capacity for extreme social plasticity. As such, they hearten me, but they fail to persuade me that “some kind of urban community is not only the environment of humanity: it is its destiny” (Bookchin 1974: 2). I don’t think anatomy is destiny and I don’t think urbanity is destiny either.