Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
♪ [African music]
♪
(female narrator) This particular lecture
is gonna be about subsistence strategies.
And now, while this is a part of the economic system,
we're talking about it separately,
because it conditions virtually every other social institution.
It's incredibly influential.
And hopefully, by the end of this lecture,
you'll understand why,
and particularly by the end of the quarter,
that will be totally clear to you.
There are four types of subsistence strategies.
There's foraging, pastoralism,
horticulture, and intensive agriculture.
We're gonna break 'em down and look at 'em one by one.
Foraging is basically hunting, fishing, and gathering.
So 85% of the food for foragers comes
from resources that are available in nature.
For 90% of human history, people were foragers.
Today, we only have
about a quarter of a million people.
Foragers make their own tools.
Now, in anthropology,
we kinda refer to this as "simple technology."
That's not a qualitative statement.
We're not trying to say
that making your tools by hand is a bad thing.
It's just that there's not complex machinery
with all these various parts, and so forth,
that you have to use to actually make the tools.
The reason for production
is that we're gonna share the resources
in addition to using them for ourselves.
So there's a very communal mindset.
Groups are egalitarian,
and what we mean by this in anthropology
is not that everybody's totally equal.
When we do see any kind of statuses or ranking
in egalitarian societies, it's usually based on age.
But egalitarian in the anthropological sense
means that each individual
has access to resources that they need to survive.
And additionally, everybody's gonna have the skills
that they need to survive.
We see relatively small communities,
and that's so they don't...take away or reduce
all of the resources in a particular area.
Hunters and gatherers, foragers, are highly mobile.
You will occasionally see foraging societies
that are relatively sedentary--
or they stay in one place for long periods of time--
but the resources have to be incredibly rich
for them to stay in one place for a long period of time.
We see high infant mortality,
and again, this is because of the mobility factor.
We have overlapping gender roles,
and what we mean here is that the division of labor
often falls out by gender.
But again, everybody has those skills they need to survive.
So if we have a group where men are predominantly the hunters,
women can also hunt, if need be.
Men can gather.
Women can gather.
Everybody can make tools.
Everybody can make the appropriate clothing
for their culture and the appropriate shelters.
So again, it gets back to that egalitarian nature,
where everybody has the skills that they need to survive.
High degree of sustainability.
Hunters and gatherers, or again foragers,
can really go on for very, very long periods of time,
if they're left alone.
Unfortunately, what's happening in the modern world
is that they're being relegated to marginal areas,
so it's much, much harder for them to survive.
So high...but it is a high degree of sustainability.
We're gonna use the !Kung as an example.
And the !Kung live in the Kalahari Desert.
They don't have a big migratory territory.
Um...vegetation is scattered, but they do move around
to wherever they can find resources.
They use about 100 species of animals,
with 50 of which they eat.
And they use over 150 species of plants,
where they eat over 100.
Now, if we look at the Kalahari Desert,
we just don't see a lot of plants,
but the !Kung, who live in it on a daily basis,
can really differentiate
between different kinds of plants.
Their favorite food is the mongongo nut,
and it's very high in protein.
So in the times when they can't get a lot of meat,
that particular nut really serves them well.
The !Kung eat their way out of areas,
so what we're talking about here
is that they eat all of the food they like first,
then they eat the less-desirable food.
And once that's done, then they leave,
so that the resources have time to regenerate.
So they're mobile when resources get low,
or sometimes they move seasonally.
So in dry season, we see large camps of 20 to 40 people,
and they gather around permanent water sources.
So it makes sense in the dry season.
In the rainy season, we see much smaller camps,
maybe two to three families,
and they're scattered all over the landscape.
More resources around,
so they don't need to be bunched up together.
Again, high degree of mobility in foraging societies.
We see a low number of possessions,
'cause if you're on the move a lot,
you don't wanna haul a bunch of stuff around.
And again, limited population growth.
Division of labor in the !Kung.
Everybody gathers.
Everybody hunts.
Food is shared with all of the members of the group.
If there are any possessions,
those are shared among the group,
and there's very, very little inequality.
The !Kung reckon their kin relations on both sides,
which in anthropology, we refer to as a bilateral system.
And when we get to family, marriage, and kinship,
we're gonna go into that in more detail.
Um...one of the things about the !Kung,
they do have contact with the "modern world,"
so they're very quick to incorporate new technology.
And most of their contact with the more modern world
comes with contact with agriculturalists,
governmental officials, and also traders.
So that's basically a foraging society.