The !Kung ‘Affluent Society’: What Hunter-Gatherers Teach Us About Work and Abundance

In 1966, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins stood before his colleagues at the University of Chicago’s “Man the Hunter” symposium and made a claim that would challenge centuries of assumptions about human progress. Hunter-gatherers, he argued, were not desperate savages constantly struggling against starvation. They were, in fact, the “original affluent society”—people who had solved the problem of scarcity not by producing more, but by wanting less.

Sahlins was drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork by Richard Borshay Lee, who had spent years living with the !Kung San (now often called Ju/‘hoansi) in the Kalahari Desert. What Lee found there—about work, leisure, and the nature of abundance—remains profoundly relevant as humanity approaches a technological transition that could free us from survival labor forever.

The 2.5 Hour Workday

Lee’s Fieldwork: Measuring Time in the Kalahari

Richard Borshay Lee began his fieldwork with the !Kung San in the Dobe area of Botswana in 1963. What he found challenged everything anthropologists thought they knew about “primitive” peoples. When Lee conducted detailed time-allocation studies over the course of a month, measuring how people actually spent their days, the results were startling.

The !Kung, living in one of the world’s harshest environments—the Kalahari Desert—devoted remarkably little time to obtaining food. Lee’s initial calculations showed that adults worked an average of two and a half days per week on subsistence activities. With each workday lasting about six hours, this translated to approximately 12-19 hours per week spent hunting and gathering.

As Lee famously reported: “The adults of the Dobe camp worked about two and a half days a week. Since the average working day was about six hours long, the fact emerges that !Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food.”

The rest of their time was spent in conversation, visiting neighboring camps, resting, or participating in elaborate healing ceremonies and social gatherings.

The Diet That Made It Possible

Central to !Kung subsistence was the mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautanenii), a remarkably nutritious food source that provided approximately 600 calories per 100 grams, rich in both protein (about 28%) and fat. The mongongo was so abundant and reliable that Lee estimated it alone contributed one-third to one-half of total calories during certain seasons.

About 60-80% of the !Kung diet came from gathered plant foods—roots, berries, melons, and especially nuts. Hunting provided the remainder, including various game animals. This was the opposite of what most people expected: gathering, primarily women’s work, supplied the majority of calories, while hunting was more prestigious but less reliable.

The !Kung’s population density—approximately one person per 10 square miles—meant that even a “harsh” environment provided more than enough resources for those who knew how to find them. The Kalahari was not a prison of scarcity but a pantry that required only modest effort to access.

The Revised Numbers

Lee later revised his estimates in his 1984 book The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi. When he included food processing, tool making, and general housework—activities he had initially excluded—the numbers changed significantly:

• Men: 44.5 hours per week total
• Women: 40.1 hours per week total

These revised figures are often cited by critics, but Lee himself noted that even this expanded definition of “work” compared favorably with modern industrial societies. The average North American wage earner, he observed, spends over 40 hours per week in wage labor plus substantial additional time on housework and shopping. When all productive activities are counted, the !Kung still came out ahead in leisure time.

A 2019 study published in PNAS examining hunter-gatherer time allocation found that shifting from subsistence foraging to fully commercial labor increases men’s work from around 45 hours per week to 55 hours. Meanwhile, a related study of the Agta hunter-gatherers found that individuals engaged primarily in farming worked around 30 hours per week, while foragers worked only about 20 hours—plus domestic chores.

Abundance Through Wanting Little

The “Zen Road to Affluence”

Marshall Sahlins’s genius was recognizing that affluence can be achieved in two fundamentally different ways. In his essay “The Original Affluent Society,” he observed:

“Wants may be ’easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little.”

He contrasted the Western “Galbraithean way”—named after economist John Kenneth Galbraith—where “man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited,” with what he called the “Zen road to affluence”:

“There is also a Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living.”

The paradox cuts to the heart of economic assumptions. If poverty is the gap between wants and means, then poverty can be eliminated either by expanding means or by limiting wants. Hunter-gatherers took the second path. They achieved abundance not through technological mastery but through cultural constraint on desire.

Affluence Without Accumulation

The !Kung possessed very few material goods—a reality that seemed, to Western observers, like evidence of poverty. But Sahlins argued this was precisely backwards. The !Kung had few possessions because their nomadic lifestyle made accumulation impractical. Carrying your belongings across the Kalahari makes material goods a burden rather than a benefit.

But this limitation became a liberation. Without possessions to protect, maintain, or worry about, the !Kung were free in ways that wealthy moderns rarely experience. They trusted that their environment would continue to provide, so they foraged only for immediate needs among plentiful resources.

This “immediate-return economy” stood in stark contrast to “delayed-return economies” like agriculture or capitalism, where present sacrifice is supposed to yield future abundance. The !Kung lived in the eternal present of sufficient provisions.

The Social Logic of Sharing

The !Kung maintained their egalitarian abundance through rigorous demand-sharing—a social practice where anyone could request resources from anyone else, and refusal was virtually impossible. If a hunter killed a large animal, the meat would be distributed throughout the camp according to elaborate social rules.

This might seem like a disincentive to effort, and critics have argued that demand-sharing discourages production. Why hunt more if others will simply take what you earn?

But Lee documented that the system worked differently in practice. The social prestige of being a successful hunter, combined with the knowledge that you could always rely on others in turn, created a robust mutual insurance system. No one could accumulate private wealth, but no one faced starvation alone either.

Criticisms and Rebuttals

The Revisionist Challenge

The “original affluent society” thesis has not gone unchallenged. Beginning in the 1980s, a group of scholars led by Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow launched what became known as the “revisionist” or “integrationist” critique.

Wilmsen’s 1989 book Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari argued that the !Kung were not isolated hunter-gatherers frozen in time, but rather a marginalized underclass with deep historical connections to regional trading networks. According to the revisionists:

• The !Kung had been incorporated into regional economic networks for thousands of years
• They had been exploited by neighboring Bantu-speaking pastoralists
• Their foraging lifestyle was not an ancient adaptation but a response to historical dispossession
• What anthropologists like Lee documented was not pristine hunter-gatherer life but rural poverty

This challenge struck at the heart of using !Kung ethnography to understand human evolution or pre-agricultural life.

Lee’s Defense

Richard Lee and his supporters responded vigorously. Lee called out Wilmsen for errors in interpreting historical documents—including famously mistaking the word “oxen” for “onions” in an old map of the Kalahari. More substantively, the “traditionalists” argued:

• Archaeological evidence for cattle and iron in !Kung areas was minimal—“small enough to fit in one hand”
• The variation Wilmsen documented proved that some !Kung groups remained relatively isolated foragers
• Even if the !Kung had some historical contact with pastoralists, this didn’t invalidate observations about their subsistence practices
• The quantity of pottery, iron, and cattle bones found on San archaeological sites was insufficient to support claims of deep integration

As Lee and Jacqueline Solway wrote in their 1990 article “Foragers Genuine or Spurious?”, there was indeed variation in San adaptations—some groups engaged full-time in foraging, others kept livestock, and still others served as clients for neighboring groups. But this variation didn’t eliminate the category of “forager” entirely.

The Work Definition Critique

Anthropologist David Kaplan published a detailed critique in 2000, “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society,’” addressing several issues:

Definition of Work: Sahlins and Lee’s original estimates counted only time spent hunting and gathering. When food processing, tool making, firewood collection, water gathering, and housework were included, the numbers increased substantially. But what counts as “work” versus “leisure”? Is socializing while preparing food work? Is walking to visit relatives work?

Nutritional Adequacy: Kaplan questioned whether hunter-gatherer diets were truly adequate, noting episodes of hunger and seasonal scarcity that the “affluence” narrative downplayed.

Famines and Hardship: During events like torrential rain, foragers could face “forced leisure”—time they couldn’t forage—leading to genuine hunger. Famines did occur among hunter-gatherer populations.

Selective Evidence: Critics argued that Sahlins cherry-picked favorable data and downplayed counterexamples.

The Infant Mortality Question

Perhaps the most serious challenge to the “affluent” label concerns health outcomes. Research by Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan documented that among hunter-gatherer societies:

• Approximately 27% of infants fail to survive their first year of life
• Approximately 47.5% of children fail to survive to puberty
• Infant mortality is over 30 times greater among hunter-gatherers than in modern developed nations

These statistics seem to directly contradict any notion of “affluence.”

However, the picture is more complex:

• The modal age of death for hunter-gatherer adults who survived childhood is approximately 72 years—not far from modern expectations
• Life expectancy at birth (25-37 years) was low primarily due to infant and child mortality, not because adults died young
• Many deaths were due to infectious diseases that affected all pre-modern societies, not foraging-specific problems
• The comparison is often with modern medicine, not with pre-industrial agriculture

Reconciling the Debate

Most scholars today take a middle position. The strongest version of the “original affluent society” thesis—that hunter-gatherers lived in paradise—is clearly overstated. But the counter-narrative—that they lived in constant misery barely avoiding starvation—is equally wrong.

The 2019 PNAS study that examined multiple forager societies found evidence supporting Sahlins’s core insight: “even the least commercial people generally work harder than Sahlins claimed, notwithstanding significant variation across societies.” Market integration increases work time, particularly for men.

What remains robust is the comparative claim: foragers worked less than farmers or industrial workers, had more leisure time, and achieved adequate (if not luxurious) material satisfaction. Whether this constitutes “affluence” depends on how we define the term.

Lessons for Modern Abundance

The Contemporary !Kung

The !Kung San that Lee studied in the 1960s no longer exist as an isolated foraging population. Today, the Ju/‘hoansi—approximately 30,000 people across Botswana, Namibia, and Angola—have undergone profound transformation:

“No one in Nyae-Nyae depends exclusively on hunting and gathering any more. A half-century of land dispossession, well-meaning if ineffective economic development programs, and a decade of military occupation make it no longer possible for the Ju/‘hoansi to live as their ancestors did.”

Most Ju/‘hoansi now live in permanent communities where they farm, herd livestock, produce crafts, and participate in the cash economy. This transition has brought new challenges, including alcohol abuse, inequality, and the loss of traditional social structures that once prevented accumulation and maintained egalitarianism.

Tragically, the “development” that displaced !Kung foraging has not delivered greater abundance. As Lee documented, the Dobe people “have been transformed in two generations from a society of foragers… to a society of small-holders who eke out a living by herding, farming, welfare, and craft production.”

Implications for Post-Scarcity Design

The !Kung case offers several insights for designing abundance in an age of automation:

1. Abundance Is a Relationship, Not an Absolute

Sahlins’s “Zen road” reminds us that scarcity is partly psychological and cultural. A society with fewer desires can feel wealthier than one with more possessions but greater wants. This challenges the assumption that abundance requires ever-increasing production.

However, we should not romanticize this insight into a prescription for modern minimalism. The !Kung’s limited wants were inseparable from their limited options. Post-scarcity should expand choices, not constrain them.

2. Work Is Culturally Defined

The debates over how to measure !Kung work time reveal that “work” is not a natural category. What counts as toil versus leisure, production versus consumption, depends on social meaning. As automation eliminates many forms of paid labor, we will need to renegotiate these categories.

3. Demand-Sharing Has Costs and Benefits

The !Kung’s egalitarian sharing system prevented accumulation and ensured universal provision—goals that align with the Unscarcity Framework’s Abundant Baseline. But demand-sharing also created constant social pressure and may have limited innovation.

The lesson: baseline provision should be unconditional (like !Kung sharing), but contribution incentives (like Mission Credits) should reward effort in ways that sharing societies could not.

4. Security Enables Generosity

The !Kung shared freely because they trusted in continuing abundance. This trust enabled a gift economy that would collapse under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty. Modern basic income or universal services might similarly enable generosity by removing survival anxiety.

5. Population Density Matters

!Kung “affluence” depended on low population density—roughly one person per 10 square miles. Their mode of abundance cannot simply scale to 8 billion people. Technological abundance must solve the density problem that foraging could not.

The Real Lesson

Marshall Sahlins died in 2021, having spent his career challenging assumptions about “primitive” societies and Western progress. The anthropologist David Graeber suggested Sahlins deserved a Nobel Prize in Economics for his insights.

What Sahlins showed—and what the !Kung demonstrated—is that abundance is possible. The question is not whether humans can live with enough, but whether we can organize our societies to ensure that everyone does.

The !Kung achieved their version of abundance through cultural constraints on accumulation and desire. Their way of life is no longer available to us—and perhaps was always more difficult than the “affluent” label suggested. But as AI and automation make material production increasingly effortless, we face the opposite problem from the one the !Kung solved. Our challenge is not limited means but unlimited wants.

Perhaps the original affluent society has one more lesson to teach: in a world of potential plenty, the question of “how much is enough?” is not economic but philosophical. The !Kung answered it through culture and reciprocity. We will need to find our own answer—one that combines the !Kung’s wisdom about sufficiency with technology’s promise of universal abundance.

References

• Lee, R. B. (1968). “What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources.” In R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.
• Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lee, R. B. (1984, 2013). The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi. Belmont: Cengage Learning.
• Sahlins, M. (1972). “The Original Affluent Society.” In Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine.
• Sahlins, M. (1966). “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” Presented at Man the Hunter symposium, University of Chicago.
• Wilmsen, E. N. (1989). Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Solway, J., & Lee, R. B. (1990). “Foragers Genuine or Spurious? Situating the Kalahari San in History.” Current Anthropology, 31(2), 109-146.
• Kaplan, D. (2000). “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society.’” Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(3), 301-324.
• Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). “Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.” Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321-365.
• Smith, E. A., et al. (2019). “Work time and market integration in the original affluent society.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(44), 22100-22105.
• Dyble, M., et al. (2019). “Engagement in agricultural work is associated with reduced leisure time among Agta hunter-gatherers.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 792-796.
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• Cultural Survival. “Progress or Poverty? The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi.” Cultural Survival Quarterly.