MAKING A LIVING: GETTING FOOD

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MAKING A LIVING GETTING FOOD
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FORAGERS or GATHERERS AND HUNTERS

• Subsistence derived from a combination of
  gathering and hunting
• Survival of foraging economies still survive
  because their environment not suitable to food
  production.

A contemporary forager from Australias Cape York
peninsula collects eggs from the nest of a magpie
goose.
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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 group or land.
• Access to resources held communally.
• Individual ownership of food, tools and other
  goods but strong pressure to share.

!Kung
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• Little difference in wealth, few material goods
• Social and political organization are simpleAt
  most, headman without authority
• Social control is informal
• Limited means of food storage

The Agta of the Phillippines live by hunting,
gathering, fishing and exchange with lowland
farmers
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• No full-time specialists
• Little warfare (conflict between groups)

• Typical gender-based 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)

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• Wide Variation in characteristics across H-G
  societies
• degree of dependence on hunting vs. gathering
• gender roles/ gender status
• technologies used
• Political organization

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Foraging
Worldwide distribution of recent hunter-gatherers.
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recent foragers have often been used to
understand prehistoric humans Caveats

• Now in least desirable environmentstundra,
  desert, rain forest
• Cultural changes in last 20,000 years
• Natural environment has changed
• Affected by other people

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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.
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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 
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• 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. 

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South American farmers. Women tend to be the
main producers in horticultural societies.
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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

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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
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Pastoralism
A female pastoralist who is a member of the
Kirgiz ethnic group in Xinjiang Province, China.
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Pastoral Nomadism
all members of the pastoral society follow the
herd throughout the year. (Iran)
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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).
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East African cattle complex
members of such economies may get agricultural
produce through trade or their own subsidiary
cultivation
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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 is one of the agricultural techniques
  that frees cultivation from seasonal domination.

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Agriculture
Irrigated and terraced rice fields used by the
rice farmers of Luzon in the Philippines.
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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).
• Agricultures long-term production (per area) is
  far more stable than horticultures.
• Intensified food production is associated with
  sedentism and rapid population increase.

Top Egyptian shaduf
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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.

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