But How Wealthy Are You?

The minimum wage in the UK for the 21-24 age range (average graduate ages) is £7.38 which means on average someone earning this makes just over £15,350 a year. With the inflation and high consumerism of today, this annual salary is shockingly low. This is especially true for those living in London and people continuing education paying huge university fees. In sum, as I finished my Bachelors and Masters degrees I did not expect all my educational hard work to be rewarded with being the poorest I have ever been – should this really be what’s waiting for graduates? In an age where education is strongly encouraged, how can people finance such endeavours when their annual earnings cannot cover it, not to mention having enough money left over to actually live on. It is undeniable that economic growth has brought about vast changes in the way we live, but with such variances between the richest and poorest people in the world, can we really adopt the Galbraithean term and call ourselves the ‘affluent society’ (1958)? Are all our material wants satisfied? I know mine aren’t, I could reel off a whole list of things I want, yet this doesn’t necessarily mean I need them. I am sure I am not alone in thinking that due to the time we’ve grown up and are living in, our wants are great, if not infinite. Yet if we always want more, we will never have enough due to ideological and limited financial reasons.

This human instinct of desiring what we can’t or don’t have is true in most societies, but not all, like some hunter-gatherer societies for example. American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins hypothesised that hunter-gatherers are in fact ‘the original affluent society’ (1966). This theory is based on the notion that hunter-gatherers practice an efficient culture of a refined mode of subsistence, desiring little and consequently being able to meet those desires. Surely then, they are affluent and not us? Can people really claim we live in a modern or ‘superior’ way to them if our culture has left us wanting more, yet they are seemingly content? Hunter-gatherers do not live in mixed or market economies like us, but, before issues such as colonisation and large-scale resource extraction on their lands, lived amongst plenty.

The stereotypical view of hunter-gatherers cast them as groups of people struggling to survive, constantly on the brink of starvation with no homes or material possessions. This however is simply not the case, even for present day hunter-gatherers. Vast amounts people are even ignorant to the fact that there are many hunter-gatherer groups across the globe today. To save you from an anthropological essay about hunter-gatherer subsistence and culture I shall briefly contradict incorrect yet popularly thought assumptions. For nomadic groups, having material possessions is predominantly a burden as owning many belongings hinders their movement, which, by the way is by choice. By being nomadic, hunter-gatherers are able to use the landscape for both plant and animal resources through stewardship, maintain knowledge of the environment and maintain kin, trade or insurance ties with other nomadic clans.

Nomadic hunter-gatherers have no requirement for surplus food as they do not have home bases to store it. This is especially true for immediate-return-societies which not only contributes to egalitarianism but also equalises disparity in hunting and gathering skills and helps alleviate the emergence of positions of authority and power as no one can accumulate wealth or store food and therefore, there are no stored resources to be controlled or flaunted by individuals. So along with no time needed for conserving and storing food nor wasting time obtaining material possessions, they have plenty of time for leisure activities, something that is missed in the ever increasing working hours in our society. In some cases where hunter-gatherers have undertaken in paid work, anthropologists have reported that the groups’ societal organisation and structure has changed and become less egalitarian. This correlates to our society where employment and financial capabilities are translatable into positions of authority and superiority and more often than not lead to gender inequality within the workplace.

So how can we take on these hunter-gatherer ways of life? Don’t we all want less time at work and more time for leisure? What is it that they do so well that we could start to do which would improve our quality of life? At this stage in our westernisation and modernisation I think it is safe to say we’re not all going to move out of our homes and become nomadic, but maybe we could all disconnect a bit from wanting more, perhaps as a result of the rise of Instagram ‘influencers’ who promote unrealistic ways of living in material abundance. Does having the latest iPhone or designer clothes make us affluent or wealthy? I guess it depends on how you personally define being affluent or wealthy. How much are our desires for material possessions driven by performative consumption, wanting something so others can see that you have it and perhaps alter their opinion of you for the better? Do you then as the consumer, become more desirable yourself?

Are you only wealthy if you have ownership of something, what about if you have a share of something? As sharing is embedded in specific cultural behaviours and expectations, you can argue it is socially driven, especially when the cultural ecology model, which examines the relationship between the society and the environment, is considered. This concept shows socially driven factors for sharing as it assesses how patterns of behaviour associated with using the environment influence aspects of culture. Sharing as a conduit for creating social ties and alliances as well as an insurance mechanisms.

So who is ‘winning’ in life? The ‘Western’ population who slave away and stress over working long hours earning money to live on and to live up to increasingly unrealistic/unachievable ideas of affluence yet never enough to subdue our endless material yearnings, or hunter-gatherers who can choose leisure over work and still have more?

Works read –

Bird-David, N. (2005) ‘The Property of Sharing: Western Analytic Notions, Nayaka Contexts.’ In Widlock, T & Tadesse, W. Property and Equality. 1:201-216.

Brunton, R. (1989), The Cultural Instability of Egalitarian Societies. Man. 24(4):673-681.

Cashdan, E (1980) Egalitarianism among Hunters and Gatherers. American Anthropologist. 82(1):116-120.

Ichikawa, M., (2005) Food Sharing and Ownership among Central African Hunter- Gatherers: an Evolutionary Perspective. In Widlock, T & Tadesse, W. Property and Equality. (1):151-164.

Kent, S. (1993), Sharing in an Egalitarian Kalahari Community. Man. 28(3):479-514.

Sahlins, M. (1972), Stone Age Economics. Tavistock Publications, London.

Testart, A. et. al. (1982). The significance of Food Storage Among Hunter-Gatherers: Residence Patterns, Population Densities, and Social Inequalities. Cultural Anthropology. 23(5):523-537.

Widlock, T. (2013), Sharing. Allowing others to take what is valued. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 3(2):11-31.

Woodburn, J. (1982). Egalitarian societies. Man (17):431-451.

Woodburn, J. (1998) “Sharing is not a form of exchange : an analysis of property-sharing in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies” from Hann, M., Property relations: renewing the anthropological tradition. pp.48-63, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yengoyan, A. (2004). Anthropological history and the study of hunters and gatherers: cultural and non-cultural. In: Barnard, A. (ed.), Hunter-gatherers in history, archaeology and anthropology. pp. 57-66. Oxford: Berg.

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