From a leading anthropologist comes a major book chronicling the history of work, from the primordial age through the Stone Age and into the digital era, and how our relationship with it has shaped our civilisation.
From a leading anthropologist comes a major book chronicling the history of work, from the primordial age through the Stone Age and into the digital era, and how our relationship with it has shaped our civilisation.
We live in a society where work defines who we are, what we do and who we spend our time with. But this wasn't always the case. For 95% of our history, our ancestors had a radically different view of its importance; hunter gatherers rarely worked more than fifteen hours per week.How did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? What are the social, economic and environmental consequences of a culture of work? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?In this major book, James Suzman charts a natural and cultural history of work. Drawing on field work at the interface between hunter gatherer societies, simple agricultural societies and the industrialised world, and integrating new insights from epigenetics, ethology, genomics, social anthropology, economics and evolutionary theory, it challenges the way we think about work today - and shows why automation may be the key to unlocking a more sustainable future.
James Suzman is an anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems. He has written for publications including the New York Times , the Observer , the Guardian , the New Statesman and the Independent . He lives in Cambridge.
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