…hunting, gathering, fishing, hiking. In the Ju/'hoansi world, those are all considered work. In the Western world … most of those things are considered leisure activities now.
The Leisurely Lives Of Hunter-Gatherers
When one thinks about hunter-gatherer society, they've imagined a world in which we endure this horrendous struggle for survival in an eat of be eaten world. Nature was red and tooth and claw, and life was hard and we learned to accumulate and grab resources. It was a great competition for life.
But it seems fairly clear, we enjoyed quite a lot of leisure time as hunter-gatherers. 20 years ago, I went off to the Kalahari, to work with a group of people called the Ju/ʼhoansi. The Ju/ʼhoansi were the first hunter-gatherer group that were really studied to see how hard they actually worked, and it was revealed that they worked 15 hours in a week, and have a very different work ethos to what we do here in the West.
The idea of what constitutes work, in the way we organize our lives, can be very different and very contextual-based: hunting, gathering, fishing, hiking. In the Ju/ʼhoansi world, those are all considered work. In the Western world, where I come from at the moment, most of those things are considered leisure activities now. The Inuit in the Arctic, the Aboriginals in Australia, and then of course people like the Ju/ʼhoansi engage with the land with consummate skill, and consummate, in some ways, ease.
— James Suzman, Anthropologist
