MAKING A LIVING:
GETTING FOOD
ADAPTIVE STRATEGIES
1. Foraging
2. Horticulture
3. Pastoralism
4. Agriculture
5. Industrialism
FORAGERS or GATHERERS AND HUNTERS
• Subsistence derived
from a combination of
gathering, hunting and
fishing
• Foraging economies
still survive because
their environment is
not suitable for food
A contemporary forager from
production.
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 Ju/’hoansi (!Kung)
group or land.
• Access to resources held
communally.
• Individual ownership of food,
tools and other goods but
strong pressure to share.
• 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
• No full-time specialists
• Little warfare (conflict
The Agta (Philippines) live by hunting,
between groups)
gathering, fishing and exchange with lowland
farmers
• 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 foraging 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 frees cultivation
from seasonal domination.
Egyptian shaduf
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.
• Larger, permanent populations
and organization of labour
results in a centralized political
structure – states
• High degree of specialization
• Hierarchical social structure
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.