Subsistence Patterns, Economic

Systems, and Making a Living

By Dr. Sumanto Al Qurtuby
(Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology,
Global & Social Studies Dept, KFUPM)
 Some Basic Questions
• What are the different ways by which societies get their foods?
• How do people make for a living?
• What economic system do they use for obtaining foods and
making a living?
• How do technology and environment influence food-getting
strategies?
• How have humans adapted to their environments throughout the
ages and history?
 Subsistence Patterns
• Critical to any culture’s survival is meeting the society’s basic
needs for shelter and access to food and drinkable water. Why?
• Every culture has a system for procuring or obtaining food:
growing it, raising it, trading for it, and even shopping for it.
• The pattern or design for obtaining one’s food is known as a
subsistence strategy.
 The influence of culture and environment
• In all parts of the world, both culture and the environment influence
the traditions that are passed on from one generation to the next in
terms of how food is obtained, what is considered food and how it is
eaten, and who gets to eat and when.
• Some societies are relied on the nature for obtaining food, some
produce their foods, and others engage in the production of nonfood
items (e.g. growing tobacco, cotton, oil, gold, marijuana, or trees for
timber) for trade and purchase their food.
Subsistence Strategy in highly urbanized societies
• In most Western countries and highly urbanized societies in
general, the majority of people are not tied to the land or the sea
for their subsistence strategy. They shop for their food, becoming
the modern-day hunter-gatherers of the supermarkets and malls.
• In modern era, people can find and eat foods from all over the
world, thanks to globalization, food preservation, transportation
system, and storage facilities.
 Making a Living
• Each society has a variety of food-getting practices, adaptive strategies, and
economic systems. They vary widely from one society to another and change
over time.
• The introduction and the spread of food production (e.g. plant cultivation
and animal domestication) led to major changes in human life, including the
formation of larger and more powerful social and political systems.
• Wherever humans found economic resources, they begin to “make a living”
and then defend them from outsiders by making and developing political
systems and social organizations.
 Adaptive Strategy
• Adaptive strategy, coined by anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (1974), is a
term to describe a society’s system of economic production.
• Cohen argued that the most important reason for similarities between
two or more unrelated societies is their possession of a similar adaptive
strategy. In other words, similar economic causes have similar socio-
cultural effects such as the similarities among foraging (hunting and
gathering) societies. Cohen developed a typology of societies based on
correlations between their economies and their social features.
 Types of Adaptive Strategy
• Five adaptive strategies: foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism,
and industrialism.
• Foraging is an adaptive strategy relied on nature. Horticulture,
agriculture, and pastoralism are adaptive strategies based on food
production. Each adaptive strategy refers to the main economic activity.
Pastoralists, for instance, consume milk, butter, blood, and meat from
their animals as mainstay (pillar) of their diet. They also add grain to
their diet by doing some cultivating or by trading with neighbors.
 Foraging or hunting-gathering (1)
• Foraging or hunting-gathering: living by hunting animals, fishing, and gathering wild
plants. People who practice this strategy are called: foraging society, foragers, hunters
and gatherers, or hunting and gathering society.
• Characteristics of the foraging society:
➢Hunting and gathering as main adaptive strategy and survival;
➢Band organization. People who subsisted by hunting and gathering usually lived in
band-organized societies. A basic social unit, band was a small group (fewer than a
hundred people) built based on kinship and marriage;
 Foraging or Hunting-Gathering (2)
➢Mobility: shifting memberships from one band / group to another following
the bands of their fathers, mothers, husbands, or wives. Since they were
exogamous, they were freely moved or changed their band membership;
➢Gender-based division of labor: men usually went hunting (animals) and
women went collecting plants (vegetables);
➢Social differences based on age: elders were the guardians of traditions,
legends, myths, or stories; accordingly, youngers usually respect elders;
➢Hospitality and generosity (share foods with others).
 Foraging or Hunting-Gathering (3)
• Environmental differences cause / create contrasts among
world’s foragers. Arctic foragers usually hunt large animals and
herd animals (e.g. oxen) and much less vegetation, whereas
tropical foragers hunt animals (deer, boars, etc.) and hunt a wide
range of plant since tropics contains tremendous biodiversity.
Despite differences caused by such environmental variation, all
foraging economies have shared the same feature: relying on
nature for making their living.
 Foraging or Hunting-Gathering (4)
• Foraging societies’ way of life survive into modern times in certain
areas: deserts, forests, islands, and cold areas.
• Examples of foraging societies are: Aborigines of Australia,
Eskimos or Inuit of Canada, the Kalahari of southern Africa,
California and Northwest Coast Indians, etc. Some group of people
living in certain remote forests in Madagascar and Southeast Asia or
certain islands off the Indian coast also follow foraging patterns.
• Do modern people adopt a foraging system?
African and Arctic Foragers
 Horticulture and Agriculture (1)

• Horticulture and agriculture are two types of cultivation mostly found in

nonindustrial societies. The two types of cultivation differ from the farming
systems of industrial nations such as the United States and Canada, which use
large land areas, modern machinery, and petrochemicals.
• Horticulture: a “cultivation that makes intensive use of none of the factors of
production: land, labor, capital, and machinery” (Cohen).
• Horticulture: “Low-intensity, small-scale cultivation using small fields, plots, or
gardens” (Ferraro & Andreatta); thereby call “garden agriculture”.
 Horticulture and Agriculture (2)

• Horticulturalists rely on human power and use simple tools such

as hoes and digging sticks to work small plots of land, grow their
crops, and produce food primarily for household consumption.
• Their fields lie fallow (unplanted) for varying lengths of time. The
use of the plot (a piece of land) is not continuous, cultivating only
for a year or two. When horticulturalists abandon a plot because
of soil exhaustion, they clear another piece of land. They utilize
slash-and-burn techniques (meaning by cutting down trees and
burning bushes) for horticulture.
 Horticulture and Agriculture (3)

• Agriculture or Intensive agriculture: a large-scale and complex system of

farming. It is a more productive form of cultivation of food plants than
horticulture, owing to the use of animal power, mechanical power, irrigation
systems, and fertilizers to produce surpluses.
• Agriculture requires more labor than horticulture does because it uses land
intensively and continuously. The greater labor demands associated with
agriculture reflect its use of domesticated animals, irrigation, and terracing.
 Horticulture and Agriculture (4)

• Many agriculturalists use animals as a means of production—for

transport, as cultivating machines, and for their manure
(compost). While horticulturalists must await the rainy season,
agriculturalists can schedule their planting in advance because they
control water. Terracing is another technique of agriculture.
Agriculturalists use terraces, mostly in lands that consist of valleys
or hills, to keep fertile soil and crops and to prevent them from
washing away during the rainy season.
Horticulture and Agriculture (5)
 Pastoralism & Pastoral Society (1)
• Pastoralism is animal husbandry. It is a subsistence pattern in which people make
their living by tending herds of large animals. It is concerned with the raising of
livestock.
• Pastoralists, living mostly in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and sub-
Saharan Africa, are people (or sometimes called “herders”) whose activities focus
on such domesticated animals as cattle, sheep, goats, camels, yak, and reindeer.
They use their products (milk, meat, blood) as their major food source and as an
item for exchange.
• Many pastoralists live in symbiosis with their herds meaning that both humans and
animals are beneficial to each: herders attempt to protect their animals and to
ensure their reproduction in return for food and other products (e.g. leather). Herds
provide dairy products and meat.
 Pastoralism &Pastoral Society (2)
• People use livestock in various ways. Natives of North America’s Great
Plains only rode their horses (not eating them). For Plains Indians, horses
served as “tools of the trade”, means of production used to hunt their main
target of economies: buffalo. This is to say that the Plains Indians were not
true pastoralists but hunters that used horses as a means of production.
Pastoralists, by contrast, typically use their herds for food. They consume
their meat, blood, and milk, from which they make yogurt, butter, and
cheese. Most pastoralists supplement their diet by hunting, gathering,
fishing, and trading since it is impossible to base their subsistence solely on
animals.
 Pastoralism & Pastoral Society (3)
• Two patterns of movement occur with pastoralism, namely nomadism
and transhumance. The two patterns are based on the fact that herds
must move to use pasture available in particular places in different
seasons. In pastoral nomadism, the entire group (women, men, and
children) moves with the animals throughout the year (e.g. the Middle
East and North Africa provide numerous examples of pastoral
nomads). In the pastoral transhumance, only part of the group moves
with the herds, most people stay in the home village (e.g. the Alps of
Europe or the Turkana of Uganda).
Pastoralists
 Economic systems and exchange:
economy, economics, economist, economic
anthropologist
• Economy: a system of production, distribution, and consumption of
resources.
• Economics: the science / study of such systems (of production,
distribution, and consumption of resources).
• Economists: expert of modern economic (usually capitalist) systems.
• Economic anthropologists: by contrast, have broaden understanding
of economic principles by gathering data on economic activities,
patterns, institutions, and systems, typically in nonindustrial societies.
 Economic system & exchange:
a mode of production
• 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 by means of tools,
skills, organization, and knowledge” (Wolf 1982: 75).
• In the modern 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.
• In nonindustrial societies, by contrast, labor usually is not bought but is given as a
social obligation. In such a kin-based mode of production, mutual aid in production is
one among many expressions of a larger web of social relations.
 Economic System & Exchange:
people and means of production
• In nonindustrial societies, there is a more intimate relationship between the worker and the
means of production (including land, labor, and tools or technology) than there is in
industrial nations. Ties between people and land were less permanent in food collectors
(foragers) than in food producers (e.g. agriculturalists). Among food producers, rights to
the means of production also come through kinship and marriage. Like land, labor is a
means of production.
• In nonindustrial societies, access to land and labor comes through social links such as
kinship, marriage, and descent. Concerning tools or technology, nonindustrial societies also
differ from industrial nations. Manufacturing is often linked to age and gender. Married
men and women, elders and youngers typically have a different tools of production. Most
people of a particular age and gender share the technical knowledge associated with that
age and gender.
 Principles that guide exchange
• There are three principles that guide exchange, namely the market principle
(dominating today’s world capitalist economy), redistribution, and reciprocity, all of
which can be present in the same society.
• The market principle governs the distribution of the means of production—land,
labor, natural resources, technology, and capital.
• Redistribution operates when goods, services, or their equivalent move from the local
level to a center. The center maybe a capital, a regional collection point, or a
storehouse near a chief’s residence.
• Reciprocity: a mode of distribution typified by the exchange of goods and services of
approximately equal value between parties or exchange between social equals, who
normally are related by kinship, marriage, or another close personal tie.
 Types of Reciprocity
• Generalized reciprocity: the practice of giving a gift without expecting a gift in
return; creates a moral obligation.
• Balanced reciprocity: the practice of giving a gift with the expectation that a similar
gift will be given in the opposite direction in the future.
• Negative reciprocity: a form of economic exchange between individuals who try to
take advantage of each other.
• Because it occurs between social equals, the principle of reciprocity is dominant in
the more egalitarian societies—among foragers, cultivators, and pastoralists.
 Nomads on notice
• The history of Gabbra nomadic pastoralists of northern Kenya
• Reasons for Gabbra nomadism: natural & cultural
• Ways/strategies of Gabbra’s survival: mobility, hard work, and cooperation
• Political elders & ritual elders play a role to control Gabbra’s life and provide moral
guidance
• Economic systems: reciprocity, exchange goods, animal management (camels are the
most precious; taboo for selling or killing of camels)
• Religious life?
• Change: from nomads to farmers