Our word work has two meanings. It can mean any unpleasant activity; or it can mean any productive or useful activity, regardless of its pleasantness or unpleasantness. The first of these meanings is the opposite of play; the second is not. We use the same word for the two meanings, I suppose, because in our culture's history the two meanings have so often overlapped. Productive activity conducted by slaves, servants, and hired hands with no sense of choice about what they are doing indeed is work in both senses of the term.

To keep the two concepts distinct, so we can think about them separately, let's use the term toil for the first meaning (unpleasant activity) and work for the second. With this terminology, toil is the opposite of play, but work is not. Work can be toil, or it can be play, or it can lie anywhere on a continuum between the two.

In last week's post, I described the characteristics of work, and the attitudes toward it, that allow many people in today's society to experience their work as play. Now I want to expand on those ideas by describing hunter-gatherers' toil-less manner of sustaining themselves.

As I noted in the introductory post*, this whole series on "Play Makes Us Human" was inspired by my immersion in the research literature on hunter-gatherer band societies. Wherever they have been studied—in isolated parts of Africa, Asia, South America, Australia, and elsewhere—such societies have been found to be extraordinarily playful. Today, such societies are mostly destroyed, or in transition to something quite different, but I use the present tense (sometimes called the "anthropological present") to describe them, as remnants of them do still exist. In past posts, I have shown (a) how hunter-gatherer children educate themselves through play; (b) how hunter-gatherers use play and humor to maintain a social and economic system founded on principles of sharing, cooperation, individual autonomy, and equality; and (c) how playfulness runs through hunter-gatherers' religious beliefs and practices in ways support their egalitarian approach to life.

In general, hunter-gatherers do not have a concept of toil. When they do have that concept, it derives apparently from their contact with outsiders. They may learn a word for toil to refer to the work of their neighboring farmers, miners, or road construction workers, but they do not apply it to their own work. Their own work is simply an extension of children's play. Children play at hunting, gathering, hut construction, toolmaking, meal preparations, defense against predators, birthing, infant care, healing, negotiation, and so on and so on; and gradually, as their play becomes increasingly skilled, the activities become productive. The play becomes work, but it does not cease being play. It may even become more fun than before, because the productive quality helps the whole band and is valued by all.

My reading about life in many different hunter-gatherer cultures has led me to conclude that their work is play for four main reasons: (1) It is varied and requires much skill and intelligence. (2) There is not too much of it. (3) It is done in a social context, with friends. And (4) (most significantly) it is, for any given person at any given time, optional. Let me expand on these, point by point.[1]

Hunter-Gatherers' Work is Playful Because It Is Varied and Requires Much Skill, Knowledge, and Intelligence.

Except for the general distinction between men as hunters and women as the primary gatherers (a distinction that holds for most but not all hunter-gatherer societies), hunter-gatherers do not specialize. Everyone is involved in most of the society's economic activities. Moreover, most of these activities require great skill, knowledge, and decision-making ability.

Anthropologists have marveled at the enormous skill and intelligence shown by hunter-gatherers in their hunting. The tools of hunting—such as bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, spears, or nets—must be crafted to perfection; and skill in using those tools effectively must be developed through years of play with them. Hunters must also learn the habits of the perhaps two to three hundred different species of mammals and birds that they hunt, which the children do in part through games of imitating the animals around them. They learn to identify each animal by its sounds and tracks as well as by its sight.

A book has been written on the thesis that the tracking of game by hunters marked the origin of what we today call science.[2] Hunters use the marks they see in the sand, mud, or foliage as clues, combined with their accumulated knowledge from past experience, to develop and test hypotheses about such matters as the size, sex, physical condition, speed of movement, and time of passage of the animal they are tracking. In describing the tracking abilities of the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gatherers of Africa's Kalahari Desert, Alf Wannenburgh wrote: "Everything is noticed, considered, and discussed. The kink in a trodden grass blade, the direction of the pull that broke a twig from a bush, the depth, size, shape, and disposition of the tracks themselves, all reveal information about the condition of the animal, the direction it is moving in, the rate of travel, and what its future movements are likely to be."[3]

The gathering of vegetable foodstuffs likewise requires great knowledge and skill. Hunter-gatherers must know which of the countless varieties of roots, tubers, nuts, seeds, fruits, and greens in their area are edible and nutritious, when and where to find them, how to dig them (in the case of roots and tubers), how to extract the edible portions efficiently (in the case of grains, nuts, and certain plant fibers), and in some cases how to process them to make them edible or more nutritious than they otherwise would be. These abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge.

In our society, too, work that is varied, that requires much skill and knowledge, and that involves much decision-making is enjoyed far more and considered more play-like than work that is simply routine. The assembly line is the enemy of playful work. Fortunately, with robots to do assembly work, the least playful sorts of jobs are largely behind us and we are moving toward a world in which most work, once again, has the potential to be play.

Hunter-Gatherers' Work is Playful Because There Isn't too Much of It.

Anthropologists have often pointed out that hunter-gatherers' work is skill-intensive but not labor-intensive. Research studies suggest that hunter-gatherers work somewhere between 20 and 40 hours a week, on average, depending on just what you count as work. Moreover, they do not work according to the clock; they work when the time is ripe for the work to be done and when they feel like it. There is ample time in hunter-gatherers' lives for leisure activities, including games of many sorts, playful religious ceremonies, making and playing musical instruments, singing, dancing, traveling to other bands to visit friends and relatives, gossiping, and just lying around and relaxing. The life of the typical hunter-gatherer looks a lot like your life and mine when we are on vacation at a camp with friends.

It's amazing when you think about it. During the 10,000 years since the onset of agriculture and then industry, we have developed countless laborsaving devices, but we haven't reduced our labor. Today, most people spend more time working than did hunter-gatherers, and our work, on average, is less playful.

Hunter-Gatherers' Work Is Playful Because It Is Done in a Social Context, With Friends.

We are a highly social species. We like to be with other people, especially with those we know well; and we like to do what our friends do. Hunter-gatherers live very social lives. Nearly all of their activity is public. Most of their work is done cooperatively, and even that which is done individually is done in social settings, with others around. And—because hunter-gatherers are highly mobile people, who move to another band if they don't like the people they are currently living with—their bands are truly friendship groups. In general, anything that we humans do with friends has more of a spirit of play than things we do alone or with collaborators who aren't really friends.

Men usually hunt in ways that involve teamwork; and women usually forage in groups. Concerning the latter, Wannenburgh wrote, of the Ju/'hoansi bands he studied, "In our experience all of the gathering expeditions were jolly events. With the [Ju/'hoansi's] gift of converting chores into social occasions, they often had something of the atmosphere of a picnic outing with children."[4] In a description of the means by which Batek people choose tasks and form work groups each day, Kirk Endicott wrote: "They may be entirely different groups from those of the previous day, for the Batek like variety both in their work and their companions."[5]

Hunter-Gatherers' Work is Playful Because Each Person Can Choose When, How, and Whether to Do It.

And now I reach the most crucial ingredient of play—the sense of choice. Play, by definition, is optional; it is something that we choose to do, not something that we have to do. How do hunter-gatherers maintain the sense of choice about the work they do?