Original affluent society

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, challenged 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." The basis of Sahlins’ argument is that hunter-gatherer societies are able to achieve affluence by desiring little and meeting those needs/desires with what is available to them. This he calls the "Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate" (Sahlins, Original). This he compares to the western way towards affluence, which he terms as the "Galbraithean way" where "man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited..." and "the gap between means and ends can eventually be narrowed by industrial productivity". Thus Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer and western societies take separate roads to affluence, the former by desiring little, the latter by producing much.