- In many ways humans are kind of, evolutionary freaks.
We are much more capable of learning skills
than let's say, our Australopithecus ancestors
a few million years ago.
When I was 19,
I bizarrely ended up getting an internship
at a merchant bank.
And in that bank, we had a manager,
and he would pepper his talks with us
with this kind of Darwinian language.
"Banking is a survival of the fittest.
You know, it's a dog eat dog world out there.
Life is a continuous process of competition."
The truth is, evolutionary history just
isn't a constant competition.
Actually, most animals spend as much time
as they can relaxing, taking it easy
or playing and enjoying themselves.
This idea that everything is continuously battling
for energy is nonsense.
I spent most
of the last 25 years documenting hunter-gatherers,
as they took their worldview
and tried to engage with our worldview
in very uneven terms,
and to try and make sense
of their perceptions of work and our perceptions of work.
And what it did was it revealed
an entirely different way of thinking,
an entirely different way of being.
My name's James Suzman,
I'm an anthropologist, and the title
of my latest book is called "Work: A Deep History,
from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots."
When one thinks about hunter-gatherer society,
they have have imagined a world
in which we endure this horrendous struggle
for survival in an eat or 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 start working with a group
of people called the Ju/'hoansi.
The Ju/'hoansi were the first
hunter-gatherer society that were really studied to
see how hard they actually worked,
and it was revealed
that they worked 15 hours in a week,
and 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/'hoansi 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 and the Arctic,
the Aboriginals in Australia,
and then of course people
like the Ju/'hoansi
engage with the land with consummate skill
and consummate, in some ways, ease.
The Kalahari desert where the Ju/'hoansi live
is an incredibly tough environment.
It's the kind of place where, most of us,
if we're dumped there
without any prior knowledge of how to do things,
we would be dead within several days.
The Ju/'hoansi, on the other hand, are able somehow
out of this seemingly desolate place to pluck
out 130 or so different plant species.
- They're able to hunt 15 or 20 animal species.
They are so skilled and so attuned
to that environment that they're able to do so
on the basis of, really, a marginal amount of effort.
Even in the toughest times of year, you're looking
at not spending more than four or five hours a day
on the food quest.
And you're looking at the best times
of year, people are able to simply pluck things.
It's almost a bit like a, a magical kind of 7/11.
Now, of course it sounds a little bit idyllic,
and hunter-gatherers went through intensely difficult times,
periods of climatic change. But for the most part,
living off the land seemed a very straightforward way
of making a living,
and we are supremely adapted to making a living
as hunters and gatherers.
Hunter-gatherer societies,
they are typically highly egalitarian.
Richard Lee, an anthropologist
who worked with the Ju/'hoansi,
he used the word "fiercely egalitarian,"
and I haven't found a better way to describe it.
There are no hierarchies whatsoever.
Age does not convey any authority to anybody.
Gender does not convey any authority to anybody.
It's incredibly open and tolerant.
People don't force things on children
but they also realize that there's an instinct.
In particular, they say not among women, but among men.
Young men who go out hunting and they bring in
their first big animal, they'll strut in and show off,
they'll say that potentially risks upsetting their
egalitarian balance that makes the society function.
Rather than praise a successful hunter, they mock them.
Somebody shows up if they've killed a giraffe-
which is something huge, and it's enough to feed everybody
for ages, and the meat's growing from the branches-
they'll say, "Ah, this giraffe, a bit of a scrawny giraffe,
and it stinks a little bit."
And there's this great ritual
of humility and insult that goes on,
and the hunter will be expected to behave
with great humility and the way it was described by one man,
he said, "We use it to gentle young mens' paths."
To enable leadership to be based purely
on context and competence.
Voluntarily given and voluntarily accepted resources
which are shared openly and evenly
and done through a system of demand sharing.
In the system of demand sharing,
it is in the right of pretty much anybody to go
and ask anybody else for a share of what they have.
And it is considered extremely rude to turn that person
down under any circumstances.
Stops any kind of authority.
This enabled food and resources to flow very evenly
and very quickly through society.
The truth is now, very few zoologists,
in fact, no zoologist or ecologist will think
of an ecosystem as governed by competition,
instead it would be governed
by webs of intricate engagements
some of which are cooperative, some of which are less.
This idea that nature is a constant competition
for life is nonsense.
Hunter-gatherers, like the Ju/'hoansi,
described their environment
as a kind of continuous flow of give and take
between species and interactions.
There's absolutely no denying that
the extraordinary attitudes that evolved
during the hunter-gatherer era
have now brought us incredible benefits.
We are both incredibly adaptable
and culturally intransigent.
When change is forced upon us,
we're really good at adapting to it.
We are amazingly good at doing it,
but only when we have no choice.
And I think what we might see is a restructuring
and reorganization of our society.
Identities now which are far more hybridized.
We certainly have a work identity through our Zoom channel.
But for many people, I think, there'll be an opportunity to
reengage themselves in physical space that they are in,
and I think it's going to profoundly reorganize the way
we think about community, identity, belonging, and self.
Economists say, 'We are all universally
this kind of selfish beast.'
Anthropologists, on the other hand,
take the very starting point of their experience, is based
on generally going up and living somewhere where
all your most fundamental and basic ideas about how
the world works are often turned on their heads.
It's a fundamental transition.
It upsets your sense of the world.
Then anthropologists, I think, are based
on having this double perspective of
being in one world and from another,
and then being able to look back
in the world that they're from.
And frankly, I think it would be good
if we still lived in a world where people
could experience another way
of living and being to the point
that it makes the strange familiar,
and the familiar strange.