Caspar Davis:
>Rifkin seems to want to bring the volunteer sector into the market
>economy. I think we need to free people from the market so that they
>can get on with the real work that needs to be done. This is largely
>what happened in aboriginal and even medieval society. It took much
>less than full time "work" to supply human needs (except where the rich
>were appropriating most of the fruits of people's work for themselves)
>so people spent a large part of their time celebrating feast days or,
>as one aboriginal woman put it, "making things', by which I believe she
>meant things like pots, songs, and stories.
Perhaps some were able to do this. I would suspect that many others were
very busy. Note the following comment on Indian people in northern
Saskatchewan:
"Several decades ago, when the home of the Chipewyan was the bush and his
subsistence heavily based on caribou, survival was not only dependent on
their skills as hunters and trappers but also upon their social system. The
basic element of this clan like society, the family unit, was superbly honed
for the subsistence hunting life and was able to absorb the additional
activity of trapping without destroying its principal character and
function. Each member of the family had special functions, which in
aggregate formed an effective and indivisible hunting team. While this tent
unit was the smallest organization of Chipewyan society, it could be
expanded as the need arose into an extended family; or temporary union with
other families may occur as a loosely organized patriarchic tribe.
This social system, based on the extended family unit, was designed for a
subsistence economy where the importance of the individual was subordinate
to that of the family. Tribal organization and leadership was extremely
loose and often of short duration, according to the conditions of the hunt.
Since commercial aspects ... were of secondary importance, their social
system was not oriented towards the market place nor to individual success.
The accumulation of wealth and property by individuals or families had no
place in their value system. Their goal was day by day survival ..."
(Bone, Robert M. and Earl N. Shannon with Stewart Raby; The Chipewyan of the
Stony Rapids Region, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, England, May
1972, pp. 185-186.)
Ed Weick
