"Work" a Western invention? Not according to anthropology

The most recent entries have been in the Anthropology of Work and Economic Anthropology.

Anthropologists cited include: Herbert Applebaum, Philippe Descola, Maurice Godelier, Raymond Firth, Tim Ingold, Richard Lee, Frank Marlowe, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Povinelli, Marshall Sahlins, Marjorie Shostak, Gerd Spittler, Sandra Wallman.

Research in anthropology is highly significant for debates on the centrality of work.

For instance, following a paradigm-setting conference in Chicago in 1966, the “Man the Hunter” symposium, a whole new picture of hunter-gatherer societies was promoted by leading US anthropologists, one which seemed to present a counter-model to work-obsessed, consumer-driven, market-centred modern societies. In a famous text presented at the conference, Marshall Sahlins drew a picture of hunter-gatherers as having created “the original affluent society”, one in which individuals are wise enough to limit their wants and have to work only to the extent required by the level of affluence these wants define. In such a society, work is limited in duration, it is not a value in itself, yet it is not viewed as toil either, leisure is abundant for all, the absence of property and of the drive to acquire translate into egalitarian relations, notably between the sexes, and to low levels of conflictuality overall.

The authority of Sahlins and the many other anthropologists who continued this approach to hunter-gatherer societies meant that the vision of a societal model in which work is of secondary importance for the community and the individuals, has become a major argument in debates on work. Many social theorists reference this anthropological research to indict modern society and its work-cult.

However, another substantial strand of research in anthropology has debunked these optimistic descriptions of hunter-gatherers . David Kaplan’s “The Darker Side of ‘The Original Affluent Society’” provides a thorough review of the findings contradicting the optimist descriptions of the affluent society thesis. More than 30 entries document these debates.

Beyond the factual issue of whether such leisure societies actually existed, these debates matter for other reasons. Studies of 20th century hunter-gatherers, for instance Richard Lee’s book on the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, Elizabeth Povinelli’s book on “labour-action” of the Belyuen in Northern Australia, or Frank Marlowe’s study of the Hadza of Tanzania, are, as a matter of fact, amongst other things, ethnographic studies of work that demonstrate the complex strategies employed by women and men in these societies to procure their livelihoods, the social organisations in which work efforts are embedded, and the rich cultural facets of working activities. Against the claim by theorists external to anthropology that only in modern, Western societies does work matter for the community and the individuals, ethnographic accounts document just the opposite: to what extent skills and knowledges acquired for and at work shape persons of all sexes, how much success at work matters socially, how deeply work is integrated in religious rituals and artistic expressions.

Accounts of other human societies, for instance Philippe Descola’s In the Society of Nature, which recounts his fieldwork with the Achuar of the Amazon, or Raymond Firth’s classic Work of the Gods in Tikopia, about work and religion in the Soloman Islands, prove just the same. Against the recurrent claim by many social theorists, that work as a general category is an invention of modern, capitalist society, that the concept does not exist in non-Western societies and therefore its importance should not be emphasised outside the Western context, anthropologists who study other societies and cultures highlight the complexity and the psychological, social and cultural importance of work for non-Western peoples.

Another debate in anthropology, in which Sahlins made an important contribution, between formalist and substantivist conceptions of the “economy”, also impacts directly on the conceptual understanding of work outside of that discipline. Substantialists like Sahlins define work as economic activity and the economy itself as one sphere within the general cultural organisation. Formalists by contrast follow Lionel Robbins’ seminal definition of economics as the science which “studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means that have alternate uses” (see for instance Burling 1962 for an early application to anthropology). In one conception, work is at the centre of economics, as it concerns the production of the goods needed for livelihood, as defined in a particular culture. In the other conception, work is less important, since there are different ways to rationally apply means of all kinds to achieve whatever ends individuals pursue. At first, the substantialist approach seems to be the one that the centrality of work thesis would favour. But things are not that simple. If by work is meant more than just the production of food, shelter and tools, if “livelihood” includes all that is necessary for human life within the entire coordinates of a particular culture, then the formalist claim that economic activity is not a sphere of society but rather a way of acting, becomes an appealing idea that might be applied to work. Following this line of thought, we might say that trying to delineate which part of social life is work and which is not, is not the most fruitful perspective to take, but rather work should be viewed as one way to act within society, in whichever sphere this occurs. On that account, the definition of work would insist, not on the objects to which it is applied (typically, a narrow set of objects on the traditional conception of “production”), but rather on key features of working activities: the expenditure of physical and mental energy; the deployment of skills and technical knowledge; technical and aesthetic standards of action; particular modes of relating to others.

The definition of work provided by Sandra Wallman in the introduction to her edited volume on the social anthropology of work captures this vision of work as activity ensuring the reproduction of individual and collective lives:

“work is the performance of necessary tasks, and the production of necessary values - moral as well as economic. The tasks of meeting obligations, securing identity, status and structure, are as fundamental to livelihood as bread and shelter. On this basis, work may be defined as the production, management or conversion of the resources necessary to livelihood”

(Social Anthropology of Work Introduction, reprinted in Current Anthropology 21(3), 1980, p.302)