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(Sounds like Marshall Sahlins.)
NY Times, July 24 2017
Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: ‘Affluence Without Abundance’
By JOHN WILLIAMS
Affluence Without Abundance
The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
By James Suzman
Illustrated. 297 pages.
Bloomsbury. $29.
The mantra of the 21st century might be that the world is interconnected
everywhere, but the anthropologist James Suzman knows better. For more
than two decades, Suzman has researched and gotten to know various
groups of Bushmen throughout southern Africa. In “Affluence Without
Abundance,” he writes of what he’s learned about these hunter-gatherers
and their way of life, how they have clashed with (and avoided)
modernity, and what their society has taught him about how the rest of
the world lives. Along with its anthropological insights, the book
offers personal portraits of several Bushmen. Below, Suzman discusses
why he chose to bring together his years of experience in this book, our
society’s obsession with work, his respect for documentary photographers
and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
The book’s been incubating in my head for years, though it’s come out in
various forms as academic pieces and reports and other bits and pieces
in the past. I suppose what persuaded me to turn this into a real book
and bring it together were two things. First, only in the last 10 years
or so have we begun to understand just how ancient the Bushmen are, and
quite how enduring that culture is. New archaeological data and genomic
data have revealed that the Bushmen were extraordinarily isolated from
other groups, and in particular from modernity and the agricultural
revolution. They’ve been around an astonishingly long amount of time,
and most likely lived in a similar manner for a period stretching back
70,000 years, possibly longer. This may give us pretty good insight into
how homo sapiens lived for 95 or 98 percent of human history.
The second thing is a sense that probably all of us have that we’ve
reached some kind of inflection point in history, and that if we think
of our history as a series of revolutions, now we’re on the edge of
another. Something fairly fundamental is shifting. We have all these big
new questions about sustainability, about whether the world can continue
as it is. Looking back at how the most sustainable cultures in human
history organize themselves might give us some idea of how to organize
ourselves in the future.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
I grew up in a society that valued work, and being able to work hard,
very highly. It was only in looking at the Bushmen that I saw how our
attitudes toward work are this kind of elementary particle to our
society. Where does this come from? It obviously didn’t come from our
lives as hunters and gatherers, who were content to work as little as
possible. There wasn’t this obsession with being busy, with full
employment, with having enough for everyone to do all the time. It
became clearer and clearer that this was a product of the agricultural
revolution and what it forced on us, placing this premium on labor. And
so many modern institutions and behaviors seem contingent on this. At
the same time, a lot of these institutions are seemingly at odds with
the way we’re able to live now. The agricultural revolution was sort of
an accidental one, and once we developed it we became hostage to it. The
population became hostage to its own growth, and this has shaped a huge
amount of the economic and intellectual architecture of our modern
culture. We’re still obsessed with growing, even when there’s not much
room left to grow in.
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to
write?
When I set out to write it, I was thinking more in terms of doing a
corrective on popular literature on the Bushmen. Historically the
Bushmen have been a canvas that people have projected their primitivist
fantasies on, and you end up with this stereotypical, two-dimensional,
almost dehistoricized view of who they are. And I kept thinking, someone
ought to do something better. I thought people might use it as a way to
look at themselves from the perspective of a hunter-gatherer. In a
sense, it was a more lighthearted thing, though there’s very little
lighthearted about the Bushmen story.
As it evolved, it became more about big ideas: the origin of money, our
sense of equality, our sense of time, and how these all integrate to
create quite a sophisticated coherent view of our world, and in some
ways quite a critical view. It shifted from being a far more localized
book, an intimate insight into their world, and more into something that
looked in a bigger way at some of the things that shaped our world.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your
work?
It’s not so much a single person. Documentary photographers. I suppose
the first one who ever got me thinking was Leni Riefenstahl, who was
Hitler’s big propagandist. But she then went off and did this amazing
photo series in southern Sudan on the Nuba. They’re some of the most
intimate and extraordinary pictures. By then she was a disgraced little
old lady.
To take a good photo, people have to be well at ease with you. You have
to have a certain temperament. Which is why Riefenstahl is so
surprising, this former Nazi sympathizer who got along with these
Nubians and was let into some extremely intimate spaces.
And other photographers, particularly in the predigital era — the war
photographers, like Don McCullin. They produced such vivid stuff, and
there’s such skill in it. Everyone’s a photographer now. But in terms of
proper reportage, documentary photography, there’s very little that
comes close to the standing of the classics.
Persuade someone to read “Affluence Without Abundance” in less than 50
words.
If we judge a civilization’s success by its endurance over time, then
the Bushmen are the most successful society in human history. Their
experience of modernity offers insight into many aspects of our lives,
and clues as to how we might address some big sustainability questions
for the future.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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