Making a Living
Nanda, Chapter 5
Culture is Patterned…
Humans have needs in common:
Food
Water
Shelter
Humans Have Resources in Common:
Ecology
Environment
Climate
Technology
Social Organization
Major Subsistence Strategies
• Foraging
• Pastoralism
• Horticulture
• Agriculture
• Industrialism
Subsistence Strategies
• Until about 10,000 years ago, humans lived by
foraging.
• As tools improved, foragers spread out and
developed diverse cultures, arriving in the
Americas and Australia about 25,000 years ago.
Subsistence Strategies
• About 10,000 years ago, human groups in the
Old World, and 4,000 years later in the New
World, began to domesticate plants and
animals.
• The domestication of plants and animals
supported increased populations and sedentary
village life became widespread.
Subsistence Strategies
• The Industrial Revolution involved the
replacement of human and animal energy by
machines.
• In a typical nonindustrial society, more than
80% of the population is involved in food
production; in a highly industrialized society,
10% of the people produce food for the other
90%.
Subsistence Strategy
• Each subsistence strategy:
• supports a characteristic level of population density.
• has a different level of productivity.
• has a different level of efficiency.
Foraging
• Relies on food naturally available in the environment
• Strategy for 99% of the time humans have been on earth
• Limits population growth and complexity of social organization
Pastoralism
• Caring for domesticated animals which produce meat and milk
• Involves a complex interaction among animals, land, and people
• Found along with cultivation or trading relations with food
cultivators
Transhumant Pastoralism
• Found mostly in East Africa
• Men and boys move the animals throughout the year as pastures
become available at different altitudes or in different climatic
zones.
• Women and children and some men remain at a permanent village
site.
Nomadic Pastoralism
• The whole population moves with the herds throughout the year
• There are no permanent villages.
Maasai With Cattle
Here, East
African Maasai
are “bloodletting”
on this calf.
What kind of
relationships
would you expect
between
pastoralists and
their animals?
Horticultural
• Production of plants using non-mechanized technology
• Typically a tropical forest adaptation that requires cutting and
burning the jungle to clear fields
• Swidden (slash and burn): Clearing fields by felling trees and
burning the brush
Agriculture
• Production of plants using plows, animals, and soil and water
control
• Associated with:
Sedentary villages
Occupational diversity
Social stratification
Peasants
• Food-producing populations that are incorporated politically,
economically, and culturally into nation-states
Transitions to Industrial Economy
Affected many aspects of society:
•
•
•
•
•
Population growth
Expanded consumption of resources
International expansion
Occupational specialization
Shift from subsistence strategies to wage labor
Globalization
• Industrialism today has outgrown national boundaries.
• The result has been great movement of resources, capital, and
population, as the whole world has gradually been drawn into the
global economy.
Economic Behavior
Nanda, Chapter 6
Economics: Studies the Way People
Organize to make Use of Resources
Behavior:
• People want more than the natural resources provide
• People are social creatures
• An economic system is constructed to govern production
distribution and consumption
Economic System
• The part of society that deals with production, distribution, and
consumption of goods and services
• The way production is organized has consequences for the family
and the political system.
• Economics is embedded in the social process and cultural pattern.
Economic Behavior
• Choosing a course of action that pursues the course of perceived
maximum benefit
Allocating Resources
• Each society has rules to regulate access to resources.
• Productive resources are used to create other goods or
information.
• Land, water, tools, and knowledge are productive resources.
Productive Resources: Foragers
• Foraging requires people to spread out over a large area.
• Boundaries can be adjusted as the availability of resources
change.
• Where resources are scarce and large areas are needed to support
the population, boundaries are not usually defended.
• Where resources are abundant, groups may be more inclined to
defend their territory.
Productive Resources: Pastoralists
• The most critical resources are livestock and land.
• Livestock are owned and managed by individuals, land and water
are generally not owned.
Productive Resources: Pastoralists
• In the rainy season, cattle graze in areas unsuitable for farming.
• In the dry season, they move to areas occupied by farmers.
• Agreements with landowners allow animals to graze on the stubble
from harvested fields.
Productive Resources: Horticulturists
• In horticulture societies, land is communally owned by an
extended kin group.
• Designated officials allocate rights to use land, which may not be
sold.
• Since almost everyone belongs to a land-controlling kin group, few
are deprived of access to this basic resource.
Productive Resources: Horticulturists
• Often involves investing labor in clearing, cultivating, and
maintaining land
• The rights to cleared land and its products are vested in those who
work it.
• Individuals may die while the land is still productive, so a system
of inheritance is usually provided.
Productive Resources: Agriculturists
• Enormous amounts of labor are invested in the land and large
quantities of food are produced.
• Control of the land becomes an important source of wealth and
power.
• Land ownership moves from the kin group to the individual or
family.
• The owner has the right to keep others off the land and dispose of
it as he or she wishes.
Productive Resources: Intensive Cultivation
• Land and other productive resources are likely to be owned by an
elite group.
• Most fieldwork is done by laborers, often referred to as peasants.
• Landowners enjoy relatively high standards of living, but peasants
do not.
Organizing Labor
• In small-scale preindustrial and peasant economies, the household
or some extended kin group is the basic unit of production and
consumption.
• Labor is just one aspect of membership in a social group such as
the family.
Organizing Labor
• In Western society, work has important social implications.
• For many people, particularly members of the middle classes,
work is a source of self-respect, challenge, growth, and personal
fulfillment.
Households
• In most nonindustrial societies, production is based around the
household.
• The household is an economic unit, people united by kinship or
other links who share a residence and organize production,
consumption, and distribution among themselves.
Gendered Division of Labor
• In all human societies, some tasks are considered appropriate for
women and others appropriate for men.
• At some level, the sexual division of labor is biological since only
women can bear and nurse children.
• Caring for infants is almost always a female role and usually
central to female identity.
Specialization in Complex Societies
• The division of labor becomes more specialized as the population
increases and agricultural production intensifies.
• Occupational specialization spreads as individuals are able to
exchange services or products for food and wealth.
• Specialists are likely to include soldiers, government officials, and
members of the priesthood as well as artisans, craftsmen and
merchants.
Specialized Labor
How does this work in a sneaker factory in Mexico
differ from that of a forager?
Patterns of Exchange
• Reciprocity
• Redistribution
• Market
Types of Reciprocity
• Generalized – Distribution of goods with no specific return
expected
• Balanced – Exchange of goods of equal value, with an obligation to
return them.
• Negative – Exchange conducted for material advantage
Generalized Reciprocity
• Generalized reciprocity involving food is an important social
mechanism among foraging peoples.
• Hunters distribute meat among members of the kin group or camp.
• Each person or family gets an equal share or a share dependent on
its kinship relationship to the hunter.
Generalized Reciprocity
• Hunters gain satisfaction from accomplishing a highly skilled and
difficult task.
• Because all people in the society are bound by the same rules, the
system gives them all opportunity to give and receive.
Balanced Reciprocity
• Involves greater social distance and includes the obligation to
return, within a reasonable time limit, goods of nearly equal value
to those given
• Characteristic of trading relations among non-industrialized
peoples without market economies
Kula Ring
• Pattern of exchange among trading partners in the Trobriands and
other South Pacific islands
• The kula trade moves two types of prestige goods from island to
island around the Kula circle.
• Soulava, necklaces of red shell, move in a clockwise
direction.
• Mwali, bracelets of white shell, move
counterclockwise.
Kula Ring
Although Kula items can be owned and may be taken
out of circulation, people generally hold them for a
while and then pass them on.
Kula Ring
Kula trading
partnerships are
lifelong affairs, and
their details are fixed
by tradition.
Redistribution
• Exchange in which goods are collected from members of the group
and then redistributed to the group
Leveling Mechanism
• A practice, value, or form of social organization that evens out
wealth in a society
• If generosity rather than the accumulation of wealth is the basis
for prestige, those who desire prestige will distribute much of
their wealth.
Potlatch
• A form of redistribution involving competitive feasting practiced
among Northwest Coast Native Americans
Cargo System
• A ritual system common in Central and South America in which
wealthy people are required to hold a series of costly ceremonial
offices
Market Exchange
• Economic system in which goods and services are bought and sold
at a price determined by supply and demand
• Impersonal and occurs without regard to the social position of the
participants
• When this is the key economic institution, social and political
goals are less important than financial goals.
Capitalism
• Economic system in which:
• people work for wages.
• land and goods are privately owned.
• capital is invested for individual profit.
• A small part of the population owns most of the resources or
capital goods.