#25. Why Hunter-Gatherers' Work Was Play

Hunter-gatherer economics defy the principles taught in Economics 101.

Dear friends,

Our word work has two different meanings. It can mean toil, which is unpleasant activity; or it can mean any activity that accomplishes something useful, whether or not the activity is pleasant. We use the same word for both of these meanings, because, in our culture, the two meanings often overlap. To a considerable degree, we view life as a process of doing unpleasant work to achieve necessary or desired ends. We toil at school to get an education (or, more accurately, a diploma); toil at a job to get money; and may even toil at a gym (“work out”) to produce better muscle tone. Sometimes we enjoy our work at school, job, or gym—and we deem ourselves lucky when we do—but our dominant cultural mental set is that work is toil, which we do only because we have to or because it brings desired ends. Work in this sense is the opposite of play.

In Letter #24 I described the conditions in our own society in which some lucky people describe their work—their way of making a living—as play. I first became interested in the idea of work as play over two decades ago when I delved into others’ research concerning band hunter-gatherers and found that hunter-gatherer “work” was highly playful, maybe even fully play.

In Letter #21 I explained my interest in hunter-gatherer societies and mentioned the survey I conducted many years ago of anthropologists who had studied such societies in various isolated parts of the world. This way of living is now nearly destroyed, but as recently as the second half of the 20th century anthropologists could find and study groups in isolated parts of the world still living a rather pristine hunter-gatherer way of life. In Letter #21 I described hunter-gatherers’ highly egalitarian way of life, involving intense cooperation and sharing, and summarized my theory that they maintained their egalitarian ways partly by fostering the playful side of their human nature. Playfulness, as I had argued in a series of letters preceding that one, counteracts tendencies toward aggression and dominance and promotes cooperation.

Then, in Letter #22, I described the playful nature of hunter-gatherer religions and explained how they both reflected and helped to foster a cooperative, egalitarian style of life. Now, in this letter (a somewhat revised version of an essay first published in my Psychology Today blog here), I describe the playful nature of hunter-gatherer work.

By all accounts, hunter-gatherers did not have a concept of work as toil (Gowdy, 1999). They did not confound productiveness with unpleasantness. They did, of course, engage in many productive activities, which were necessary to sustain their lives. They hunted, gathered, built and mended huts, built and mended tools, cooked, shared information, and so on. But they did not regard any of this as burdensome. They did these things because they wanted to. According to some researchers (e.g. Gould, 1969, Gowdy, 1999, Lee, 1988), hunter-gatherer groups did not even have a word for work as toil, or, if they did, it applied to what neighboring farmers, miners, road-builders and other non-hunter-gatherers did, not to what they were doing.

My reading about life in many different hunter-gatherer cultures has led me to conclude that their work was play for four main reasons: (1) There was not too much of it. (2) It was varied and required much skill and intelligence. (3) It was done in a social context, with friends. And (4) most significantly, it was, for any given person at any given time, optional. Let me expand on these, point by point.

Hunter-Gatherers' Work Was Playful Because There Wasn’t Too Much of It.

One contributing factor to the play-like quality of hunter-gatherer work is that the work was not excessive. According to several quantitative studies, hunter-gatherers typically devoted about 20 hours per week to hunting or gathering and another 10 to 20 hours to chores at the campsite, such as food processing and making or mending tools (e.g. Lee, 1972; Sahlins, 1972 ). All in all, the research suggests, hunter-gatherer adults spent an average of 30 to 40 hours per week on all subsistence-related activities combined, which is considerably less than the workweek of the typical modern American, if the American’s 40 or more hours of paid employment is added to the hours spent on domestic chores.

 The short workweek becomes less surprising when we think about how hunter-gatherers made their living. Hunter-gatherers, by definition, did not plant or cultivate crops or tend animals; they just harvested. With that way of life, long hours of work would be counterproductive. Harvesting wild animals and plants faster than their regeneration rate would deplete nature's food supply and eventuate in either mass starvation or a need to move ever farther, into new, uncharted, possibly dangerous territory. Moreover, without means for long-term food storage, there was no value in harvesting more than would be consumed within a short period after its harvest. There was also no value in spending lots of time producing material goods. Possessions beyond what a person could easily carry on long treks from one campsite to another would be burdens, not luxuries.

 One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins (1972), famously characterized hunter-gatherer societies collectively as “the original affluent society.” An affluent society, by Sahlins’s definition, is one in which “people’s material wants are easily satisfied.” Hunter-gatherers were affluent not because they had so much, but because they wanted so little. They could provide for those wants with relatively little work, and, as a result, had lots of free time, which they spent, according to one observer of the Ju/’hoansi (Shostak, 1981), at such activities as “singing and composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around and resting.” These are just the kinds of activities we would expect of happy, relaxed people anywhere.

Hunter-Gatherers’ Work Was Playful Because It Was Varied and Challenging.

Except for the general distinction between men as hunters and women as the primary gatherers (a distinction that holds for most but not all hunter-gatherer societies), hunter-gatherers did not specialize. Everyone was involved in most of the society's economic activities. Moreover, most of those activities required great skill, knowledge, and intelligence.

Anthropologists have marveled at the enormous skill and intelligence shown by hunter-gatherers in their hunting. The tools of hunting—such as bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, spears, or nets—must be crafted to perfection; and skill in using those tools effectively must be developed through years of play with them. Hunters also learned the habits of the perhaps two to three hundred different species of mammals and birds they hunted. They had to identify each animal by its sounds and tracks as well as sight.

A book has been written on the thesis that the tracking of game by hunters marked the origin of what we today call science (Liebenberg, 1990). Hunters used marks they saw in the sand, mud, or foliage as clues, combined with their accumulated knowledge from past experience, to develop and test hypotheses about such matters as the size, sex, physical condition, speed of movement, and time of passage of the animal they were tracking. In describing the tracking abilities of the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gatherers of Africa's Kalahari Desert, Alf Wannenburgh (1979) wrote: "Everything is noticed, considered, and discussed. The kink in a trodden grass blade, the direction of the pull that broke a twig from a bush, the depth, size, shape, and disposition of the tracks themselves, all reveal information about the condition of the animal, the direction it is moving in, the rate of travel, and what its future movements are likely to be."

The gathering of vegetable foodstuffs likewise required much knowledge and skill. Hunter-gatherers had to know which of the countless varieties of roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in their area were edible and nutritious, when and where to find them, how to extract the edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and certain plant fibers), and in some cases how to process them to make them edible or more nutritious than they otherwise would be. These abilities included physical skills as well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge.

In our society, too, work that is varied, requires much skill and knowledge, and involves intelligent decision-making is enjoyed far more and considered more play-like than work that is routine and boring (see Letter #24).

Hunter-Gatherers' Work Was Playful Because It Was Done in a Social Context, with Friends.

We are a highly social species. We like to be with other people, especially with those we know as friends. Hunter-gatherers lived very social lives. Nearly all of their activities were public. Most of their work was done cooperatively, and even solo activities were done in social settings, with others around. And—because hunter-gatherers were highly mobile individuals, who moved to another band if they didn’t like the people they were currently living with—their bands were truly friendship groups. In general, anything we humans do with friends is more play-like than things we do alone or with collaborators who aren't really friends.

Men usually hunted in teams; and women usually foraged collectively. Concerning the latter, Wannenburgh (1979) wrote, of the Ju/'hoansi bands he studied, "In our experience all of the gathering expeditions were jolly events. With the [Ju/'hoansi's] gift of converting chores into social occasions, they often had something of the atmosphere of a picnic outing with children." In a description of the means by which Batek people chose tasks and formed work groups each day, Kirk Endicott (1979) wrote: "They may be entirely different groups from those of the previous day, for the Batek like variety both in their work and their companions."

Hunter-Gatherers' Work Was Playful Because Each Person Could Choose When, How, and Whether to Do It.

And now I reach the most crucial ingredient of play—the sense of choice. Play, by definition, is optional; it is something we choose to do, not something we have to do (see Letter #2). How did hunter-gatherers maintain the sense of choice about the work they did?

Clearly, in an ultimate sense, hunter-gatherers' work was not optional. As a band, they had to hunt, gather, make tools, build huts, and so on to survive. However, for any given person, on any given day, these activities for the most part were optional. As I noted in Letter #21, hunter-gatherers everywhere maintained an extraordinary ethic of personal autonomy, to a degree that may seem radically extreme by our standards. They deliberately avoided telling one another how to behave, in work as in any other context. Each person was his or her own boss.

On any given day at a hunter-gatherer campsite, a hunting or gathering party might form. The party was composed only of those who wanted to hunt or gather that day. That group decided collectively where they would go and how they would approach their task. Anyone made unhappy by the decision was free to form another party, or hunt or gather alone, or stay at camp all day, or do anything at all that was not disruptive to others. There was no retribution for backing out. A person who didn’t hunt or gather still received an equal share of whatever food was brought back. By adopting this strategy, hunter-gatherers avoided being held back, in their foraging, by someone who was there begrudgingly and had a bad attitude about it.

Hunter-gatherers did not seem to be concerned about what we Westerners consider to be the “free-rider problem,” the idea that some reap an equal portion of the gains without contributing equally to the work. In one recorded case, a single man acquired nearly 80% of the meat for the entire band for a month while four other men did no hunting at all, yet those four were apparently not excluded or criticized (Hawkes, 1993). In the system of hunter-gatherer ethics there is great social pressure to share, but not to produce. The genius of this is that it keeps the activities of production within the realm of play by disassociating them from extrinsic rewards.

Ultimately, of course, hunting and gathering were crucial to the band’s survival. Everyone knew that, and that no doubt influenced people’s choices of what to do.  My guess is that if the hunter who brought in 80% of the meat one month had been less successful, others would have gone out and picked up the slack.  But for the most part, on any given day, the decision of what to do is each person’s choice, freely made, with no pressure.

What a different attitude hunter-gatherers had than we! To us, it seems almost sinful that someone who does less work than others should receive as much of the bounties as anyone else. But that is because we think of work as toil. If produce requires toil, then those who toil the most should get the most. If someone is lazy and doesn't toil, they do not deserve the rewards. That's our concept of justice, and it's a reasonable one if we think of work as toil. But what if we thought of work as play, something fun. With that attitude, why should those who get the most intrinsic rewards from play—because they enjoy it so much, and are so skilled at it, and therefore participate in it the most—also reap the most extrinsic rewards from it?

Economists and behavioral psychologists alike tend to think of life as a matter of give-and-take, cost-and-benefit, effort-and-reward. From this view, work is what you do for a benefit. If someone gets the benefit without having done the work, something is wrong. Economists and behavioral psychologists often talk of this as if it is essential human nature. But they are wrong. As far as we can tell, hunter-gatherers were living for tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands, before the advent of agriculture, without a concept of reward for work done. They did not conceive of life in terms of cost and benefit. They saw it, instead, as a playful adventure. You do things because they are fun, and you share the bounty with everyone you know, regardless of what those people have been doing. Precisely because of that attitude, people willingly and joyfully did the work that needed to be done, all as part of play.

Final Thoughts

The overall title of this Substack is Play Makes Us Human. We are fully human when we are playing, and if work is play we are fully human as we work. For hunter-gatherers, work was humanizing, not dehumanizing, and so it can be for us. We have gone through an awful period of post-hunter-gatherer history in which many were enslaved or virtually so, and many if not most jobs were properly considered toil. But we may be emerging from that now. In theory, at least, the toil today can be done by machines and we should be free to do the creative, social, joyful tasks. That could be the reality. In my next letter I’ll consider the question of why it is not the reality it should be.

If you have questions or thoughts about anything in this letter, please share them in the comments section below. I read all comments and respond when I think I have something worth saying.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Endicott, K. (1979). Batek Negrito Religion: The World-View and Rituals of a Hunting and Gathering People of Peninsular Malaysia, 163-164.

Gould, R.A. (1969). Yuwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert.

Gowdy, J. (1999) “Hunter-Gatherers and the Mythology of the Market,” in R.B. Lee & R. Daly (Eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, 391-398.

Hawkes, K. (1993). “Why Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of Public Goods,” Current Anthropology, 34 (1993), 341-361.

Lee, R.B. (1988). “Reflections on Primitive Communism,” in T. Ingold, D. Riches & J. Woodburn (Eds.), Hunters and Gatherers I.

Lee, R.B. (2003). Dobe Ju/’hoansi, 3rd ed.

Liebenberg, L. (1990). The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science.

Sahlins, M. (1972), Stone Age Economics.

Shostak, M. (1981). Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman.

Wannenburgh, R. The Bushmen (1979).