Farming for the Long Haul by Michael Foley

Author:Michael Foley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

CHAPTER 8

It Takes a Village: Leisure, Community, and Resilience

Anthropologists are in accord that traditional agriculturalists, pastoral peoples, and hunter-gatherer societies had time on their hands. These so-called primitives, savages, peoples without a State for the most part managed a comfortable living on a few hours a day of work or very sporadic work. Even peasants, forced by lord or market to produce for more than themselves, often had ample leisure time. The anthropological and historical evidence is overwhelming: It was once possible to get a living with a minimum expenditure of time. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put it, summarizing the evidence for hunter-gatherer cultures, this was “the original affluent society.”1

Traditional societies were organized around a principle of sufficiency. Once subsistence was assured, there were no particular incentives to acquire more. Technology was matched to need, and traditional societies were as adept at managing their environment relative to their needs as are we, maybe more so. “The astonishing thing about the Eskimo, or the Australians,” says French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, “is precisely the diversity, imagination, and fine quality of their technical activity, the power of invention and efficiency evident in the tools used by those peoples.”2 Adapted tools and well-honed subsistence strategies meant ample leisure time. And leisure time was highly valued. As Clastres writes, even “when the Indians discovered the productive superiority of the white men’s axes, they wanted them not in order to produce more in the same amount of time, but to produce as much in a period of time ten times shorter.”3

Hunter-gatherer societies could get a living in two to four hours of leisurely “work,” which they scarcely distinguished from play. But even traditional agriculturalists did not slave in their gardens days on end—not, that is, unless compelled to do so. Rising clan leaders, headmen, chiefs, and kings could call upon farmers to provide for their leaders’ households or retinues or for ritual consumption; but too great a strain often provoked rebellion or murder of the offending individual. Even in medieval Europe, where peasants were obliged to produce for the lord’s table and trade, there was an astonishing amount of leisure. Sociologist Juliet Schor estimates that between the big vacations surrounding Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer’s Eve, numerous saints’ days, prescribed rest days, and minor feasts, English peasants occupied a third of the year in holiday. In France and Spain rest may have added up to some five months of the year.4

Barbara Ehrenreich tracks the suppression of such widespread human enjoyment through Western history in her exploration of what sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence”—ritual and festivity marked by music, dance, and sometimes ecstatic or even riotous episodes. Viewed askance but long tolerated by churchmen, raucous festivity was gradually moved out of churches into the streets by the sixteenth century. About this time, too, the aristocracy and local authorities of Europe began to abandon popular festivities as they adopted new mores of civility appropriate to the touchy life of the royal court. Popular celebrations that featured role reversals and parody of the authorities no longer had the authorities on hand to torment.

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