To the lower grades of the leisure class
certain other employments are open, but they are employments that
are subsidiary to one or another of these typical leisure-class
occupations. Such are, for instance, the manufacture and care of
arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing and
handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred
apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these
secondary honourable employments, except from such as are plainly
of an industrial character and are only remotely related to the
typical leisure-class occupations.
If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into
the lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure
class in fully developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the
usages, motives, and circumstances out of which the institution
of a leisure class has arisen, and indicates the steps of its
early growth. Nomadic hunting tribes in various parts of the
world illustrate these more primitive phases of the
differentiation. Any one of the North American hunting tribes may
be taken as a convenient illustration. These tribes can scarcely
be said to have a defined leisure class. There is a
differentiation of function, and there is a distinction between
classes on the basis of this difference of function, but the
exemption of the superior class from work has not gone far enough
to make the designation "leisure class" altogether applicable.
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