1. SSF 1044: Introduction to Anthropology and Sociology
Making A Living:
Economic Subsistence

2. Adaptive Strategies
Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to describe a group’s system of economic production.
Cohen has developed a typology of cultures using this distinction, referring 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.

3. Key Features/Varieties
Adaptive Strategies
Yehudi Cohen’s Adaptive Strategies:
Adaptive Strategy
Also Known As
Key Features/Varieties
Foraging
Hunting-gathering
Mobility, use of nature's resources
Horticulture
Slash-and-burn, shifting cultivation, swiddening, dry farming
Fallow period
Agriculture
Intensive farming
Continuous use of land, intensive use of labor
Pastoralism
Herding
Nomadism and transhumance
Industrialism
Industrial production
Factory production, capitalism, socialist production

4. 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.
A contemporary forager from Australia’s Cape York peninsula collects eggs from the nest of a magpie goose.
Photo Credit: Thand Samuels Abell II/ National Geographic Society

5. Foraging Worldwide distribution of recent hunter-gatherers.
Source: Gäran Burenhult, ed., People of the Stone Age: Hunters and Gatherers and Early Farmers (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993).

6. Correlates of Foraging
Band-organization is typical of foraging societies, because its flexibility allows for seasonal adjustments.
Members of foraging societies typically are socially mobile, having the ability to affiliate with more than one group during their lifetimes (e.g., through fictive kinship).
The typical foraging society gender-based division of labor has women gathering and men hunting and fishing, with gathering contributing more to the group diet.
All foraging societies distinguish among their members according to age and gender, but are relatively egalitarian (making only minor distinctions in status) compared to other societal types.

7. Horticulture
Horticulture is non-intensive plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools and cyclical, non-continuous use crop lands.
Slash-and-burn cultivation and shifting cultivation are alternative labels for horticulture.
This man in Ranomafana, Madagascar, is practicing slash-and-burn horticulture.
Photo Credit: Paul Harrison/Still Pictures/ Peter Arnold, Inc.

8. Agriculture
Agriculture is cultivation involving continuous use of crop land, and is more labor-intensive (due to the ancillary needs generated by farm animals and crop land formation) than horticulture.
Domesticated animals are commonly used in agriculture, mainly to ease labor and provide manure.
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 (particularly irrigated cultivation) susceptible to agriculture (e.g., the Ifugao of Central Luzon, in the Philippines.

9. Agriculture
Irrigated and terraced rice fields used by the rice farmers of Luzon in the Philippines.
Photo Credit: Paul Chesley/Tony Stone Images

10. Agriculture: Costs and Benefits
Agriculture is far more labor-intensive and capital-intensive than horticulture, but does not necessarily yield more than horticulture does (under ideal conditions).
Agriculture’s long-term production (per area) is far more stable than horticulture’s.

11. The Cultivation Continuum
In reality, non-industrial economies do not always fit cleanly into the distinct categories given above, thus it is useful to think in terms of a cultivation continuum.
Sectorial fallowing: a plot of land may be planted two-to-three years before shifting (as with the Kuikuru, South American manioc horticulturalists) then allowed to lie fallow for a period of years.
A baseline distinction between agriculture and horticulture is that horticulture requires regular fallowing (the length of which varies), whereas agriculture does not.

12. Intensification
Agriculture, by turning humans into ecological dominants, allows human populations to move into (and transform) a much wider range of environments than was possible prior to the development of cultivation.
Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid population increase.
Most agriculturalists live in states because agricultural economies require regulatory mechanisms.

13. 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.
Patterns of Pastoralism:
Pastoral Nomadism: 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. Pastoralism
A female pastoralist who is a member of the Kirgiz ethnic group in Xinjiang Province, China.
Photo Credit: Image Bank

15. Economic Anthropology
Economic Anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
An economy is a study of production, distribution, and consumption of resources.
Mode of production is defined as 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. Nonindustrial Production
All societies divide labor according to gender and age, but the nature of these divisions varies greatly from society to society.
Valuation of the kinds of work ascribed to different groups varies, as well.
Examples are taken from the Betsileo, of Madagascar.

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
By definition, 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. Alternative Ends
People devote their time, resources, and energy to five broad categories of ends: subsistence, replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent.
Subsistence fund: work is done to replace calories lost through life activities.
Replacement fund: work is expended maintaining the technology necessary for life (broadly defined).

21. The Market Principle
The market principle obtains 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 non-industrial 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.
These workers in Yunnan Province, China, strive for an equal distribution of meat.
Photo Credit: John Eastcott/Yva Momatiuk/ Woodfin Camp & Assoc.

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 (common in tribal societies, and has serious ramifications for the relationship of trading partners).
Negative reciprocity involves very distant trading partners and is characterized by each partner attempting to maximize profit and an expectation of immediate exchange (e.g., market economies, silent barter between Mbuti foragers and horticulturalist neighbors).

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 post-contact diseases and the influx of new trade goods dramatically affected the nature of potlatches, which began to extended to the entire population.

27. Potlatching
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, non-marginal environmental setting.

28. Potlatching
Map of Native American Tribes of the Northwest Coast.

29. Questions?