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CAT 2023 Slot 1 RC 4 (Sahlins` essay against Consumerism)
Module 4 of 27
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.
[CAT 2023 Slot 1]
[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] "Original Affluent Society" have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins's principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers' hours. Refusing to maximize, many were "more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game." . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .
Viewed in today's context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as "left behind" by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins's effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
1) We can infer that Sahlins's main goal in writing his essay was to:
(1) highlight the fact that while we started off as a fairly contented egalitarian people, we have progressively degenerated into materialism.
(2) put forth the view that, despite egalitarian origins, economic progress brings greater inequality and social hierarchies.
(3) hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen successfully to be non-materialistic.
(4) counter Galbraith's pessimistic view of the inevitability of a capitalist trajectory for economic growth.
2) The author mentions Tanzania's Hadza community to illustrate:
(1) that forager communities' lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from their own choice.
(2) how two vastly different ways of living and working were able to coexist in proximity for centuries.
(3) how pre-agrarian societies did not hamper the emergence of more advanced agrarian practices in contiguous communities.
(4) that hunter-gatherer communities' subsistence-level techniques equipped them to survive well into contemporary times.
3) The author of the passage criticises Sahlins's essay for its:
(1) outdated values regarding present-day foragers versus ancient foraging communities.
(2) failure to supplement its thesis with robust empirical data.
(3) critique of anthropologists who disparage the choices of foragers in today's society.
(4) cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
4) The author of the passage mentions Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" to:
(1) contrast the materialist nature of contemporary growth paths with the pacifist content ways of living among the foragers.
(2) document the influence of Galbraith's cynical views on modern consumerism on Sahlins's analysis of pre-historic societies.
(3) show how Galbraith's theories refute Sahlins's thesis on the contentment of pre-hunter-gatherer communities.
(4) show how Sahlins's views complemented Galbraith's criticism of the consumerism and inequality of contemporary society.
[CAT 2023 Slot 1]
[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] "Original Affluent Society" have such an impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins's principal argument was simple but counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, hunter-gatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep bankers' hours. Refusing to maximize, many were "more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game." . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life, imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of collective self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to the imagination of possibilities.
With its title's nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith's famously skeptical portrait of America's postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with New Left contempt for consumerism, "The Original Affluent Society" brought this critical perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers' lives really exist. If the capitalist world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive desires, foraging societies follow "the Zen road to affluence": not by getting more, but by wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by "progress," this is due only to the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods, these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .
Viewed in today's context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating present-day foragers as "left behind" by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from appreciating Sahlins's effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
1) We can infer that Sahlins's main goal in writing his essay was to:
(1) highlight the fact that while we started off as a fairly contented egalitarian people, we have progressively degenerated into materialism.
(2) put forth the view that, despite egalitarian origins, economic progress brings greater inequality and social hierarchies.
(3) hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen successfully to be non-materialistic.
(4) counter Galbraith's pessimistic view of the inevitability of a capitalist trajectory for economic growth.
2) The author mentions Tanzania's Hadza community to illustrate:
(1) that forager communities' lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from their own choice.
(2) how two vastly different ways of living and working were able to coexist in proximity for centuries.
(3) how pre-agrarian societies did not hamper the emergence of more advanced agrarian practices in contiguous communities.
(4) that hunter-gatherer communities' subsistence-level techniques equipped them to survive well into contemporary times.
3) The author of the passage criticises Sahlins's essay for its:
(1) outdated values regarding present-day foragers versus ancient foraging communities.
(2) failure to supplement its thesis with robust empirical data.
(3) critique of anthropologists who disparage the choices of foragers in today's society.
(4) cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
4) The author of the passage mentions Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" to:
(1) contrast the materialist nature of contemporary growth paths with the pacifist content ways of living among the foragers.
(2) document the influence of Galbraith's cynical views on modern consumerism on Sahlins's analysis of pre-historic societies.
(3) show how Galbraith's theories refute Sahlins's thesis on the contentment of pre-hunter-gatherer communities.
(4) show how Sahlins's views complemented Galbraith's criticism of the consumerism and inequality of contemporary society.