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Making a Living
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Adaptive Strategies
Foraging
Cultivation
Pastoralism
Modes of Production
Economizing and Maximization
Distribution, Exchange
Potlatching
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Adaptive Strategies
• Advent of food production fueled major
changes in human life
– Formation of larger social and political
systems - eventually states
– Yehudi Cohen used term adaptive strategy
to describe a group's system of economic
production
• Developed typology of societies based on
correlation between economies and social
features.
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Adaptive Strategies
• Yehudi Cohen included 5 adaptive
strategies
– Foraging
– Horticulture
– Agriculture
– Pastoralism
– Industrialism
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Yehudi Cohen’s Adaptive Strategies (Economic
Typology) Summarized
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Foraging
• Foraging economies have relied on
nature to make their living
– All foragers rely on natural resources for
subsistence, rather than controlling plant
and animal reproduction.
– Foraging survived mainly in environments
that posed major obstacles to food
production
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Foraging
• Correlates of Foraging
– Correlations – association or covariation
between two or more variables
– People who subsist by hunting, gathering, and
fishing often live in band-organized societies
• Band – small group of fewer than 100 people
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Foraging
• Typical characteristic of foraging
societies is mobility
– Fictive Kinship – personal relationships
modeled on kinship
– All human societies have some kind of
division of labor based on gender
• Men typically hunt and fish
• Women gather and collect
– All foragers make social distinctions based
on age
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Horticulture
• Cultivation that makes intensive use of
none of factors of production: land,
labor, capital, and machinery
– Use simple tools
– Field not permanently cultivated
• Slash-and-burn cultivation
• Shifting cultivation
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Agriculture
• Cultivation that requires more labor than
horticulture does, because it uses land
intensively and continuously
• Domesticated animals
– Many agriculturalists use animals as
means of production
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Cultivation
• Terracing
– Labor necessary to build and maintain a
system of terraces is great
• Irrigation
– Can cultivate a plot year after year
– Capital investment that increases in value
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Cultivation
• Costs and Benefits of Agriculture
– Long-term yield per area is far greater and
more dependable
– Agriculture societies tend to be more
densely populated than are horticultural
ones
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The Cultivation Continuum
• Intermediate economies, combining
horticulture and agricultural features,
exist
– Horticulture always uses a fallow period
whereas agriculture does not
– Until recently, horticulture was main form of
cultivation in Africa, Southeast Asia,
Pacific islands, Mexico, Central America,
and South American tropical forest
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Intensification: People and the
Environment
• Intensive cultivators are sedentary
people
• Agricultural economies grow
increasingly specialized – focusing on:
– One or a few caloric staples, such as rice
– Animals that are raised
• Agricultural economies also pose a
series of regulatory problems – which
central governments often have arisen
to solve
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Pastoralism
• Pastoralists – herders whose activities
focus on such domesticated animals as
cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and yak
– Herders attempt to protect their animals
and to ensure their reproduction in return
for food and other products
– Herders typically make direct use of their
herds for food
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Pastoralists
• Before the Industrial Revolution,
pastoralism almost totally confined to
the Old World
– Pastoral Nomadism – members of
pastoral society follow herd throughout the
year
– Transhumance – part of group moves with
herd, but most stay in the home village
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Modes of Production
• Economy – system of production,
distribution, and consumption of resources
• Mode of production – way of
organizing production; “set of social
relations through which labor is
deployed to wrest energy from nature
using tools, skills, organization, and
knowledge” (Wolf, 1982)
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Production in
Nonindustrial Populations
• Division of economic labor related to age
and gender a cultural universal, but
specific tasks assigned to each sex and
age varies
– Betsilio of Madagascar have 2 stages of
teamwork in rice cultivation
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Means of Production
• Means, or Factors, of Production –
include land, labor, technology, and
capital
• Land
– Land less permanent among foragers than
it is for food producers
– Among food producers, rights to means of
production also come through kinship and
marriage
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Modes of Production
• Labor, tools, and specialization
– In nonindustrial societies, access to land
and labor comes through social links
• Alienation in Industrial Economies
– When factory workers produce for sale and
for their employer's profit, rather than for
their own use, they may be alienated from
the items they make
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Economizing and Maximization
• How are production, distribution, and
consumption organized in different
societies?
• What motivates people in different
cultures to produce, distribute or
exchange, and consume?
– Anthropologists view both economic
systems and motivations in a cross-cultural
perspective
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Economizing and Maximization
• Economizing – rational allocation of
scarce means (or resources) to alternative
ends
• Idea that individuals choose to
maximize profits basic assumption of
classical economist of 19th century
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Economizing and Maximization
• Some economists recognize individuals
may be motivated by other goals
– Maximize profit
– Wealth
– Prestige
– Pleasure
– Comfort
– Social Harmony
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Economizing and Maximization
• Alternative Ends
– People devote some of their time and
energy to building up subsistence fund
– Citizens of nonindustrial states also
allocate scarce resources to a rent fund,
resources that people render to an
individual or agency that is superior
politically or economically
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Economizing and Maximization
• Alternative Ends
– Peasants – small-scale agriculturalists
who live in nonindustrial states and have
rent fund obligations
• Live in state – organized societies
• Produce food without elaborate technology
• Pay rent to landlords
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Distribution, Exchange
• The Market Principle
– “Organizational process of purchase and
sale at money price” (Dalton 1967)
• Value set by supply and demand
• Redistribution
– Operates when goods, services, or their
equivalent, move from local level to a
center
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Distribution, Exchange
• Reciprocity
– Exchange between social equals, normally
related by kinship, marriage, or close
personal tie
– Dominant in more egalitarian societies
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Distribution, Exchange
• Three types of reciprocity
– Generalized reciprocity – giving with no
specific expectation of exchange
– Balanced reciprocity – exchanges
between people who are more distantly
related than are members of the same
band or household
– Negative reciprocity – dealing with
people outside or on the fringes of their
social systems
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Coexistence of Exchange Principles
• In North America, market principle governs
most exchanges
• Also support redistribution and generalized
reciprocity
– Balanced reciprocity would be out of place in
foraging band
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Potlatching
• Festive event within a regional
exchange system among tribes of the
north Pacific Coast of North America
– Some tribes still practice the potlatch
– Potlatches traditionally gave away food,
blankets, pieces of copper, or other items
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Potlatching
• If profit motive universal, how does one
explain the potlach, in which wealth is
given away?
– Potlaching also served to prevent the
development of socioeconomic
stratification, a system of social classes
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Location of Potlaching Groups
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