1. Chapter 16 Making a Living
This chapter introduces students to the variety of economic systems that are present in human societies. It especially focuses on the distinctions between foraging, horticulture, agriculture, and pastoralism, and on models of distribution and exchange.
Chapter 16
Making a Living

2. Adaptive Strategies
Yehudi Cohen (1974) used the term adaptive strategy to describe a group’s system of economic production.
Ethnoatlas

3. Adaptive Strategies
Cohen has developed a typology of cultures using this distinction:
Foraging
Horticulture
Agriculture
Pastoralism
Industrialism

4. Adaptive Strategies
Cohen’s typology refers to a relationship between economies and social features
arguing that the most important reason for similarities between unrelated cultures is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy.

5. Foraging
Human groups with foraging economies are not ecologically dominant.
The primary reason for the continuing survival of foraging economies is the inapplicability of their environmental settings to food production.

6. Correlates of Foraging
Band organization
Typically are socially mobile
Gender-based division of labor
women gathering
men hunting and fishing
All foraging societies distinguish among their members according to age and gender, but are relatively egalitarian compared to other societal types.

7. Horticulture
Horticulture is nonintensive plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools and cyclical, noncontinuous use crop lands.
Slash-and-burn cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for horticulture.

8. Agriculture
Agriculture is cultivation involving continuous use of crop land and is more labor-intensive than horticulture.
Domesticated animals are commonly used in agriculture,
Irrigation is one of the agricultural techniques that frees cultivation from seasonal domination.
Terracing is an agricultural technique which renders land otherwise too steep for most forms of cultivation

9. The Costs and Benefits of Agriculture
Agriculture is far more labor-intensive and capital-intensive than horticulture
Agriculture’s long-term production (per area) is far more stable than horticulture’s.

10. The Cultivation Continuum
Nonindustrial economies do not always fit cleanly into the distinct categories given above
Sectorial fallowing: a plot of land may be planted two to three years before shifting then allowed to lie fallow for a period of years.
Horticulture requires regular fallowing (the length of which varies), whereas agriculture does not.

11. Intensification: People and the Environment
Agriculture, by turning humans into ecological dominants
Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid population increase.
Most agriculturalists live in states because agricultural economies require regulatory mechanisms.

12. Pastoralism
Pastoral economies are based upon domesticated herd animals
but members of such economies may get agricultural produce through trade or their own subsidiary cultivation.

13. Pastoralism Pastoral nomadism: Transhumance or agro-pastoralism:
all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year.
Transhumance or agro-pastoralism:
part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village (this is usually associated with some cultivation by the pastoralists).

14. Modes of Production
Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
An economy is a study of production, distribution, and consumption of resources.

15. Modes of Production Mode of production:
a way of organizing production--a set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.
Similarity of adaptive strategies between societies tends to correspond with similarity of mode of production: variations occur according to environmental particularities.

16. Production in Nonindustrial Populations
All societies divide labor according to gender and age
the nature of these divisions varies greatly from society to society.
Valuation of the kinds of work ascribed to different groups varies, as well.

17. Means of Production
Means of production include land, labor, technology, and capital.
Land: the importance of land varies according to method of production — land is less important to a foraging economy than it is to a cultivating economy.
Labor, tools, and specialization: nonindustrial economies are usually but not always characterized by more cooperation and less specialized labor than is found in industrial societies.

18. Alienation in Industrial Economies
A worker is alienated from the product of her or his work when the product is sold, with the profit going to an employer, while the worker is paid a wage.
A consequence of alienation is that a worker has less personal investment in the product, in contrast to the more intimate relationship existing between worker and product in nonindustrial societies.
Alienation may generalize to encompass not only worker-product relations, but coworker relations, as well.

19. Economizing and Maximization
Classical economic theory assumed that individuals universally acted rationally, by economizing to maximize profits,
but comparative data shows that people frequently respond to other motivations than profit

20. Economizing and Maximization
Alternative Ends
People devote their time, resources, and energy to five broad categories of ends:
Subsistence fund
Replacement fund
Social fund
Ceremonial fund
Rent fund

21. The Market Principle
The market principle occurs when exchange rates and organization are governed by an arbitrary money standard.
Price is set by the law of supply and demand.
The market principle is common to industrial societies.

22. Redistribution
Redistribution is the typical mode of exchange in chiefdoms and some nonindustrial states.
In a redistributive system, product moves from the local level to the hierarchical center, where it is reorganized, and a proportion is sent back down to the local level.
Examples in U.S.?

23. Reciprocity
Reciprocity is exchange between social equals and occurs in three degrees: generalized, balanced, and negative.
Generalized reciprocity is most common to closely related exchange partners and involves giving with no specific expectation of exchange, but with a reliance upon similar opportunities being available to the giver (prevalent among foragers).

24. Reciprocity
Balanced reciprocity involves more distantly related partners and involves giving with the expectation of equivalent (but not necessarily immediate) exchange
Negative reciprocity involves very distant trading partners and is characterized by each partner attempting to maximize profit and an expectation of immediate exchange

25. Coexistence of Exchange Principles
Most economies are not exclusively characterized by a single mode of reciprocity.
The United States economy has all three types of reciprocity.

26. Potlatching
Potlatches, as once practiced by Northwest Coast Native American groups, are a widely studied ritual in which sponsors (helped by their entourages) gave away resources and manufactured wealth while generating prestige for themselves.
Potlatching tribes (such as Kwakiutl and Salish peoples) were foragers but lived in sedentary villages and had chiefs--this political complexity is attributed to the overall richness of their environment.
Dramatic depopulation resulting from postcontact diseases and the influx of new trade goods dramatically affected the nature of potlatches, which began to extended to the entire population.

27. Potlatching (cont.)
The result of the new surplus, cultural trauma, and the competition caused by wider inclusion was that prestige was created by the destruction of wealth, rather than the redistribution of it
Potlatches were once interpreted as wasteful displays generated by culturally induced mania for prestige, but Kottak argues that customs like the potlatch are adaptive, allowing adjustment for alternating periods of local abundance and shortage.
The Northwest Coast tribes were unusual in that they were foraging populations living in a rich, nonmarginal environmental setting.