Leisure and the development of culture

Abstract

The place of leisure and free time in both preliterate and preindustrial societies has received little attention by leisure researchers, often leading to inaccurate conceptions of the nature of work, leisure, and time-use in such cultures. This note is an effort to bring recent anthropological data and theory concerning the nature of leisure in preindustrial and preliterate cultures to the attention of leisure researchers and to examine the relationships, if any, between free time availability, its use, and the development of culture. An economic surplus has often been considered as a necessary, and perhaps a sufficient, condition for social stratification, craft specialization, and other forms of cultural elaboration to occur. Specifically, the change from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture during the neolithic has been suggested as the cultural development which provided the economic security required for increased cultural complexity. This economic security consists of three related components-surpluses of food, population, and leisure or free time. While Just (1980) traces the idea that surplus leisure contributes to cultural elaboration to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, the general concept of economic surplus, which can be defined as a “. . portion of total output which is in excess of the requirements of subsistence . . .” (LeClair and Schneider 1968) dates most directly to David Ricardo’s (1817) Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. In turn, some anthropologists saw economic surplus as a kind of prime mover in cultural development. Boas (1940) most clearly stated this thesis: