Avoid All Work (That Can’t Be Done Playfully)
The Kpelle people of Liberia, to name one, scarcely make the distinction at all, allowing for a difference between arduous “forest work” and lighter “town work” but generally avoiding all work that can’t be done playfully, amid song and dance and jest.
It’s not that they’re slackers.
On the contrary: Diligent rice farmers, they organize their lives around the constant activity of cultivation. But when government advisors pressured them to switch from dry rice farming to more productive paddy-based methods, they resisted—not because they had no interest in making more money, but because they had no interest in working joylessly. The techniques of paddy-rice farming might be more efficient, the anthropologist David Lancy has explained, but they would reduce the Kpelle’s daily activity to “just plain work”, bereft of “the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance” that makes Kpelle work worth doing. (via Caterina)
