Setting the Debate: Why Hunter-Gatherers Were Recast as “Affluent”

Older anthropology often described hunter-gatherers as people living close to starvation, with little surplus, little leisure, and constant insecurity. In Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan, this earlier view is summarized through statements such as M. J. Herskovits’s claim that for groups like the Bushmen or the people of Tierra del Fuego, food was of “maximum value” because they lived in a “state of potential hunger,” leaving “little surplus of energy or resources available for other activities than the food quest.” From that perspective, farming appeared to be an obvious improvement and a major step forward in human history.

The older scarcity model

The scarcity model assumed that hunter-gatherers had very limited means and were always struggling to survive. This interpretation was often reinforced by outsider misunderstandings. Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan notes that European observers sometimes saw varied local diets as proof of desperation, assuming people were forced by famine to eat foods Europeans found strange or unappealing. But the text also cites Sir George Grey’s warning that this was a mistake: some of the foods travelers pitied were actually highly valued, nutritious, and enjoyable to the people eating them.

• Hunter-gatherers were seen as having low productivity.
• They were thought to live in chronic shortage or “potential hunger.”
• The search for food was assumed to consume nearly all their time and energy.
• Agriculture was therefore cast as a progressive escape from scarcity.

Sahlins’s challenge to that assumption

Marshall Sahlins directly challenged this older picture in “The Original Affluent Society,” included in Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan. His central claim is striking: hunter-gatherers may consume less energy per person than other societies, yet they can still be considered “affluent” because “all the people’s material wants were easily satisfied.” This argument redefined affluence. Instead of measuring well-being by abundance of goods or high levels of production, Sahlins measured it by the relationship between wants and means.

He argues that there are “two possible courses to affluence”:

• Produce much
• Desire little

This is the heart of Sahlins’s thesis. Modern market societies usually assume that human wants are unlimited and that affluence comes from increasing production. Sahlins questioned that assumption. He suggested that hunter-gatherers could be affluent in another sense: their wants were modest enough that they could satisfy them without endless labor.

How the new thesis changed the debate

In Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan, Sahlins supports this challenge with evidence that some hunter-gatherer groups spent relatively limited time on subsistence and often lived at a measured, even leisurely, pace. The text describes the Hadza as living in an area of “exceptional abundance,” with men sometimes devoting more energy to gambling than to hunting, and women gathering food at a leisurely pace. It also describes a casual attitude toward possessions among some groups, suggesting not desperation but a way of life in which basic needs were regularly met.

This did not mean hunter-gatherers had luxury in the modern consumer sense. Rather, the argument was that they did not need to produce large surpluses to live adequately. Their apparent “affluence” came from a fit between limited wants and available means.

Why this mattered

Sahlins’s thesis overturned a powerful assumption in anthropology. If affluence could mean satisfied wants rather than accumulated wealth, then hunter-gatherers no longer had to be viewed simply as poor people trapped in scarcity. Instead, they could be understood as societies organized around different standards of need, work, and well-being.

As Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan explains, later research in the 1960s and after helped fuel this rethinking by providing time-allocation and subsistence studies of groups such as the Bushmen and Hadza. The broad result was a major shift in debate:

• Old view: hunter-gatherers were poor because they produced little.
• Sahlins’s view: hunter-gatherers could be affluent because their wants were easily met.
• Key redefinition: affluence is not only about having more goods; it can also mean needing less.

Important caution

Week_2_Sahlins,_Kaplan also includes criticisms of the “original affluent society” thesis. Some scholars argued that findings about leisure, nutrition, or well-being could be overstated, especially in discussions of the !Kung. These criticisms matter because they show that the debate did not end with Sahlins. Still, for this lesson, the key point is that Sahlins changed the terms of the argument: he challenged the older scarcity model by redefining affluence around the satisfaction of wants rather than the quantity of production.