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The "original affluent society" is the proposition that argues that the lives of hunter-gatherers can be seen as embedding a sufficient degree of material comfort and security to be considered affluent. The theory was first put forward in a paper presented by Marshall Sahlins at a famous symposium in 1966 entitled 'Man the Hunter'. Sahlins observes that affluence is the satisfaction of wants, "which may be 'easily satisfied' either by producing much or desiring little." Given a culture characterized by limited wants, Sahlins argued that hunter-gatherers were able to live 'affluently' through the relatively easy satisfaction of their material needs. At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee's work on the !Kung of southern Africa, was challenging popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival. Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the people's wants are easily satisfied."
References
- Sahlins, M. (1968). "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp. 85-89.ISBN:020233032X
- Sahlins, M. (2005). The Original Affluent Society [Online] in M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
- Barnard, Alan (1983). "Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers: Current Theoretical Issues in Ecology and Social Organization". Annual Review of Anthropology 12: 193–214. doi:10.1146/annurev.an.12.100183.001205. https://dx.doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev.an.12.100183.001205
- Lee, Richard B. (1965). Subsistence Ecology of !Kung Bushmen (PhD). University of California, Berkeley.
- Lee, Richard B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29561-0.
- "The Original Affluent Society--Marshall Sahlins". http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm.
- Sahlins, Marshall (2009). "Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age". Pacific Ecologist 18: 3–8. http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers.pdf. Retrieved 2015-07-29.
- Lawrence H. Keeley (1996). War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press. pp. 272. ISBN 9780195119121. https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/war-before-civilization-9780195119121?cc=us&lang=en&.
- "Hunter-gatherer mortality". http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolution/hill_2007_hiwi_mortality.html.
- Kaplan, David (2000). "The Darker Side of the Original Affluent Society". Journal of Anthropological Research 56 (3): 301–324. doi:10.1086/jar.56.3.3631086. http://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf.
