Several
*Marxist analyses in anthropology have cited Australian Aboriginal societies as
possessing varieties of *‘primitive communism’, but the power conferred by
control of religious cults renders Aboriginal society significantly less
egalitarian than the other classic *hunter-gatherers of semi-arid environments,
the Kalahari San and the Hadza.
McCarthy
and MacArthur’s observations of two Aboriginal camps during a threeweek period
in Arnhem Land provided one of the key pieces of ethnographic evidence in support
of †Sahlins’s theory of the ‘original affluent society’, which argued it was
the lack of a political incentive to accumulate resources above subsistence
needs that caused the apparent material poverty of huntergatherers. McCarthy
and McArthur’s data showed that the average length of time taken to forage for
and prepare food in Arnhem Land was four to five hours per person per day.
People stopped foraging as soon as they had enough for their immediate needs,
leaving plenty of spare time. From these and similar observations on other
hunter-gatherer communities Sahlins derived his concept of the ‘domestic mode
of production’. Sahlins’s domestic mode of production portrays each household
as a politically-independent unit of production; a concept which underestimates
the importance of reciprocal rights of access between foraging ranges, and meat-sharing
between households within camp, as devices for reducing the risks of exploiting
scarce and unpredictable resources.
While
Sahlins recognized the inadequacy of McCarthy and McArthur’s data, it was not
until the 1980s that long-term studies of Aboriginal susbsistence practices
were published. It is noteworthy that these studies were possible, a century
after Frazer had anticipated the imminent extinction of Aboriginal culture,
because many communities had, over the previous decade, returned to a more
traditional subsistence economy after some years spent on church or government
settlements. Both Altman (1987) and Meehan (1982) conclude that women’s work
has been made easier by the availability of purchased flour and sugar and
consequently question Sahlins’s picture of leisured affluence in pre-colonial
society. Both studies underline the contribution that hunting and gathering can
still make to the diet; Altman calculates that it provides 81 per cent of protein
and 46 per cent of the calories consumed on the outstation he investigated.