SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
VOLUME 22 . NUMBER 1 . MARCH 1968 230 PARK AVENUE · NEW YORK, N.Y. 10017
LABOR AND LEISURE IN TRADITIONAL AFRICAN SOCIETIES by William O. Jones .. THE conference on competing demands for the time of labor in traditional African societies, cosponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies and the Agricultural Development Council on October 19-21, 1967 at Holly Knoll, the Robert R. Moton Memorial Foundation conference center, Capahosic, Virginia, was an attempt to encourage interdisciplinary investigations of the nature, value, and cost of activities frequently considered not to be economically productive. Papers prepared for the conference were intended to illustrate the kinds of information available about such activities, to examine ways of measuring their magnitude, and to illuminate the problem of estimating their value. Five papers presented information about particular societies, two reported on surveys of the relevant literature for eastern and central Africa, and one concerned the nature and effectiveness of organized work in traditional societies; these papers were distributed in advance and served as the basis for discussion. The 22 participants in the conference were mainly anthropologists and economists, but also included representatives of other social sciences and of the humanities. l • The author is Director of the Food Research Institute, Stanford Uni· versity, and chainnan of the Joint Committee on African Studies, of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. He organized the conference on which he reports here. 1 The participants were: David W. Ames, San Francisco State College; D. G. R. Belshaw, Makerere University College; Elizabeth Colson, University of California, Berkeley; Philip D. Curtin, University of Wis· consin; Walter W. Deshler, University of Maryland; Luther P. Gerlach, University of Minnesota; Philip H. Gulliver, University of London; Peter B. Hammond, Washington, D.C.; Stephen H. Hymer, Robert F. Thompson, and Stanley H. Udy, Jr., Yale University; William O. Jones, Stanford University; Igor Kopytoff, and Robert M. Netting, University of Pennsylvania; Rowland L. Mitchell, Jr., Social Science Research Council; Edgar Raynaud, European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences; Priscilla Reining, Catholic University of America; Wo Roder, University of Cincinnati; Roy
The joint committee's interest in such a conference derived from the assumption in much of the recent writing on economic development that rural societies like the African ones are characterized by extensive unemployment or underemployment of labor which could be used productively either in industry or in agriculture if complementary resources were made available. Some writers have argued, however, that rural unemployment in preindustrial societies may be more apparent than real, and that economists who have thought to demonstrate its magnitude have tended to classify as uneconomic, or "leisure," a variety of activities usually regarded as productive when performed in industrial economies. These activities include ceremonial, religious, and entertainment services as well as the more obviously economic production of shelter, clothing, and ornamentation, and provision of educational, governmental, and personal services. To the extent that leisure time actually is devoted to performing some of these activities, withdrawal of labor from the rural sector must either reduce the supply of the services and products it has provided, or must reduce employment in agriculture or other rural occupations. Better understanding of the importance of these often overlooked activities appears to depend, first, on improved estimates of the amount of time devoted to them, and second, on better estimates of the value, economic or social, of the satisfactions they afford. These were the two problems to which participants in the conference were asked to direct their attention. Underlying this approach was the assumption that it should be possible to examine and measure the ways in Sieber, Indiana University; Wolfgang F. Stolper, University of Michigan; Benjamin E. Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles; Edgar V. Winans, University of Washington.
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