The study of working life tends to be dominated by economists, management consultants and business-school professors. So it is nice to get a new perspective. James Suzman, an anthropologist, provides that fresh appraisal in an ambitious new book called “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time”. LINK

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Evening Standard  "This is one of those “big ideas” books that will make you reconsider the life/work balance."

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"The economic trauma induced by the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work and to re-evaluate what jobs we consider really important."  LINK

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Another review from Japan's largest daily.

 https://book.asahi.com/article/12959014r review from Japan

Another review from Japan

In shops from May 30th (UK) & August 30th (rest of the world)

John Ryle, Legrand Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, New York reviews Affluence without Abundance for the Financial Times

James Suzman signs deals for a new natural and cultural history of work. English language rights have been acquired by Bloomsbury (UK and Commonwealth) and Penguin (USA). Foreign rights have been acquired in the following languages: German, French, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Dutch,Portuguese and Spanish. 

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I'm sure it has nothing to do with the  extraordinary  coincidence  that the next best 49 are in alphabetical order. . . .  

The prehistoric shift towards cultivation began our preoccupation with hierarchy and growth – and even changed how we perceive the passage of time

Lessons from the Bushmen: How this tech-free society could foreshadow our technological future

The Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari have always been fiercely egalitarian. They hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. It’s what made them part of the most successful, sustainable civilisation in human history

Affluence without Abundance- Why understanding our hunting and gathering past is vital to our efforts to meet present and future  challenges. 

He explained that the fattest goat in my small herd, a dappled brown male with an irrational confidence in humans and a worrying tendency to lick shoes, had been killed by jackals.. . . 

I talk about hunter-gatherers and inflexion points in history with Sheila McDonald. . . for ABC

Suzman’s talent for evoking the region’s vast and haunting landscapes, his elegiac account of a passing covenant with nature, and his warm and compassionate character sketches of individual Ju’/hoansi, make this a fascinating and at times profoundly moving work of literary non-fiction.

Another double act with James C Scott. Apparently we sit s time to "rip up the textbooks" on civilisation....."Suzman and Scott have both written excellent books, which could serve on reading lists for geography, history and politics, as well as in their natural homes of archaeology and anthropology."

Jonathan Green interviews me about   Afflubundence. on ABC (Oz)

John Lanchester's feature in the New Yorker on Affluence Without Abundance and James Stott's new book, Against the Grain: The Case Against Civilisation. 

The mantra of the 21st century might be that the world is interconnected everywhere, but the anthropologist James Suzman knows better. For more than two decades, Suzman has researched and gotten to know various groups of Bushmen throughout southern Africa

This fascinating glimpse into a disappearing way of life leads Suzman to reflect on our world today: a world where wealth and possessions are valued above all other pursuits. Suzman’s account of the lives of Bushmen, past and present, offers plenty of fuel for thought. Their success was not based “on their ability to continuously colonize new lands, expand and grow into new spaces, or develop new technologies, but on the fact that they mastered the art of making a living where they were.” Could we, he asks, learn from their example and “be satisfied with having fewer needs more easily met”? These are provocative and timely questions. What's this item about? What makes it interesting? Write a catchy description to grab your audience's attention...

Every year automation and computerization squeeze out new segments of the labor force. In response, trade unions and workers anxiously wring their hands while savvy politicians demonize the “sinister” forces of globalization and make promises about job retention that they almost certainly won’t be able to keep.

Tsumkwe is the closest thing to a town in Namibia’s Nyae Nyae district, the epitome of remoteness in a country where almost everywhere is remote. Tsumkwe is also the capital of roughly 3,500 Ju/'hoansi, perhaps the best known of the few groups of people who continued to live as hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century.

But “Affluence Without Abundance” is not simply a description of Bushman life. Mr Suzman deftly weaves his experiences and observations with lessons on human evolution, the history of human migration and the fate of African communities since the arrival of Europeans. The overarching aim of the book is more ambitious still: to challenge the reader’s ideas about both hunter-gatherer life and human nature.

This clip from John Marshall's archive held at the Smithsonian beautifully captures the  poetry of spoken Ju/'hoan. It includes a brief clip of Chief Tsemkxau =Oma's   father.  He is  pictured here with one of his many granschildren outside of his house in Tsumkwe. 

John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now advances in productivity and technology would mean that nobody worked for more than 15 hours a week. Yet despite far greater technological advances and improvements in productivity than Keynes predicted we seem to be working as hard as ever.

          What went wrong? And how might a better understanding of how hunter-gatherers made a living help us to solve this problem?

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Genetic data now reveals Khoisan (Bushmen) to have lived in southern Africa since the evolution of modern Homo sapiens. What questions does this extraordinarily continuity raise about how hunter-gatherers perceived time and their relationships with the world around them.  Interview with James Suzman and photo essay on Moowon

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What do Bushman attitudes to pets and dogs in particular reveal about how hunter-gatherers empathised with their prey and how this changed with the Agricultural Revolution. Article in the New York Times by James Suzman  

James Suzman delivers the annual 2013 Promos Lecture at the Parliament Chamber of London's Inner Temple. The lecture,  "Kalahari Truffle and the Meaning of life" touches on many of the key themes in "Affluence Without Abundance".