Food and Subsistence
This is a subsistence system that relies on wild plant and animal food resources. The people live in small, mobile, egalitarian bands and get everything they eat by hunting, gathering, and fishing. This system is sometimes called “hunting and gathering.
What is foraging?
This term names the current period of geological time, in which human activities like clearing forests for fields and burning oil, gas, and coal on a large scale have changed the earth’s basic geochemical cycles.
What is the Anthropocene?
This form of exchange happens among the closest relationships, like parents and children or the Ju/’hoansi sharing meat across their camp. People give without keeping track of value or expecting anything specific in return.
What is generalized reciprocity?
This term means adapting global products or ideas to fit local tastes. Examples include McDonald’s selling the McAloo Tikki in India and Zapotec families in Oaxaca using Tupperware to share funeral tamales.
What is glocalization?
This is the ability to get others to act a certain way through persuasion, unlike power, which uses coercion or the threat of physical force. Foragers such as the !Kung rely on it more than on power.
What is authority?
This is a subsistence system in which people raise herds of domesticated livestock. People can move their animals several times a year for grass and water, and often rely more on milk than meat. Among the Maasai, men own the cattle while women do most of the work, and households are built around polygynous marriages.
What is pastoralism?
Also called slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation, this farming method clears and burns forest, plants crops for a few years, then lets the forest regrow. Anthropologists argue it’s sustainable when population density is low and there’s enough land, and it breaks down when cleared land becomes pasture or industrial farms.
What is swidden agriculture?
In this form of exchange, something is given with the expectation that something of equal value will be returned within a set time, usually between people who know each other but aren’t family. Malinowski studied the Kula ring, where Trobriand Islanders trade shell necklaces for armbands.
What is balanced reciprocity?
When two cultures meet, people sometimes blend their beliefs, even contradictory ones, into a single new tradition. In Candomblé, enslaved Africans in Brazil kept worshipping their orixás in plain sight by pairing them with Catholic saints, like the sea goddess Iemanja with Our Lady of Conception. What is syncretism?
What is syncretism?
This is the perception that an individual has a valid right to leadership. Inca emperors claimed it from the Sun God, European monarchs through divine right, and U.S. leaders through the consent of the governed in elections.
What is legitimacy?
This form of farming moves its fields (shifting cultivation), clears them by slash-and-burn, and lets the forest grow back so the soil renews. It grows many crops together, like the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash, for the family’s own use rather than for sale. Trobriand Islanders gain prestige from their yam piles
What is horticulture?
This approach, named by Julian Steward, looks for ecological and economic explanations for cultural practices. Examples include Marvin Harris arguing that Hindus hold cows sacred because of their value for milk, dung, and plowing, and Roy Rappaport showing how the Tsembaga’s ritual pig feasts keep the pig population in balance.
What is cultural ecology?
In this form of exchange, a central authority collects goods or money from everyone and gives them back as goods and services. Examples include the IRS collecting taxes and Northwest Coast potlatches, which moved goods from groups with a surplus to groups in need.
What is redistribution?
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai used this term for the five global flows of people, technology, ideas, money, and media. Salsa dance congresses involve all of them, from dancers traveling worldwide to online event ads.
What are scapes (ethnoscape, technoscape, ideoscape, financescape, and mediascape)?
In these societies, there are no great differences in status or power, and leaders like headmen or big men lead only by persuasion and consensus. The !Kung practice reverse dominance by ridiculing anyone who acts superior and the Inuit settle disputes with song duels.
What are egalitarian societies (bands and tribes)?
This form of farming uses irrigation, draft animals, fertilizers, and pesticides to work the same land continuously. It depends on a few staple crops grown as a surplus to sell, like rice in China or potatoes in Ireland, and is linked to population growth, division of labor, wealth inequality, and environmental degradation.
What is small-scale/intensive agriculture?
This approach studies how traditional societies know and use plants, animals, and ecosystems, often called traditional ecological knowledge. Darrell Posey’s Kayapó project showed how the Kayapó of Brazil planted and tended islands of forest in the savanna.
What is ethnoecology?
This form of exchange is driven by supply and demand and usually involves general purpose money. James Acheson found that Maine lobster fishermen build long-term relationships with dealers to manage how much prices swing.
What is market exchange?
This free-market ideology emphasizes privatization and unregulated markets. IMF and World Bank loan conditions pushed Bolivia to privatize its water, leading to protests in Cochabamba in 2000 that forced out the foreign water company.
What is neoliberalism?
In these societies, status depends on how closely you are related to the chief, whose position is a hereditary office. At a Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch, guests’ speeches judged whether a new chief was legitimate, and in West Africa the poro and sande secret societies mediate disputes.
What are ranked societies (chiefdoms)?
This form of farming keeps the same fields in continuous use with mechanized equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation instead of moving to new land. It grows huge quantities of a few staple crops like wheat and corn through mono-cropping, which reduces dietary diversity and contributes to environmental degradation. It’s the dominant system in the United States, where farmers grow crops to sell rather than to eat.
What is industrial/globalized agriculture?
This approach focuses on how power, politics, and economics shape environmental problems. Piers Blaikie found that soil erosion was caused by state policies like taxes, not bad farming, and Fairhead and Leach showed that villagers in Guinea were planting forests, not destroying them.
What is political ecology?
The Tz’utujil Maya coffee farmers of La Voz in Guatemala grow corn with family labor for their own meals while also selling fair-trade coffee on the global market. This shows two of these happening at the same time.
What are the domestic (kin-ordered) and capitalist modes of production?
Seth Holmes did multi-sited participant observation, living in a Washington berry-farm labor camp, in Triqui hometown San Miguel in Oaxaca, and crossing the border with Triqui men. He found that NAFTA let subsidized U.S. corn undersell local corn, leaving families without enough money for food, while farm jobs in the U.S. offered work. These are the two kinds of factors that shape migration.
What are push and pull factors?
In these societies, an elite minority controls the strategic resources, and the central government has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force. India’s caste system is legitimized by karma, and conflicts are settled through codified law, like Hammurabi’s code, with judges whose decisions are binding.
What are stratified societies (states)?