Economic Systems, Subsistence,
& Forms of Exchange
Economic systems

Production, allocation, and consumption
of material goods and services

Do not operate in isolation of other
aspects of society
economic systems – three
interrelated aspects
Patterns of subsistence – the means by
which environmental resources are
converted for human use
 Systems of distribution – the means by
which goods and services are made
available to members of a particular
group
 Patterns of consumption

The Study of Economic Systems

Anthropological approaches and the
Formalist vs. Substantivist Debate

The birth of economic anthropology
The Formalist Approach
Adam Smith (19th cent.), western
capitalism, & the “invisible hand”
 Profit motive as human universal
 Maximizing utility
 Scarcity, cost/benefit, price
 Market governed by laws of supply and
demand
 Rational economic behavior – human
universal

The Counter Formalist Approach:
Marxism and Neo-Marxism
Karl Marx (19th cent.) & the “critique” of
capitalism
 Marxist and Neo-Marxist approaches

– How economic systems produce economic
relations
– How economic systems produce & sustain
relations of power & control over labor
– The “mode of production”
• Means/Forces of production
• Relations of production
• Superstructure (ideology)
Smith and Marx
Both Smith and Marx grappling with the
meaning of emerging industrial system
 Both agreed on the notion of rational
economic behavior – everyone will work
to further his or her own individual
interests
 Both see the profit motive
(accumulation) as universal

– Marx – utopia & communism
Anthropologists and the formalist
approach
look at activities in societies without a
market system, or that do not use
money in ways that make sense in a
system like a capitalist market
 using language of formal economic
theory
 emphasizing universals of economic
behavior

Substantivist Economic Theory
formal neoclassical theory cannot be
used to explain economic activities in
non-western societies
 patterns of production, distribution
(exchange), consumption must instead
be interpreted within a society's cultural
context
 Rational economic behavior is culturally,
not universally defined

The Substantivist Approach

Economic maximization and cultural
specificity
– Economizing: the rational allocation of
scarce means (or resources) to alternative
ends (or uses)
Socially embedded economy with other
values than profit and maximization
 Idea of the moral economy

The Substantivists and Marx’s
modes of production
Marx’s Modes of Production
Emphasizes social relations & conflict
within the system
 Emphasizes role of economy (a system
of production, distribution, and
consumption) in establishing and
maintaining social relations
 Substantivist concern with the social
embeddedness of the economy

Production
Subsistence & adaptation
 Making a living
 Subsistence & social stratification

– The division of labor
– Differentiation & integration
– From minimal to complex

Environment, technology, society,
culture
Understanding Production
How humans as social groups adapt to
different kinds of environments
 How human’s material conditions of life
are affected by power differentials and
relations within and between social
groups

Subsistence as Adaptive Strategies
From food getting to food production -From Foraging to Cultivation
 Foraging – hunting and/or gathering
 Horticulture (extensive or ecological
cultivation)
 Pastoralism (food production –
cultivation)
 Agriculture (intensive cultivation)

Adaptation and the Anthropology of
Subsistence

Long standing disciplinary concern
 Basis for materialist theoretical orientations
– Theories of social & cultural evolution
Subsistence, Economy, & Materialist
Theories in Anthropology
Human diversity understood in terms of
environment & technology
 Emphasis on:

– Constraints: land, technology, population
– Systematic, integrative relationships
– Evolution and adaptation
Major Theories & Theorists

19th century social & cultural evolutionism &
universal histories (L.H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor)
– General or universal evolution

cultural ecology (J. Steward, M. Sahlins)
– Specific or multi-linear evolution

Neo-evolutionism (L. White)
– General or universal evolution

World systems theory (E. Wallerstein)
– History

Political ecology (E. Wolf)
– history
Materialist Theories and Evolution

Universal/General Evolution
– All societies common evolutionary trajectory
• primitive/simple-complex/civilized-foraging to
food production
– technological determinism -- cultures
advanced through refinements in toolmaking
– tools & economic practices have social
implications
– major changes in technology soon followed
by changes in society and culture
FUNCTIONALISM and Materialist
Concerns (early 20th cent.)
B. Malinowski - all cultural traits serve
the needs of individuals in a society;
they have a function
 basic needs - food, clothing, shelter give
rise to secondary needs i.e. need for
food leads to the need for cooperation
in food collection or production
 all linked together to form an integrated
whole - everything functioning together

NEO-EVOLUTIONISM (20th cent.)

Leslie White
– culture as an energy capturing system
– more advanced technology gives humans
more control over energy
– all societies move through same system technology changes related to capturing
energy influence social and cultural forms

From foragers to horticulturalists to
intensive agriculturalists
Cultural Ecology

Julian Steward - relationship between
culture and the environment
 cultural variation found in adaptation to
specific environmental circumstances
 Human ecology is the system & systematic
relationships between humans, material life,
& environment
 environment not determinant -- societies
react to their ecology
 typology of cultures, patterns, sequences
Specific or multi-linear evolution

specific evolution - adaptive processes in a
particular society in a particular
environment; changes in one society rather
than human society in general
 Multi-linear evolution - cultures have
followed different lines of development
(rather than general processes), particular to
each environment
 Strategies of adaptation - adjustments that
individuals make to obtain & use resources
and to solve immediate problems
Steward’s culture core
constellation of features which are most
closely related to subsistence activities
& economic arrangements
 social, political, religious patterns as are
empirically determined to be closely
connected with those arrangements

WORLD SYSTEMS (Wallerstein)
Global economic relations between
subsistence strategies, regions, nations
 Capitalism and common political, social,
economic, structure

– Core, peripheries, & semi-peripheries
Relationships of dependency
 World economy — development and
predominance of market trade =
capitalism

POLITICAL ECOLOGY





Putting cultural ecology in historical motion
Still strongly about human/environment
relations
inter-relationships between groups within a
world system of political, economic relations
Attention to an international division of labor
Temporal framework is history rather than
evolution
Patterns of Subsistence

Food Getting – FORAGING
– hunters & gatherers, gatherers & hunters,
fishing

Food Production – CULTIVATION
– The cultivation continuum
• horticulture (ecological agriculture)
• Agriculture
• Pastoralism
Industrialism
 Adaptive strategies & constraints

– Environment, technology, population
Subsistence
the market as economic organizing principle
is very recent in terms of human history
 economy oriented toward subsistence (food
getting & production) the norm for most of
human history
 agriculture (cultivation) also recent (10,000
yrs ago)
 for 100,000 years of human history - foraging
(food getting) was the economy of human life

Foraging
Humans have practiced foraging longer
than any other subsistence strategy in
human history
 Aka. Hunting and/or gathering (H & G)
 Not a form of cultivation
 Food getting

FORAGING
hunters & gatherers, gatherers &
hunters, fishing
 food getting is dependent on naturally
occurring resources, plants & animals

– Naturally occurring?

Little or no human modification
modern day foragers
few forgers remaining
 San (!Kung) - Africa; Kalahari desert
 Mbuti - equatorial forests of west &
central Africa
 Madagascar and SE Asia
 Aborigines of Australia
 Inuit - hunters (now using snow mobiles
& rifles)

Features of Foraging

small communities in sparsely populated
areas
– few hundred people related by kinship &
marriage

mobile lifestyle - no permanent
settlements
– no individual land rights
size of community may vary from
season to season, culture to culture
 Band form of social organization

Foraging and Social Stratification
Egalitarian societies – little social
stratification
 social stratification by age & gender (no
classes)
 division of labor - age & gender

Foraging and Gender
gender - great deal of diversity
tendency is for men to hunt & women to
gather
 gathering contributes more to daily diet
than hunting
 women & men share equal status - more
or less, egalitarian society
 Where hunting & fishing dominate - the
status of women is lower

Eleanor Leacock on Foragers and
Social Stratification
egalitarian societies do exist where men
and women can do different jobs and
remain separate but equal
 Control over exchange of scarce
resources is related to social
stratification in foraging groups

– Important insight for all economic systems
The Problem of Man the Hunter
man the hunter model ignored evidence
for modern foragers: women do some of
the hunting
 female gathered goods account for
more than half & at times nearly all of
what is eaten
 Problem of the archaeological record

woman the gatherer
Re-focused model of human evolution
 key importance of female gathering
 "lost" female tools in arch. record - fiber
carrying nets & baskets
 food sharing rather than hunting key to
human evolution

– Food sharing & the need for social
relations
– Cooperation and competition
Conceptualizing Foragers
The gender problem
 The “analogy” problem

– “living fossils of early humans,” in 19th
century unilineal evolutionism
Noble savages or maximizing brutish
life
 The “affluent society” (Sahlins)

Generalized Forager Model
Cultural Ecology
Egalitarianism (lack of private property;
no accumulation; constraint of mobility)
 Low population density
 Lack of territoriality
 Minimum of food storage
 Flux in band composition

Forager Mode of Production
Collective ownership of means of
production (land and its resources)
 Right to reciprocal access
 Little emphasis on accumulation (ethos
opposing hoarding)
 Total sharing throughout camp
 Equal access to tools necessary to
acquire food
 Individual ownership of tools

Foragers: World Systems & Political
Ecology
H-G do not exist apart from more
complex societies
 ecological “symbiosis” & wider social
relations
 rural proletariat of the political economic
(world system) model
 “freedom fighters” of indigenous
perspectives

The Cultivation Continuum

Horticulture or ecological agriculture
 Agriculture
 Pastoralism
Horticulture

Aka.
– Swidden
– Slash and burn
– Extensive agriculture
– Ecological agriculture
Horticulture or Ecological
Agriculture

Some human modification of
environment
– gardens & fields & technology
cultivation method that works in a
variety of environments - most common
in temperate and tropical forests &
savannas
 Cultivation that works with, and to
varying extents, mimics the natural
ecology

Horticulture/Ecological Agriculture





growing crops of all kinds with relatively
simple tools and methods, in the absence of
permanently cultivated fields
break up soil only using hand tools, hoes,
spades, sharpened sticks
clear land for planting with simple tools,
knives, axes, and fire is used to remove trees
and grasses
Little if any use of fertilizers
Little if any effort towards increase supply of
water to the fields
Horticultural Methods

Slash & burn
– Associated with poor tropical soils
– Initially big trees are cleared
– Brush is cut and left to dry
– Burned before arrival of rains providing
a little fertilisation and clears the plot of
weeds
– After several years of use must lie
fallow

Swidden- a garden cultivated by the
slash and burn technique.
Slash and Burn
Ecological agriculture
Ecological Agriculture
Destroyers of the rain forest?
Public Perceptions of
Horticulturalists
they’re inefficient, wasteful, ignorant
 Destroyers of the rain forest

• or

they rotate crops
 they’re efficient and sustainable
 they have great knowledge of forest
resources and desire to maintain the forest
 their livelihoods are threatened by state and
international political and economic
processes
characteristic features - horticulture

size of settlements are larger than foragers
– more stable sources of food available
tend to aggregate into villages - settlements are
more permanent, investments of labor into
fields, encourages sedentism
 compared to foragers horticulturalists their
family and kin invest labor in improving a
specific and relatively well defined territory

– property rights = access to resources
– each group laying claim to a specific area for
clearing, plantings, residence by applying their labor
to it
Social Stratification
more densely populated areas, sedentary
lives
 divisions of labor - age & gender
 land & inheritance - family claims to
land; heads of families, resources,
claims, political & judicial orgs
 increased specialization - food
producers vs. non food producers

Agriculture - intensive cultivation
a variety of techniques employed that enable
the cultivation of permanent fields
 Large-scale human modification of land,
plants, animals

Agricultural Techniques





nutrients back into the fields, use of
fertilization and multi cropping
Plant species are manipulated & fully
domesticated
domesticated animals and fertilization, turned
loose into fields after harvest, manure,
nutrients back into soil
more intensive weeding
Irrigation, dams and runoff, stored water &
reservoirs, streams rechanneled, terracing
controls water on hillside & mountains
Investments
greater control over
land ->increased
outputs/yields
 Increased inputs –
Leslie White
 long term
production,
dependable output

characteristic features






sedentism, large permanent communities villages, towns, cities
growth in population size & density
surpluses - a cultivator can feed many more
people than just him or her self and family
more need to coordinate land, labor, resources
more need to regulate relations through
governing bodies
tributes, taxes, rents, private property
Social Stratification

Surpluses and people
–
–
–
–
more people who don't produce food
high degree of craft specialization
more complex political organization
larger differences in wealth and power
Leslie White





degree of cultural development varies directly
as the amount of energy per capita per year
harnessed and put to work
amount of energy per capita harnessed & put
to work within the culture
technological means with which this energy is
expended
human need-serving product that accrues
from the expenditure of energy
E (energy) V T (technology) = P (product)
food growers & non-food growers

rural peoples who
are integrated into a
larger society
politically (imposed
laws, taxes, rents,
etc. from outside
their community) &
economically
(exchange products
of their labor for
products produced
elsewhere)
Increased Coordination – land, labor,
resources

increased need to regulate social
relations -- governing bodies arise
Agriculture as Maladaptation (J.
Diamond)

Homo sapiens from genetic standpoint
– humans are still late paleolithic
preagricultural hunters and gatherers
(35,000yrs ago)
Rise of new disease profile
 Decline in environmental/ecological
diversity
 Decline in food diversity

Pastoralism

Pastoral societies are those in which a
sizeable proportion of their subsistence is
based on the herding of animals within a set
of spatially dispersed natural resources
(vegetation, water, etc.).
Pastoralism





herders acquire much of their food by raising,
caring for, and subsisting on the products of
domesticated animals
many pastoralist/herders cultivate
many acquire bulk of their calories from their
crops rather than their animals or through
trade
herds subsist on natural forage and must be
moved to where the forage naturally occurs
Some move all the time, others move
seasonally
characteristic features
nomadism - entire group moves or
transhumance - only part of the group
moves; some groups sedentary
 interdependence between pastoral and
agricultural groups

– trade animal products for agri. products
from cultivators
– sell livestock, hides, meat, wool, milk,
cheese, or other products for money
– use livestock as beasts of burden
advantages of herding as adaptation
vegetation of grasslands & arid
savannas & of tundra is indigestible by
humans
 livestock turn it into milk, blood, fat,
meat all of which can be eaten or drunk
by herders
 livestock provide insurance against
unpredictable environments of drought
& low yields
 mobility - herds can be moved to fresh
grass and water, avoid the tax man

Alberta Pastoralism or Industrial
Beef Production?
First Nations Pastoralism or
Foraging?
Subsistence Strategies, Resources,
Social relations and Stratification
Cultural rules & social regulations
(social stratification = society)
governing:
• Patterns of labor
• Control of land
• Technology
Patterns of Labor

Sexual Division of Labor

Found in every society

Flexibile

Rigid segregation & Dual sex
– women and men form separate socio-cultural
entities, and make decisions in their own separate
spheres
– severing domestic space from political-economic
space
Patterns of Labor

Age Division of Labor
– Typical of human societies

Cooperation
– Household is the basic unit

Craft Specialization
– Found in both industrial and nonindustrial
societies
Control of Land







Societies allocate (distribute) land
resources
– Culture makes those allocations
meaningful
Food Foragers -- Where to hunt and gather
Horticulturalists -- Distribution of farmland
Pastoralists -- Water and grazing rights
Agriculture – formalized land rights & tenure
Industrial societies -- Private ownership
prevails
Non-industrial societies -- Often controlled
by kinship groups
Technology

Tools and other material equipment,
together with the knowledge of how
to make and use them
• Foragers and pastoralists generally have
fewer and less complex tools than
sedentary peoples
Forms of Exchange (Distribution)

Formalist approach ignores some forms
of exchange
– Reciprocity
– Redistribution
– Market (contract)
What Can be Exchanged or
Distributed?
Material goods
 Symbolic goods
 Labor
 Money
 Services
 Rights
 People

Reciprocity

two individuals or groups pass goods
and/or back and forth with the aim of:
– helping someone in need by sharing goods
with him or her
– creating, maintaining, or strengthening
social relationships
– obtaining goods for oneself
Forms of Reciprocity
generalized - those who give goods or
services do not expect the recipient to
make a return of goods and services at
any definite time in the future
 balanced - goods and services are
given to someone with the expectation
that a return in goods and services of
roughly equal value will occur
 negative - both parties attempt to gain
all they can from the exchange while
giving up as little as possible

Reciprocity and Social Distance

In time (social/historic) and space (social)
 Establishes and maintains social distance
 Can change already established social
distance
Reciprocity and “the Gift”
(M. Mauss)
Obligatory & interested exchanges
 The gift received has to be repaid
 The persons represented are moral
persons (relational) -- clans, tribes,
families, castes, classes

Redistribution
the members of an organized group
contribute goods, services, or money
into a common pool or fund
 usually a central authority has the
privilege and responsibility to make
decisions about how the goods,
services, or money later will be
allocated (distributed) among the group
as a whole

– i.e. taxation
Market or contract exchange

forces of supply and demand determine
costs and prices, goods or services are
sold for money, which in turn is used to
purchase other goods, with the ultimate
goals of acquiring more money and
accumulating more goods
– Disinterested
– Legally defined
Ceremonial Exchange & Sacrifice



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
Embodies all forms of exchange
"dramatic enactment of other subjugations," –
social & supra social relations
E.B. Tylor (1889) who associated the sacrifice
with the gift,
Durkheim (1972), and Hubert & Mauss (1964)
whom portrayed sacrifice as opening the
barriers between the sacred and profane.
Evans-Pritchard (1940) described the victim
of the sacrifice as the embodiment of
community
the social dimension of sacrifice, its
celebration and consumption of the fruits of
common labor
The functions of sacrifice
to mediate the arrival or the departure of
the divine
 balances the sacred and the profane.
 a mimesis of death and rebirth

Sacrifice as gift

a request made to a deity as if he were a
human, so sacrifice is a gift made to a deity
as if he were a human"
 food features centrally and persistently in
sacrifice: insofar as sacrifice is a species of
social eating
 distinguish between the actual value the deity
might ascribe the gift, and the interest of the
deity in the homage or the self-abnegation
which might be involved in the offering
 Transformation of actual sacrifices into
substitutions or symbols
– the "essence" of what is offered, rather than in the
thing itself.
Consumption





Not just what we eat but the resources we
use
The economist treats the desire for objects as
an individual urge grounded in psychology
according to the anthropologist it is for
fulfilling social obligations and represents the
distribution of goods as a symptom of the
form of society
Demand (consumption) and desire
Consumption is an aspect of the overall
political economy (Baudrillard & Marx)
Consumption

consumption goods communicate, create
identity and establish relationships
 Consumption -- Not culture free
 Collective regulation of demand/consumption
 Social regulation of the desire for goods and
services
– Free trade
– Ethos of limited good
Consumption

Consumption excludes as well as includes
– the pattern of their flow shows up the form of
society

consumption is the framework of desire that is
in each individual's head (psychological),
itself a manifestation of the collective
(cultural) construction of a structure of
meaning of objects of consumption and a
parallel structure of people
 Goods and services consumed circulate
regimes of value (Appadurai)
 Prestige group, class, and
taste/demand/consumption (Bourdieu)
– The social life of things (Appadurai)
Substantivist Approach Redux
Economic systems (production,
distribution, consumption) socially and
culturally produce and reproduce social
differences (social stratification or
structure)
 Economic systems enacted within and
between societies (social structure)

– This action (agency) made meaningful
through and in culture

Economic systems always social &
cultural systems