Critique of The Original Affluent Society Article
In his article, "The Original Affluent Society," Marshall Sahlins shows that hunter-gatherer societies are by nature affluent because "all the people's material wants were easily satisfied." Their low standard of living, and correspondingly few material needs, implies that the basic necessities of hunter-gatherers are usually met. Sahlins contrasts the hunter-gatherer concept of affluence with the capitalist notion of wealth: "modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity." People in industrialized nations work long hours and hoard large amounts of material goods for the fear of future scarcity. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, feast when they have food and move on to more lush surroundings when food supplies grow scarce.Although the individuals living in hunter-gather societies have few poss
Sahlins does not suggest that hunter-gather societies are superior to capitalist ones, but rather, seeks to expose the ethnocentricism inherent in many ethnographies of hunter-gatherer cultures. Peeking into a hunter-gather society with the biases of the modern world, the anthropologist might be tempted to conclude that hunter-gatherers are poor, and subsequently, deprived. Sahlins shows that on the contrary, hunter-gatherers are affluent because they desire so little and because they base their existence on the idea that nature is inherently productive, abundant, and yielding. The fault with ethnocentric analyses of hunter-gather societies is that many anthropologists tend to few hunter-gather societies as an evolutionary stage, thereby implying that hunter-gatherer societies are inferior to modern industrial ones. What Sahlins shows is that hunter-gat
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 578
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)
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