The Ju/’hoansi spent an average of 17 hours a week finding food—2,140
calories daily—and devoted another 20 to chores, as Suzman gleaned from
other ethnographies and firsthand research. This left them with
considerably more downtime than the typical full-time employee in the
U.S., who spends about 44 hours a week doing work—and that doesn’t
include domestic labor and child care. In that downtime, the Ju/’hoansi
remained strikingly free, over centuries, from the urge to cram it with
activities that we would classify as “productive” (or, for that matter,
destructive). By day, they did go on walks with children to teach them
how to read the canvas of the desert for the footprints of animals. But
they also lounged, gossiped, and flirted. During firelit evenings, they
sang, danced, and told stories. One anthropologist studying another
hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza people of northern Tanzania, described
its members in the 1960s as habitual small-stakes gamblers whose days
were filled with one particular pastime: winning and losing arrows in
games of chance.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/james-suzman-work/617266/
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