While Lee and others were plucking scorpions from their boots in deserts and jungles, he’d been ferreting through anthropological texts, colonial reports, and other documents that described encounters between Europeans and hunter-gatherers. From these he had concluded that at the very least the stereotypical image of hunter-gatherers enduring life as a constant struggle against scarcity was far too simplistic. What interested Sahlins the most was not how much more leisure time hunter-gatherers enjoyed compared to stressed-out workers in agriculture or industry, but the “modesty of their
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