ABSTRACT
By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied. In the nonsubsistence sphere, the people's wants are generally easily satisfied. Such "material plenty" depends partly upon the ease of production, and that upon the simplicity of technology and democracy of property. As the people would keep the advantage in local production, and maintain a certain physical and social stability, their Malthusian practices are just cruelly consistent. Some ethnographers testify to the contrary that the food quest is so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves. The exception evokes a source of ethnographic misconceptions: the anthropology of hunters is largely an anachronistic study of ex-savages—an inquest into the corpse of one society, Sir George Grey once said, presided over by members of another.
