For this semester’s class on Culture and Nature we opened with readings from a book on Hunter-Gatherers, economics, and the environment titled “Limited Wants, Unlimited Means” (J. Gowdy, Editor). The initial readings paint a picture of neolithic life as characterized by short work and long leisure periods, extensive interpersonal relationships and non-attachment to objects. The hunter-gatherer is painted as a process person over a product-oriented individual, as a person who works little and plays often, and as essentially peaceful.

All this is well and good and it led to many discussions about cultural differences between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, between immediate-return societies and delayed-return societies, and the challenges associated with bridging those cultural gaps. What was profound for me, however, was the way in which anthropologists were imposing the delayed-return temporal perspective on these immediate return groups. The very fact of immediate-return implies a different perspective about the future and therefore about time. So how is it possible to measure their time by our standards? This matters a lot when we talk about leisure time vs work time. If you don’t measure time the same way, if you don’t experience it in a similar manner, you can’t compare it accurately.

Take the (for simplicity we’ll call it Western but truthfully i think it’s the industrial perspective coming out of the labour movement) “western” perspective: work is the unpleasant but necessary activity the virtuous enact and the unworthy avoid. Leisure is the very opposite and can be either quiet contemplation or sinful revelry, but it is characterized by pleasure, idleness, and choice. Work is a “burden” for westerners because it excludes Choice. You work because you MUST, you play because you CAN.

For Hunter-Gatherers described in our first readings, work is apparently not a burden because it is a choice (not explained in the book this way, but quite obvious to me). The freedom to commit whatever activity you wish operates under social and environmental controls, but the plain fact is that if you don’t want to go pick berries today you don’t have to and no one is going to make you. Post-modern industrial society has a model for this in certain select retirees who are able to become contractors after retirement. In effect they begin their “real job” once they have the freedom of choice about what kind of work they will do. It is no longer considered “work” on the same scale, because on any day if they don’t want to go pick berries they don’t have to and there is no one who can make them.

We have a million and one self-help books about finding the career, “choosing” the life you want, making your hobby your job. No one says “make your hobby your work” – because work has come to mean something else. I suppose what I’m trying to point out here is that the very definition of work, and the relationship we have with it, significantly impacts our analyses of other cultures’ economic and life-sustaining activities. I’ve tried out living “the hunter-gatherer way” – not being concerned about the time (but showing up at work at the same time every day), being socially oriented while at “work” or not, working in rhythms of intensity and relaxation, and most importantly, applying the same importance weighting on my home life as my work life. If all becomes equal in value and emotional attachment, should I have the same resentment about doing the dishes as I would about whatever pissed me off at work today? Or should I have the ability to really relax at work, see myself as living there , and be settled in my life in both locations? there are “stresses” everywhere, there are things we can’t control in every aspect of life. But I think that the less we imagine that the weekends “should” be for resting or playing (not for laundry and other home “work” activities), and equally the less we believe that weekdays “should” be resented with the roll of the eyes about mondays and the excitement about fridays and the imagined R&R on the weekend, perhaps the MORE we would be happy and content, the more balance we would be achieving in our daily lives.

I conclude this ridiculously long post with an encouragement to see the CBC’s little documentary “Educating Margaret”. This is not about hunter-gatherers and I certainly don’t want you to think I am mistaking this. But it is, in some ways, about work and responsibility. Margaret is a Kenyan woman who, by being sponsored for education is now a nurse. What is incredible is to see her GLOW of pride when she describes the sheer number of people she, and she alone, supports with her income (11 people, some who she lives with, others back home in her village).  To see her smile is to know that for her this responsibility is not a burden but is a blessing. It is a beautiful thing, not a “source of stress” as we would have it here. Here in the west people have nervous breakdowns because of the pressure of having to support many people on a single income. Yet here is Margaret, smiling and counting on her fingers all those who she is able to help.  Hers is a very different perspective indeed.