Subsistence, Economy, and Materialist Theories in Anthropology
• Human diversity understood in terms of environment & technology
• Emphasis on:
– Constraints: land, technology, population
– Systematic, integrative relationships
– Evolution and adaptation
Major Theories & Theorists
• 19th century social & cultural evolutionism & universal histories (L.H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor)
• Multilinear evolution & cultural ecology (J. Steward, M. Sahlins)
• Neo-evolutionism (L. White, M. Harris)
• World systems theory (E. Wallerstein)
Patterns of Subsistence
• Food Getting – FORAGING
– hunters & gatherers, gatherers & hunters, fishing
• Food Production – CULTIVATION
– The cultivation continuum
• horticulture (ecological agriculture)
• Agriculture
• Pastoralism
• Industrialism
• Adaptive strategies & constraints
– Environment, technology, population
Subsistence
• the market as economic organizing principle is very recent in terms of human history
• economy oriented toward subsistence (food getting & production) the norm for most of human history
• agriculture (cultivation) also recent (10,000 yrs ago)
• for 100,000 years of human history - foraging (food getting) was the economy of human life
Adaptation and the Anthropology of Subsistence
• Long standing disciplinary concern
• Basis for materialist theoretical orientations
– Theories of social & cultural evolution
Situating Anthropological Theories
EARLY EVOLUTIONISM (late 19TH cent.)
• the idea of linear progress, unilineal social and cultural evolution
– Stages of development
– Humans in nature – subject to laws of nature
– diversity observed represented different stages of evolution
• social Darwinism
Progress Evolving
Nature of humans – Enlightenment Visions
• Rousseau (1712-1778)
– noble savage; romantic primitivism
– Fall of humans from state of natural grace
– ruined by civilization & society
– return to natural state
• Hobbes (1588-1679)
– humans are brutish & selfish
– need strong repressive government
• Locke (1632-1704)
– humans are blank slates, empty closets
– became what experience made them
– Imp. Of education & society
19th Cent. EVOLUTIONISM
major anthropologists & proponents
• Lewis Henry Morgan
• Edward B. Tylor
• Sir James George Frazer
• Others (non-anthropologists)
– Karl Marx
– Herbert Spencer
stages of development/progress of 19th century theories of social and cultural evolution
• savagery - barbarianism – civilization
• simple societies not yet reached higher stages, resembled ancient societies
• complex societies proved cultural evolution
• survivals -> traces of earlier customs (making pottery, superstitions)
Materialist Theories and Evolution
• Universal/General Evolution
– All societies common evolutionary trajectory
• primitive/simple-complex/civilized-foraging to food production
– technological determinism -- cultures advanced through refinements in toolmaking
– tools & economic practices have social implications
– major changes in technology soon followed by changes in society and culture
universal evolution of the 19th cent.
• From simple to complex (primitive to civilized)
• why? usually technology & ability to adapt to environment
– Materialist theoretical orientation
• Europe always the zenith of civilization, complexity
• History understood in terms of the “progress” of Europe
• “primitive” tribes a timeless model of European past
Social Darwinism & Social/Cultural Evolution
• “the survival of the fittest”
– from Darwin's concept of natural selection-used to justify status quo
• Hobbes vision of human nature becomes definition of adaptation
– Humans were brutish and selfish
– Seeking to maximize in favor of their own self interests
FUNCTIONALISM and Materialist Concerns (early 20th cent.)
• B. Malinowski - all cultural traits serve the needs of individuals in a society; they have a function
• basic needs - food, clothing, shelter give rise to secondary needs i.e. need for food leads to the need for cooperation in food collection or production
• all linked together to form an integrated whole - everything functioning together
NEO-EVOLUTIONISM (20th cent.)
• Leslie White
– culture as an energy capturing system
– more advanced technology gives humans more control over energy
– all societies move through same system - technology changes related to capturing energy influence social and cultural forms
• From foragers to horticulturalists to intensive agriculturalists
Cultural Ecology
• Julian Steward - relationship between culture and the environment
• cultural variation found in adaptation to environmental circumstances
• Human ecology is the system & systematic relationships between humans, material life, & environment
• environment not determinant -- societies react to their ecology
• typology of cultures, patterns, sequences
Specific or multi-linear evolution
• specific evolution - adaptive processes in a particular society in a particular environment; changes in one society rather than human society in general
• Multi-linear evolution - cultures have followed different lines of development (rather than general processes), particular to each environment
• Strategies of adaptation - adjustments that individuals make to obtain & use resources and to solve immediate problems
Steward’s culture core
• constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities & economic arrangements
• social, political, religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with those arrangements
CULTURAL MATERIALISM
• Marvin Harris
– Each society must cope with problems of production
– Each society must behaviorally cope with the problem of reproduction (avoiding destructive increases/decreases in pop. size)
– Each society must cope with the necessity of maintaining secure & orderly behavioral relationships
WORLD SYSTEMS (Wallerstein)
• Global economic relations between subsistence strategies, regions, nations
• Capitalism and common political, social, economic, structure
– Core, peripheries, & semi-peripheries
• Relationships of dependency
• World economy — development and predominance of market trade = capitalism
POLITICAL ECOLOGY
• Putting cultural ecology in historical motion
• Still strongly about human/environment relations
• inter-relationships between groups within a world system of political, economic relations
• Attention to an international division of labor
• Temporal framework is history rather than evolution
Levels of Socio-Cultural Integration & Subsistence
• band, tribe, chiefdom, state
– Typology of ideal types
• Foragers and cultivators
• Agriculturalists – intensive cultivation
FORAGING
• hunters & gatherers, gatherers & hunters, fishing
• food getting is dependent on naturally occurring resources, plants & animals
– Naturally occurring?
• Little or no human modification
modern day foragers
• few forgers remaining
• San (!Kung) - Africa; Kalahari desert
• Mbuti - equatorial forests of west & central Africa
• Madagascar and SE Asia
• Aborigines of Australia
• Inuit - hunters (now using snow mobiles & rifles)
Features of Foraging
• small communities in sparsely populated areas
– few hundred people related by kinship & marriage
• mobile lifestyle - no permanent settlements
– no individual land rights
• size of community may vary from season to season, culture to culture
• Band form of social organization
Foraging and Social Stratification
• Egalitarian societies – little social stratification
• social stratification by age & gender (no classes)
• division of labor - age & gender
Foraging and Gender
gender - great deal of diversity
• tendency is for men to hunt & women to gather
• gathering contributes more to daily diet than hunting
• women & men share equal status - more or less, egalitarian society
• Where hunting & fishing dominate - the status of women is lower
Eleanor Leacock on Foragers and Social Stratification
• egalitarian societies do exist where men and women can do different jobs and remain separate but equal
• Control over exchange of scarce resources is related to social stratification in foraging groups
The Problem of Man the Hunter
• man the hunter model ignored evidence for modern foragers: women do some of the hunting
• female gathered goods account for more than half & at times nearly all of what is eaten
• Problem of the archaeological record
woman the gatherer
• Re-focused model of human evolution
• key importance of female gathering
• "lost" female tools in arch. record - fiber carrying nets & baskets
• food sharing rather than hunting key to human evolution
– Food sharing & the need for social relations
Conceptualizing Foragers
• The gender problem
• The “analogy” problem
– “living fossils of early humans,” in 19th century unilineal evolutionism
• Rousseau and Hobbes
– Noble savages or maximizing brutish life
• The “affluent society” (Sahlins)
Generalized Forager Model
Cultural Ecology
• Egalitarianism (lack of private property; no accumulation; constraint of mobility)
• Low population density
• Lack of territoriality
• Minimum of food storage
• Flux in band composition
Forager Mode of Production
• Collective ownership of means of production (land and its resources)
• Right to reciprocal access
• Little emphasis on accumulation (ethos opposing hoarding)
• Total sharing throughout camp
• Equal access to tools necessary to acquire food
• Individual ownership of tools
Professional Primitives
• H-G do not exist apart from more complex societies
• ecological “symbiosis”
• rural proletariat of the political economic (world system) model
• “freedom fighters” of indigenous perspectives
The Cultivation Continuum
• Horticulture or ecological agriculture
• Agriculture
• Pastoralism
Horticulture or Ecological Agriculture
• Some human modification of environment
– gardens & fields & technology
• cultivation method that works in a variety of environments - most common in temperate and tropical forests & savannas
• Cultivation that works with, and to varying extents, mimics the natural ecology
Horticulture/Ecological Agriculture
• growing crops of all kinds with relatively simple tools and methods, in the absence of permanently cultivated fields
• break up soil only using hand tools, hoes, spades, sharpened sticks
• clear land for planting with simple tools, knives, axes, and fire is used to remove trees and grasses
• Little if any use of fertilizers
• Little if any effort towards increase supply of water to the fields
Horticulture or Ecological Agriculture
• cultivation method that works in a variety of environments - most common in temperate and tropical forests & savannas
Horticultural Methods
• Slash & burn
– Associated with poor tropical soils
– Initially big trees are cleared
– Brush is cut and left to dry
– Burned before arrival of rains providing a little fertilisation and clears the plot of weeds
– After several years of use must lie fallow
• Swidden- a garden cultivated by the slash and burn technique.
Kinds of Horticulture or Ecological Agriculture
• Slash & burn or
– shifting cultivation
– Swidden
– extensive agriculture
• dependence on tree crops
– Long term use
Slash and Burn
Perceptions of Horticulturalists
• they’re inefficient, wasteful, ignorant
• Destroyers of the rain forest
• they don’t cut virgin forests
• or
• they rotate crops
• they’re efficient and sustainable
• they have great knowledge of forest resources and desire to maintain the forest
• their livelihoods are threatened by state and international political and economic processes
characteristic features - horticulture
• size of settlements are larger than foragers
– more stable sources of food available
• tend to aggregate into villages - settlements are more permanent, investments of labor into fields, encourages sedentism
• compared to foragers horticulturalists their family and kin invest labor in improving a specific and relatively well defined territory
– property rights = access to resources
– each group laying claim to a specific area for clearing, plantings, residence by applying their labor to it
Social Stratification
• more densely populated areas, sedentary lives
• divisions of labor - age & gender
• land & inheritance - family claims to land; heads of families, resources, claims, political & judicial orgs
• increased specialization - food producers vs. non food producers
Agriculture - intensive cultivation
• a variety of techniques employed that enable the cultivation of permanent fields
• Large-scale human modification of land, plants, animals
Agricultural Techniques
• nutrients back into the fields, use of fertilization and multi cropping
• Plant species are manipulated & fully domesticated
• domesticated animals and fertilization, turned loose into fields after harvest, manure, nutrients back into soil
• more intensive weeding
• Irrigation, dams and runoff, stored water & reservoirs, streams rechanneled, terracing controls water on hillside & mountains
Investments
• greater control over land ->increased outputs/yields
• Increased inputs – Leslie White
• long term production, dependable output
characteristic features
• sedentism, large permanent communities - villages, towns, cities
• growth in population size & density
• surpluses - a cultivator can feed many more people than just him or her self and family
• more need to coordinate land, labor, resources
• more need to regulate relations through governing bodies
• tributes, taxes, rents, private property
Social Stratification
• Surpluses and people
– more people who don't produce food
– high degree of craft specialization
– more complex political organization
– larger differences in wealth and power
Leslie White
• degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work
• amount of energy per capita harnessed & put to work within the culture
• technological means with which this energy is expended
• human need-serving product that accrues from the expenditure of energy
• E (energy) T (technology) = P (product)
food growers & non-food growers
• rural peoples who are integrated into a larger society politically (imposed laws, taxes, rents, etc. from outside their community) & economically (exchange products of their labor for products produced elsewhere)
Increased Coordination – land, labor, resources
• increased need to regulate social relations -- governing bodies arise
4 major civilizations of the old world: association of intensive agriculture with large scale political organization: the state
• Tigris & Euphrates rive valleys of Mesopotamia
• Indus river valley Pakistan
• Shan cities of China
• Nile river
New World Agriculture
• Mayans of the Yucatan
• Toltecs & Aztecs of Mexico
• Incas of Peru
Wet Rice Agriculture: A Case Study
• Sawah – wet rice
• Padi – rice field
Agriculture as Maladaptation (J. Diamond)
• Homo sapiens from genetic standpoint
– humans are still late paleolithic preagricultural hunters and gatherers (35,000yrs ago)
• Rise of new disease profile
• Decline in environmental/ecological diversity
• Decline in food diversity
Pastoralism
• Pastoral societies are those in which a sizeable proportion of their subsistence is based on the herding of animals within a set of spatially dispersed natural resources (vegetation, water, etc.).
Pastoralism
• herders acquire much of their food by raising, caring for, and subsisting on the products of domesticated animals
• many pastoralist/herders cultivate
• many acquire bulk of their calories from their crops rather than their animals or through trade
• herds subsist on natural forage and must be moved to where the forage naturally occurs
• Some move all the time, others move seasonally
characteristic features
• nomadism - entire group moves or transhumance - only part of the group moves; some groups sedentary
• interdependence between pastoral and agricultural groups
– trade animal products for agri. products from cultivators
– sell livestock, hides, meat, wool, milk, cheese, or other products for money
– use livestock as beasts of burden
advantages of herding as adaptation