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CHAPTER 11: MAKING A LIVING
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter introduces students to the variety of economic systems found in human societies. In
particular, it focuses on the distinctions between foraging, horticulture, agriculture, and pastoralism, and
on the various principles that govern distribution and exchange.
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
1.
Know what distinguishes an adaptive strategy, and identify the five adaptive strategies in Cohen’s
typology of societies. How does Cohen link economy and social features?
2.
Understand what foraging, horticulture, and agriculture entail, and know the predominant social
features often correlated with these adaptive strategies in Cohen’s typology and in particular
ethnographic studies. Be familiar with the features of agriculture that distinguish it from
horticulture.
3.
Know what pastoralism entails, distinguish between pastoral nomadism and transhumance, and
be able to discuss the social features typically found in pastoral societies.
4.
Consider how contemporary foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, and pastoralists live in
nation-states and potentially engage in several different adaptive strategies and/or forms of labor.
5.
Distinguish between modes and means of production, and understand how industrialism leads to
the alienation of a worker from the product of his or her labor.
6.
Know the subject matter of economic anthropology. In particular, be able to discuss how
anthropologists and anthropological studies respond to classic economic theories that posit the
profit motive as universal.
7.
Know the different forms of distribution and exchange. In particular, be able to distinguish
among the market principle, redistribution, and the various forms of reciprocity.
8.
Be familiar with the potlatch. Specifically, know what it is, where it is found, how it has changed
through time, and how it fosters social relationships and alliances both locally and regionally.
From Kottak’s discussion, what arguments have anthropologists made for the significance of the
potlatch?
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Adaptive Strategies
A. Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to describe a society’s system of economic
production.
1. Cohen argued that the most important reason for similarities between two or more
unrelated societies is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy.
2. Cohen developed a typology of societies based on correlations between their
economies and their social forms; this typology includes five adaptive strategies:
foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, and industrialism.
B. Foraging
1. Until 10,000 years ago all humans were foragers.
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2. Most foragers eventually turned to food production, and those foragers who still exist
have at least some dependence on food production or on food producers.
3. All modern foragers live in nation-states, depend to some extent on government
assistance, and are influenced by national and international policies and political and
economic events in the world system.
4. Throughout the world, foraging survived mainly in environments that posed major
obstacles to food production.
5. A few groups living in environments suitable for food production nevertheless
remained foragers because they could support themselves adequately by hunting and
gathering.
C. Correlates of Foraging
1. People who subsisted by hunting and gathering often, but not always, lived in bandorganized societies.
a. Bands were small groups of fewer than a hundred people, all related by
kinship or marriage.
b. Among some foragers, band size stayed roughly constant throughout the
year; in other foraging societies, bands split up during part of the year.
2. Members of foraging societies typically were socially mobile, having the ability to
join any band to which they had kin or marital links.
3. All human societies have some kind of division of labor based on gender.
a. Among foragers, men typically hunted and fished while women gathered and
collected.
b. Among foragers in tropical and semitropical areas, gathering tended to
contribute more to the diet than hunting and fishing did.
4. All foraging societies had social distinctions based on age.
a. Old people frequently were respected for their special knowledge of ritual
and practical matters.
b. Most foraging societies were egalitarian (contrasts in prestige are minor and
based on age and gender).
II. Cultivation
A. Horticulture
1. Horticulture is cultivation that does not make intensive use of land, labor, capital, or
machinery.
2. Horticulture involves the use of simple tools and frequently slash-and-burn
techniques.
3. Horticulture is also called shifting cultivation because horticulturalists shift between
plots of land, leaving areas with exhausted soil or thick weed cover to lie fallow for
several years before returning to cultivate them once agains.
B. Agriculture
1. Agriculture is cultivation that involves intensive and continuous use of land.
2. Agriculture is more labor intensive because of its use of domesticated animals,
irrigation, and/or terracing.
3. Many agriculturalists use animals for transport, as cultivating machines, and for their
manure.
4. Irrigation
a. Irrigation allows agriculturalists to schedule their planting in advance (they
do not have to wait for a rainy season), and it makes it possible to cultivate a
plot year after year.
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b. Irrigation enriches soil by creating ecosystems with several species of plants
and animals, many of them minute organisms, whose wastes fertilize the
land.
5. Terracing is an agricultural technique that allows steep hillsides to be cultivated and
irrigated.
6. Costs and Benefits of Agriculture
a. An agricultural field does not necessarily produce a higher single-year yield
than does a horticultural plot.
b. Because agriculture is very labor intensive (e.g., construction and
maintenance of irrigation systems and terraces, care of animals), its yield
relative to the labor invested is lower than that of horticulture.
c. The main advantage of agriculture is that its long-term yield per area is far
greater and more dependable (agricultural land can yield one or two crops
annually for years, or even generations).
C. Agricultural Intensification: People and the Environment
1. Agriculture has allowed human populations to move into (and transform) a much
wider range of environments than was possible prior to the development of
cultivation.
2. Intensified food production is associated with sedentism; growth in the size and
density of populations; and increased regulation of interpersonal relations, land,
labor, and other resources.
3. Intensive agriculture can have significant environmental effects, such as increased
disease, deforestation, and loss of ecological diversity.
III. Pastoralism
A. Pastoral economies are based on herds of domesticated animals (e.g., cattle, sheep, goats,
camels, yaks, reindeer).
B. Many pastoralists live in symbiosis with their herds (symbiosis is an obligatory interaction
between groups that is beneficial to each).
C. Pastoralists typically use their herds for food.
D. It is impossible to base subsistence solely on animals, so most pastoralists supplement their
diets by hunting, gathering, fishing, cultivating, or trading.
E. Two patterns of movement occur with pastoralism: nomadism and transhumance.
1. In pastoral nomadism, the entire group—women, men, and children—moves with the
animals throughout the year.
2. With transhumance, part of the group moves with the herds, but most people stay in
the home village.
3. Pastoral nomads trade for crops and other products with more sedentary people
during their annual movement, while in transhumant societies, the people who remain
in year-round villages can grow their own crops.
IV. Economic Systems
A. An economy is a system of production, distribution, and consumption of resources, and
economics is the study of such systems.
B. Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
C. A mode of production is 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,” in the words of anthropologist Eric Wolf.
1. In the capitalist mode of production, money buys labor power, and there is a social
gap between the people (bosses and workers) involved in the production process.
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2. In nonindustrial societies, the mode of production is kin-based; labor usually is not
bought but is given as a social obligation
3. Societies with the same adaptive strategy tend to have a similar mode of production,
and differences in the mode of production within a given strategy may reflect
differences in environments, target resources, or cultural traditions.
D. Production in Nonindustrial Societies
1. All societies divide economic labor according to gender and age, but the nature of
these divisions varies from society to society.
2. In nonindustrial societies there is a more intimate relationship between the worker
and the means of production than there is in industrial nations.
E. Means of Production
1. Means (or factors) of production include land (territory), labor, and technology.
2. Land
a. Among foragers, ties between people and land are less permanent than they
are among food producers.
b. Descent groups (groups whose members claim common ancestry) are
common among nonindustrial food producers, and those who descend from
the founder share the group’s territory and resources.
3. Labor, Tools, and Specialization
a. In nonindustrial societies, access to both land and labor comes through social
links such as kinship, marriage, and descent.
b. Mutual aid in production is just one aspect of ongoing social relations.
c. In nonindustrial societies, neither technology nor technical knowledge is as
specialized as it is in states.
d. Craft specialization (e.g., ceramic production) does occur in some tribal
societies.
F. Alienation in Industrial Economies
1. Industrial Economies
a. In industrial economies, a worker is alienated from the product of her or his
work when the product is sold and the profits going to an employer.
b. As a consequence of such alienation, the worker has less pride in and
personal identification with their products.
c. Industrial workers also have impersonal relations with their coworkers and
employers.
2. Nonindustrial Societies
a. In nonindustrial societies, people usually have more personal investment and
a greater sense of accomplishment in their products than do workers in
industrial economies.
b. In nonindustrial societies, economy is embedded in society; the relations of
production, distribution, and consumption are social relations with economic
aspects.
3. A Case of Industrial Alienation
a. Female factory workers in Malaysia suffer from difficult and exhausting
work conditions, constant male supervision, low wages, job uncertainty, etc.
b. Spirit possession of female factory workers may represent an unconscious
protest against labor discipline and male control of the industrial setting.
V. Economizing and Maximization
A. Classical economic theory assumes that individuals act rationally and strive to maximize
profit (the profit motive).
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B. Anthropology demonstrates that people are not always motivated by the desire to maximize
profit—that depending on the society and the situation, people may try to maximize profit,
wealth, prestige, pleasure, comfort, or social harmony.
C. Alternative Ends
1. Throughout the world, people invest their scarce resources in subsistence,
replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent funds.
a. People devote some of their time and energy to building up a subsistence
fund, working to replace the calories they use in their daily activity.
b. People invest in a replacement fund, maintaining their technology and other
items essential to production and to everyday life.
c. People invest in a social fund, helping their friends, relatives, in-laws, and
neighbors.
d. Ceremonial fund refers to expenditures on ceremonies or rituals.
e. People in nonindustrial societies also devote resources to a rent fund,
rendering resources to an individual or agency that is superior politically or
economically.
2. Peasants are small-scale agriculturalists who live in nonindustrial states and have rent
fund obligations.
a. Peasants produce to feed themselves, to sell their produce, and to pay rent.
b. All peasants live in state-organized societies and produce food without the
elaborate technology of modern farming or agribusiness.
c. Often the rent fund becomes peasants’ foremost obligation (even at the
expense of their own diets).
VI. Distribution, Exchange
A. Polanyi defined three principles that guide exchanges: the market principle, redistribution,
and reciprocity.
B. The Market Principle
1. The market principle dominates in capitalist economies.
2. With market exchange, items are bought and sold, using money, with the goal of
maximizing profit, and value is determined by the law of supply and demand.
3. Bargaining is characteristic of market-principle exchanges.
C. Redistribution
1. Redistribution operates when goods, services, or their equivalent move from the local
level to a center, usually through a hierarchy of officials who may consume some of
the goods.
2. Eventually, goods are redistributed—that is, they flow in the reverse direction, down
through the hierarchy and back to the local level.
D. Reciprocity
1. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals, who are normally related by kinship,
marriage, or another close personal tie.
2. Reciprocity is dominant in more egalitarian societies (foragers, cultivators, and
pastoralists).
3. There are three degrees of reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative.
4. Generalized Reciprocity
a. With generalized reciprocity, which is prevalent among foragers, someone
gives to another person and expects nothing concrete or immediate in return.
b. Such exchanges are expressions of personal relationships, rather than
primarily economic transactions.
5. Balanced Reciprocity
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a. With balanced reciprocity, exchange occurs between people who are more
distantly related than are members of the same band or household, and
reciprocation is expected.
b. Although reciprocation need not come immediately, complete failure to
reciprocate will strain the social relationship.
6. Negative Reciprocity
a. Negative reciprocity involves exchanges with people outside or on the
fringes of a social system.
b. In such exchanges, which are full of ambiguity and distrust (at least initially),
each partner attempts to maximize profit and expects an immediate return.
E. Coexistence of Exchange Principles
1. The different exchange principles can all be present in the same society, although
they govern different kinds of transactions.
2. Although most exchanges in the United States are governed by the market principle,
redistribution and reciprocal (both generalized and balanced) exchanges also occur.
F. Potlatching
1. Potlatches, practiced by tribes of the North Pacific Coast of North America, are a
widely studied ritual in which sponsors (assisted by members of their communities)
gave away resources in exchange for greater prestige.
2. Potlatching tribes (such as the Kwakiutl and the Salish) were foragers, but they lived
in sedentary villages and had chiefs.
3. Potlatches traditionally were viewed as economically wasteful and driven by
irrational desires for prestige.
4. Cultural ecology (a theoretical school that attempts to interpret cultural practices in
terms of their long-term role in helping humans adapt to their environment) suggests
instead that customs such as the potlatch are cultural adaptations to alternating
periods of local abundance and shortage.
a. Despite the overall richness of the North Pacific coastal environment,
resources fluctuated from year to year and place to place.
b. Potlatching linked villages together in a regional economy—an exchange
system that distributed food and wealth from wealthy to needy communities,
and rewarded potlatch sponsors and their villages with prestige.
VII. Anthropology Today: Scarcity and the Betsileo
A. Kottak describes some of his fieldwork experiences in Madagascar, particularly in the
Betsileo village of Ivato, a principle research site where he made many friends.
B. People in Ivato felt that (in contrast to Americans) they had little need of money because they
produced almost everything they used, and that they had all they needed.
1. The Ivatans’ attitudes illustrate that the notion of scarcity is variable, not universal.
2. Although shortages do arise in nonindustrial societies, the concept of scarcity
(insufficient means) is much less developed in stable subsistence-oriented societies
than in industrial societies, particularly as reliance on consumer goods increases.
C. Over the past several decades, the concepts of scarcity, commerce, and negative reciprocity
have become prevalent among the Betsileo as a result of rapid population growth, agricultural
intensification (including the cultivation of cash crops), and increasing demand for cash.
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LECTURE TOPICS
1.
Compare horticulture and agriculture. What are the main similarities and differences between these
two subsistence strategies? What are the costs and benefits of agriculture relative to horticulture?
Explore the relationships between agriculture and variables such as population growth and density,
sedentism, health and disease, and the environment.
2.
Consider how contemporary foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, and pastoralists live in
nation-states and potentially engage in several different adaptive strategies and/or forms of labor.
This discussion could highlight how contemporary foragers struggle with competing claims to their
traditional foraging lands and, with one ethnographic case as a focus, address the status of foraging
men and women in contemporary nation-states and in the “modern world system.”
3.
Discuss how Malinowski’s fundamental work on the Kula ring of the Trobriand Islands challenged
classic economic theories which posited a universal human tendency toward economic
rationalization.
4.
With Kottak’s definitions in mind, discuss the socio-economic “ends” (subsistence, replacement,
social, ceremonial, rent) as they occur in your own life or perhaps those of your students. Compare
and contrast allocations to these “funds” with a cross-cultural ethnographic study of another
historical time period and/or place.
5.
Discuss the coexistence of all three exchange principles in the contemporary United States
(including the three forms of reciprocity). In order to provide examples, draw upon what are likely
to be typical social relations and exchanges in the daily lives of you and your students.
SUGGESTED FILMS
The Omnivore: Satisfying Humanity’s Hunger
1997 48 minutes
This film explores the development of humankind’s efforts to subsist, beginning with hunting and
gathering and continuing up to agriculture. From Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Nenetsi Samoyeds: Nomads of the Siberian Tundra
1997 52 minutes
This film depicts the life of the nomadic Nenetsi reindeer herdsmen of the Yamal Peninsula. The film
follows the Nenetsi on their spring journey to southern grazing lands. From Films for the Humanities and
Sciences.
N!ai: The Story of a !Kung Woman
1980 59 minutes
This film provides an historical overview of the daily life of the !Kung, a gathering and hunting people in
South Africa. It presents the story of N!ai, a !Kung woman, from childhood to her mid-thirties. The film
shows the contrast in lifestyle between traditional foraging of thirty years ago and life in a government
settlement in Namibia in 1978. From the Odyssey Series.
Kula: Ring of Power
2000 52 minutes
This film explores the Kula exchange among the Trobriand Islanders as it follows chief Nalabatau as he
participates in the Kula. A coproduction with National Geographic Explorer, ZDF Germany, and the
Finnish Broadcasting Corporation. A film by Sky Visuals, distributed by the University of Hawaii Press
for Cowrie Books.
Series: Netsilik Eskimos
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1967 A series of 9 films in 21 half-hour segments.
This series follows a group of Netsilik Eskimos during their seasonal movements and shifting subsistence
strategies. Titles in the series: At the Caribou Crossing Place (2 segments); At the Autumn River Camp
(2 segments); At the Winter Sea-Ice Camp (4 segments); Jigging for Lake Trout (1 segment); At the
Spring Sea-Ice Camp (3 segments); Group Hunting on the Spring Ice (3 segments); Stalking Seal on the
Spring Ice (2 segments); Building a Kayak (2 segments); Fishing at the Stone Weir (2 segments).
Documentary Educational Resources, Watertown, MA.
The Chinampas
1990 31 minutes
This film discusses the traditional Mexican farming of chinampas—raised fields—of the Xochimilco
region of the Basin of Mexico. University of California, Extension Media Center, Berkeley, CA.
The Feast
1970 29 minutes
This film details a Yanomamo feast involving two villages. Part of the Yanomamo series from
Documentary Educational Resources, Watertown, MA.
Patterns of Subsistence: Food Foragers and Pastoralists
1983 29 minutes
This film examines foraging and pastoral societies, and explores several ancient patterns of subsistence,
some of which are still followed today. The film looks at how foragers (e.g., !Kung, Netsilik Inuit) and
pastoralists (e.g., Nepali sherpas, Iranian Basseris) adapt to widely varying environmental zones. Part of
the series Faces of Culture. From Insight Media.
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