Sahlins contests the Western equation of affluence with maximised production and consumption. His iconic proposition is the “original affluent society”, in which hunter-gatherer communities achieve material sufficiency through limited wants and relatively modest labour rather than technological abundance. The theoretical contribution lies in treating economy as a cultural category embedded in kinship, politics and symbolic order, not a universal domain governed by scarcity and utility maximisation. Methodologically, Sahlins combines ethnographic comparison, critique of economic reason and analysis of reciprocity, domestic production and exchange. The conceptual operation is anthropological inversion: categories presumed natural to modern capitalism become historically provincial. The wider bridge reaches ecological economics, political anthropology, degrowth theory and theories of value. Affluence appears as a relation between desires and means rather than an absolute stock of goods, opening a profound challenge to industrial societies whose institutions continuously expand wants while presenting scarcity as inevitable.
