MAKING A LIVING:
GETTING FOOD
FORAGERS or GATHERERS AND HUNTERS
• Subsistence derived
from a combination
of gathering and
hunting
• Survival of foraging
economies still
survive because their
environment not
suitable to food
production.
A contemporary forager
from Australia’s Cape York
peninsula collects eggs from
the nest of a magpie goose.
Correlates of Foraging
• Band-organization (30-50)
people -- flexibility allows for
seasonal adjustments.
• Mobile, at least seasonally
nomadic -- Pattern of
congregation and dispersal
• Bands flexible in composition.
• No permanent attachment to
group or land.
• Access to resources held
communally.
• Individual ownership of food,
tools and other goods but
strong pressure to share.
!Kung
• Little difference in
wealth, few
material goods
• Social and political
organization are
simple
At most, headman
without authority
• Social control is
informal
• Limited means of
food storage
The Agta of the Phillippines
live by hunting, gathering,
fishing and exchange with
lowland farmers
•No full-time specialists
•Little warfare (conflict between groups)
• Typical genderbased division of
labor with 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)
Wide Variation in characteristics across H-G societies
degree of dependence on hunting vs. gathering
gender roles/ gender status
technologies used
Political organization
Foraging
Worldwide distribution of recent hunter-gatherers.
recent foragers have often been used to
understand prehistoric humans
Caveats
• Now in least desirable
environments:
tundra, desert, rain
forest
• Cultural changes in last
20,000 years
• Natural environment has
changed
• Affected by other people
Horticulture
• non-intensive plant
cultivation, based on the
use of simple tools and
cyclical, non-continuous
use crop lands.
• Slash-and-burn or
swidden cultivation and
shifting cultivation are
alternative labels for
horticulture.
• About 300 million people
depended primarily on
swidden cultivation for
subsistence.
slash-and-burn horticulture
Ranomafana, Madagascar.
Horticulturists
–Slash-and-burn agriculture
•Cyclical process
•Burned vegetation,
ashes nourish land
•Land left fallow for
several years
•Tend to be less nomadic
and more sedentary than
foragers
–Cultures include:
•Yanomamö
•Tsembaga
•Iroquois
Women planting taro
in New Guinea
• Groups range from 100 to more than 5,000
• Relatively settled, but nomadic within limits
• Location of villages is shifted periodically to keep the
near areas being cultivated but even so, villages usually
remain in each location for several consecutive years.
South American farmers. Women tend to be the
main producers in horticultural societies.
Horticultural Adaptations
• Gardening, using tools that require
human power
• Domesticated plants
• Shift in emphasis on role of women in
kinship
• Sedentism
• Increased labor intensity
• Surpluses
• Social stratification
• notions of private property, and
ownership of land
• warfare
Pastoralists
– Subsistence based on
care of domesticated
animals
– Migration follows herds
– Examples: Bedouins,
Nuer Lapps,
– East African cattle
complex
• Supplement diet with
gardens
• Largely eat blood
and milk from cattle,
not meat
Bedouins
Pastoralism
A female pastoralist who is a member of the Kirgiz
ethnic group in Xinjiang Province, China.
Pastoral Nomadism
all members of the pastoral society follow the
herd throughout the year. (Iran)
Transhumance
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).
East African cattle complex
members of such economies may get agricultural produce
through trade or their own subsidiary cultivation
Agriculture
•cultivation involving continuous use of crop land more
labor-intensive than horticulture due to needs generated
by farm animals and crop land formation)
•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.
Agriculture
Irrigated and terraced rice fields used by the rice farmers of
Luzon in the Philippines.
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.
• Intensified food production is associated with sedentism and rapid
population increase.
Top: Egyptian shaduf
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.