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Even before Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in the Concord woods and holed up there for the better part of two years, the quest for a simpler, less material, more meaningful life periodically appealed to many Americans. As Thoreau said in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854): “Our life is frittered away by detail.
Thomas Dichter is a cultural anthropologist who has worked in international development for five decades.
