Anthropologist Margaret Mead on Work, Leisure, and Creativity
“On another South Sea island, Manus, I found in 1928 a people without clocks, without a calendar, with only the simply rhythm of a three-day market and the monthly rush of the fish over the reef, who nevertheless drove themselves from one unrecognized and unmarked year to the next, seeing feasts as harder work than days which had no feasting. To them the white man’s periodicity of hours to start work and hours to stop came as a blessed relief and the Christian Sabbath as a day of undreamed-of rest. They spoke with enthusiasm of the bells which punctuated the hard labor on European-owned plantations: “When the bell sounds at noon you can stop, and you don’t have to work again until the bell sounds to return to work.”
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