Study plan
Study Plan: Hunter-Gatherer Culture through Sahlins’s “Original Affluent Society” and Kaplan’s Critique
Create a 4-6 lesson study plan on hunter-gatherer culture focused on Sahlins's Original Affluent Society thesis and Kaplan's critique, using only the indexed Sahlins and Kaplan reading.
Lessons in this plan
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1
Setting the Debate: Why Hunter-Gatherers Were Recast as “Affluent”
Identify the older anthropological view of hunter-gatherers as living in scarcity and explain how Sahlins’s thesis challenged that assumption by redefining affluence around satisfied wants rather than high production.
- 2 Sahlins’s Core Argument: Affluence by Desiring Little Explain Sahlins’s two paths to affluence and summarize his claim that hunter-gatherers could meet material wants through limited desires, low per-capita energy use, and a different relationship between wants and means.
- 3 Ethnographic Evidence in Sahlins: Diet, Work, Possessions, and Leisure Examine the examples Sahlins uses—such as Australian Aboriginal foods, Yahgan attitudes toward possessions, and Hadza work and leisure—to understand how he supports the original affluent society thesis.
- 4 Limits within Sahlins’s Model: Storage, Sharing, and Diminishing Returns Describe the constraints Sahlins acknowledges within hunting and gathering economies, especially the social undesirability of storage and the problem of diminishing returns as local resources are depleted.
- 5 Kaplan’s Critique: Methodological and Nutritional Challenges to Affluence Analyze Kaplan’s critique of the affluent society thesis by focusing on concerns about selective time-allocation evidence, overgeneralization from cases like the !Kung, and reports of food anxiety and nutritional stress.
- 6 Comparative Synthesis: Evaluating Sahlins against Kaplan Compare Sahlins’s thesis and Kaplan’s critique to form a balanced interpretation of hunter-gatherer culture, specifying what parts of the affluence argument are persuasive and what parts remain vulnerable.