a203-11f-11-Foraging - Introduction to Cultural...

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology: Class 11
Making a living: foraging
 Copyright Bruce Owen 2011
- Subsistence
- “How people get their groceries”
- subsistence is fundamental to understanding everything else about a culture
- in cultural materialists’ terms, because subsistence is a major part of the infrastructure of
any society
- as such, it influences or determines much of the rest of society
- in more general anthropological terms, because culture is integrated
- subsistence is inextricably linked to everything else
- as a result, anthropologists can rarely, if ever, discuss subsistence without bringing in
other aspects of culture
- the reading by Lee illustrate this
- he has to address gender roles, because the tools and activities of men and women are
different
- he discusses sharing of food, exchange of arrows, ownership of meat, etc.
- he can’t discuss hunting practices without dealing with “insulting the meat” and
Ju/’hoansi ideas about young people, aggression, and status
- studying subsistence leads to broader questions
- why do different societies use such different subsistence strategies?
- why have subsistence strategies changed over time?
- how does using a given subsistence strategy affect other aspects of society?
- what are the effects of shifting from one subsistence strategy to another?
- General types of subsistence strategies
- Foraging = hunting and gathering
- living on wild resources without intentionally altering the landscape
- includes maritime foragers: people who depend on fish and shellfish
- Agriculture = farming
- Activities to artificially increase plant food yields (sowing seeds, clearing forest, weeding,
diverting water, fertilizing, etc.)
- some people distinguish between agriculture and horticulture, but we won’t bother with
that here
- Pastoralism = herding
- depending primarily on herds of domesticated animals
- pastoralists travel with their herds to pasture areas, rather than bringing food to them
- Agropastoralism
- depending on a mix of agriculture and pastoralism
- typically with one or more fixed settlements
- often plus pastures to which the animals are sent with some group members seasonally
- our subsistence base is really none of the above
- strictly speaking, it still rests on agropastoralism

Intro to Cultural Anthro F 2011 / Owen: Foraging p. 2
- but the practices are so different from subsistence agropastoralism that it would be
misleading to use the same term
- and besides, most people get their own subsistence in ways far removed from
agropastoral production
- Wage labor system
- people work for pay, rather than producing their own subsistence goods
- many are paid for tasks that do not produce subsistence goods at all
- then exchange that income for subsistence goods produced by others for exchange
- These types oversimplify reality
- people mix and vary these strategies
- most societies don’t fit perfectly into these clear, well-defined types
- but these types give us a shorthand for the general ways people live
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