“Then somebody must have started playing around with seeds and plants and invented agriculture. It must have seemed a good idea, for we didn't have to walk far to get enough food. But life became more complicated and toilsome. Wehad to stay in the same place for at least several months to store the seeds for the next crop and to plan and organize work on the fields. Fields and harvest also had to be defended from our nomadic gatherer hunter cousins who kept thinking that everything belonged to everybody. Conflicts between farmers, hunters and cattle breeders arose. We had to explain to others that we "worked" to accumulate our provisions--and they didn't even have a word for "work".
What does work mean to you?
bolo bolo can be found at http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000137.txt
6 comments:
First of all, the author views work is a little bit different then mine. He writes about how the farmers thought that the nomadic people did not do any "work." They were barbaric and roamed the land with no purpose. The meaning of work that Ibu presents is that in order to accomplish work, one must have an accumulation of something to show what they have done. The nomads would hunt and gather, then eat. The farmers on the other hand would spend entire seasons to reach their goal of having a lot of something at once.
There are many things that come to mind when I think of work. To me, pretty much anything that produces something is work. If you wrote a paper, that's work. If you gathered corn, that's work. However now that we're doing work in physics, I also think of work as force applied over a distance in the same direction. However you could also argue for this equation that work also means that you simply have something to show for your progress. In this case, you may have moved a box 5 feet.
Your physics reference is well timed based on what is going on in that class. However, we know that Ibu is not referring to work in that way.
Accumulation of 'stuff' is what many of of now see as work- money- cars, clothes, jewelery, etc. But many even today live paycheck to paycheck and don't have much, but they still work.
Perhaps they didn't have a word for work because that was simply living life. You had to gather food to live- whereas with work they are ways now and probably then of avoiding work but still getting by.
I think this paragraph is introduction of human nature; the begining of the human thought of possesion or belonging. Here are the "seedlings of thought" that propels nationalism as well as war.
I don't take physics, so I might be confusing the concept of work, but from my understanding, one can argue that nomads "worked" more. In order to say capture and kill a buffalo (or whatever a woolly mammoth) you need percision, speed, accuracy and plan which all take time to perfect. Farmers at this time didn't really have much to do but gather (which nomads did as well) and wait. The sun and the rain took care of the plant growth.
I think that work is an abstract concept that people created to stimulate our intellectual capacity. We imagined work to be this ultimate driving force that would give a purpose, something to do to make life meaningful. We have identified work to mean many things depending on its context--sometimes work refers to an occupation, sometimes it is physical exertion, sometimes it is an abstract reference to unmeasurable mental effort, and other times it is a reference to a concrete mathematical proportion that relates force to distance.
When I think of work, I think of anything that results in an outcome, anything that changes something in some way, or anything that results in physical deprivation of energy. I see work as someone lifting a heavy object, or a machine running on electricity, or a student completing a homework assignment.
To expand upon Caroline's first point, work is a term that was developed to describe what people do and to determine a standard of what people should do. Work was only conceived once people began to do it; before agriculture there was no concept of work, since it was not applicable to our lives. Work is not a constant idea; it changes relative to the way it applies to a society and how that society needs to use it.
This is similar to the concept of newspeak in the book 1984--words are created and destroyed as new functions and opportunities come into or are banished from existence. Our current ideas on what work is are likely to change as the times change; the definition of the word is as transient as the action itself.
The idea that humans developed the word work to suit our own purposes was not meant to imply that humans define work as just doing something. I meant it in a more abstract sense--that people create arbitrary concepts and ideas to suit our instinctual needs and to satisfy our need to be occupied and challenged. Obviously all creatures do things; in that sense, everything is always doing work. However, that is not how I defined it--I defined work simply looking at how the word is connotated in society today--work is often correlated with a job or school--concepts that we as humans have created all on our own. Before we contrived the ideas of having a job and getting a formal education, no other animal or plant did that. Thus, we have created arbitrary words to represent arbitrary concepts that we have developed to keep ourselves occupied.
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