ABSTRACT
Since the late 1960s much has been written about the reputed idyllic world of hunter-gatherers. This view stems in large part from the fieldwork of James Woodbum (1968) among the Hadza of Tanzania and from the work of Richard Lee (1968, 1979) among the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, and from the famous ‘Man the Hunter’ conference in 1966. Woodbum has argued for the Hadza, ‘Over die year as a whole probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food.’ He has throughout the years held to his thesis that the Hadza have an undemanding hunting and gathering life and that even old people can survive alone in what appears to be a harsh environment. Soon other fieldworkers were emphasizing that hunter-gatherers were keeping ‘bankers’ hours’ and in the words of Sahlins (1968, 1972) they were the original ‘affluent society.’ Barnard and Woodbum have argued that despite some criticisms the crux of the affluent society theory has ‘stood up well to twenty years of additional research’ (Barnard and Woodbum 1988: p. 11). But an insightful informative article by David Kaplan has done much to undermine the complacency of this view (Kaplan 2000). In this article Kaplan raises the question of why the concept of the affluent society was so eagerly embraced and why so much counter data was ignored.
