Kabloona

"Kabloona - Among the Inuit" (by Gontran De Poncins and read by Grover Gardner) is a 1st person narrative of the author's experiences in the high Canadian Artic in the late 1930's.  (Amazon and Wikipedia articles have more specifics and reactions - all positive, and which I endorse.)

Core hunter-gatherer social norms are on clear display in this book.  The Artic itself is a major player: the harsh life means typical overpopulation issues: territory scarcity and threat of invasion are not present (although risk of starvation is a major issue).  The community is therefore uncommonly free from strife and rituals of warfare.  Gatherings are small, rarely more than a dozen people, and power never concentrates.  Leadership is generalized.  Social conventions are strictly enforced, partially in language itself.  Consumables are community property (consumption, if not management), individual worth is measured (to the extent it is measured at all) by contribution,  and conversation is about the humor that is the other reaction (besides upset) to interrupted action.

The contrast between the 'pure' remote Inuit and the 'near' Inuit provide a glimpse of what appears to happen to clan/communal property when unusual objects (traded, arising from specialization elsewhere in the world) arrive in this environment.  The normal life of the aboriginal Inuit only suffers from seasonal scarcity of any particular object pre exposure to these objects... so it is pointless for an Inuit to worry about the replaceablity of any object.  Hence anything (even wives and dogs) can be lent in the expectation that an equivalent will be returned when the need is there.  This 'nothing is scarce over any sufficiently long span of time' paradise is deflated by the arrival of the robustly scarce items... things that neither the Inuit nor the enviroment can create or provide, and may or may not be available at some point through trading.

Material wealth and poverty are experienced as an individual relationship to relative scarcity.  Inuit are not poor when fish and seal and caribou are abundant, nor when, as an individual, one's fellows have been successful hunting.  Wealth and poverty are subjective, psychologically determined states of mind.   Economists (and politicians) would have us believe that poverty is due to a 'low' income, when in reality, it has to do with ability to access what one either wants or needs in their local environment.  

Another sense of the words 'materially poor' would related to the number of options available to a person.  The Inuit were poor in this sense.  But fixation on invisible and largely irrelevant material choices seems alien to what was the Inuit point of view.

Altogether an unforgettable book.  On the ethnographic studies bookshelf, it's up there with Yanomamo - The Fierce People (Chagnon), Tiwi of Northern Australia (Hart et al) and Twilight of the Spears (Descola).