Economic Life in Cross-Cultural Perspective (“Making a Living”)

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
1. Know what distinguishes an adaptive strategy, and identify the five
adaptive strategies in Cohen’s typology of societies. How does Cohen
link economy and social features?

2. Understand what foraging, horticulture, and agriculture entail, and

know the predominant social features often correlated with these
adaptive strategies in Cohen’s typology and in particular ethnographic
studies. Be familiar with the features of agriculture that distinguish it
from horticulture.

3. Know what pastoralism entails, distinguish between pastoral nomadism

and transhumance, and be able to discuss the social features typically
found in pastoral societies.
4. Consider how contemporary foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists,
and pastoralists live in nation-states and potentially engage in several
different adaptive strategies and/or forms of labor.

5. Distinguish between modes and means of production, and understand

how industrialism leads to the alienation of a worker from the product
of his or her labor.

6. Know the subject matter of economic anthropology. In particular, be

able to discuss how anthropologists and anthropological studies
respond to classic economic theories that posit the profit motive as
universal.

7. Know the different forms of distribution and exchange. In particular,

be able to distinguish among the market principle, redistribution, and
the various forms of reciprocity.

8. Be familiar with the potlatch. Specifically, know what it is, where it is

found, how it has changed through time, and how it fosters social
relationships and alliances both locally and regionally. From Kottak’s
discussion, what arguments have anthropologists made for the
significance of the potlatch?

CHAPTER OUTLINE
0
. Introduction, Understanding Ourselves
A. In traditional societies, distinctions like those delineating work from the family
economy and society were nowhere near as stark as they are today. Co-workers
were often kin. Economy and society were not easily separated.
B. Although economists often assume that economic gain is a chief motive for
human behavior, anthropologists tend to highlight the fact that different
individuals have different goals. Many of these goals are decidedly social.
I. Adaptive Strategies
 A. The anthropologist Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to
describe a group’s system of economic production.

B. Cohen has developed a typology of societies based on correlations

between economies and social features, arguing that the most
important reason for similarities between two or more unrelated
societies is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy.

C. Cohen identified the following five adaptive strategies: foraging,

horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, and industrialism.

*Human society is a strategy for acquiring food ... the manner in which
that food is acquired defines the shape, scale, and kind of that society

B. Foraging
1. Until 10,000 years ago all humans were foragers.
2. Most foragers eventually turned to food production, and those foragers who
still exist have at least some dependence on food production or on food
producers.
3. All modern foragers live in nation-states, depend to some extent on
government assistance, and are influenced by national and international
policies and political and economic events in the world system.
4. Throughout the world, foraging survived mainly in environments that posed
major obstacles to food production.
5. A few groups living in environments suitable for food production
nevertheless remained foragers because they could support themselves
adequately by hunting and gathering.
C. Correlates of Foraging
1. People who subsisted by hunting and gathering often, but not always, lived in band-
organized societies.
a. Bands were small groups of fewer than a hundred people, all related
by kinship or marriage.
b. Among some foragers, band size stayed roughly constant throughout
the year; in other foraging societies, bands split up during part of the
year.
2. Members of foraging societies typically were socially mobile, having the
ability to join any band to which they had kin or marital links.
3. All human societies have some kind of division of labor based on gender.
a. Among foragers, men typically hunted and fished while women
gathered and collected.
b. Among foragers in tropical and semitropical areas, gathering tended
to contribute more to the diet than hunting and fishing did.
4. All foraging societies had social distinctions based on age.
a. Old people frequently were respected for their special knowledge of
ritual and practical matters.
b. Most foraging societies were egalitarian (contrasts in prestige are
minor and based on age and gender).

II. Cultivation
A. Horticulture
1. Horticulture is cultivation that does not make intensive use of land, labor, capital, or
machinery.
2. Horticulture involves the use of simple tools and frequently slash-and-burn
 techniques.
3. Horticulture is also called shifting cultivation because horticulturalists shift
between plots of land, leaving areas with exhausted soil or thick weed cover
to lie fallow for several years before returning to cultivate them once agains.
B. Agriculture
1. Agriculture is cultivation that involves intensive and continuous use of land.
2. Agriculture is more labor intensive because of its use of domesticated
animals, irrigation, and/or terracing.
3. Many agriculturalists use animals for transport, as cultivating machines, and
for their manure.
4. Irrigation
a. Irrigation allows agriculturalists to schedule their planting in advance
(they do not have to wait for a rainy season), and it makes it possible
to cultivate a plot year after year.
b. Irrigation enriches soil by creating ecosystems with several species
of plants and animals, many of them minute organisms, whose
wastes fertilize the land.
5. Terracing is an agricultural technique that allows steep hillsides to be
cultivated and irrigated.
6. Costs and Benefits of Agriculture
a. An agricultural field does not necessarily produce a higher single-
year yield than does a horticultural plot.
b. Because agriculture is very labor intensive (e.g., construction and
maintenance of irrigation systems and terraces, care of animals), its
yield relative to the labor invested is lower than that of horticulture.
c. The main advantage of agriculture is that its long-term yield per area
is far greater and more dependable (agricultural land can yield one or
two crops annually for years, or even generations).
C. Agricultural Intensification: People and the Environment
1. Agriculture has allowed human populations to move into (and transform) a much
wider range of environments than was possible prior to the development of
cultivation.
2. Intensified food production is associated with sedentism; growth in the size
and density of populations; and increased regulation of interpersonal
relations, land, labor, and other resources.
3. Intensive agriculture can have significant environmental effects, such as
increased disease, deforestation, and loss of ecological diversity.

III. Pastoralism
A. Pastoral economies are based on herds of domesticated animals (e.g., cattle, sheep,
goats, camels, yaks, reindeer).
B. Many pastoralists live in symbiosis with their herds (symbiosis is an obligatory
interaction between groups that is beneficial to each).
C. Pastoralists typically use their herds for food.
D. It is impossible to base subsistence solely on animals, so most pastoralists
supplement their diets by hunting, gathering, fishing, cultivating, or trading.
E. Two patterns of movement occur with pastoralism: nomadism and transhumance.
1. In pastoral nomadism, the entire group—women, men, and children—moves with the
animals throughout the year.
2. With transhumance, part of the group moves with the herds, but most people
stay in the home village.
 3. Pastoral nomads trade for crops and other products with more sedentary
people during their annual movement, while in transhumant societies, the
people who remain in year-round villages can grow their own crops.

IV. Economic Systems

A. An economy is a system of production, distribution, and consumption of value, of
various resources, and economics is the study of such systems.
B. Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
C. 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 using tools, skills,
organization, and knowledge,” in the words of anthropologist Eric Wolf.
1. In the 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.
2. In nonindustrial societies, the mode of production is kin-based; labor usually
is not bought but is given as a social obligation
3. Societies with the same adaptive strategy tend to have a similar mode of
production, and differences in the mode of production within a given strategy
may reflect differences in environments, target resources, or cultural
traditions.
D. Production in Nonindustrial Societies
1. All societies divide economic labor according to gender and age, but the nature of
these divisions varies from society to society.
2. In nonindustrial societies there is a more intimate relationship between the
worker and the means of production than there is in industrial nations.
E. Means of Production
1. Means (or factors) of production include land (territory), labor, and technology.
2. Land
a. Among foragers, ties between people and land are less permanent
than they are among food producers.
b. Descent groups (groups whose members claim common ancestry)
are common among nonindustrial food producers, and those who
descend from the founder share the group’s territory and resources.
3. Labor, Tools, and Specialization
a. In nonindustrial societies, access to both land and labor comes through social

links such as kinship, marriage, and descent.

b. Mutual aid in production is just one aspect of ongoing social

relations.
c. In nonindustrial societies, neither technology nor technical
knowledge is as specialized as it is in states.
d. Craft specialization (e.g., ceramic production) does occur in some
tribal societies.
F. Alienation in Industrial Economies
1. Industrial Economies
a. In industrial economies, a worker is alienated from the product of her
or his work when the product is sold and the profits going to an
employer.
b. As a consequence of such alienation, the worker has less pride in and
 personal identification with their products.
c. Industrial workers also have impersonal relations with their
coworkers and employers.
2. Nonindustrial Societies
a. In nonindustrial societies, people usually have more personal
investment and a greater sense of accomplishment in their products
than do workers in industrial economies.
b. In nonindustrial societies, economy is embedded in society; the
relations of production, distribution, and consumption are social
relations with economic aspects.
3. A Case of Industrial Alienation
a. Female factory workers in Malaysia suffer from difficult and
exhausting work conditions, constant male supervision, low wages,
job uncertainty, etc.
b. Spirit possession of female factory workers may represent an
unconscious protest against labor discipline and male control of the
industrial setting.

V. Economizing and Maximization

A. Classical economic theory assumes that individuals act rationally and strive to
maximize profit (the profit motive).
B. Anthropology demonstrates that people are not always motivated by the desire to
maximize profit—that depending on the society and the situation, people may try to
maximize profit, wealth, prestige, pleasure, comfort, or social harmony.
C. Alternative Ends
1. Throughout the world, people invest their scarce resources in subsistence,
replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent funds.
a. People devote some of their time and energy to building up a
subsistence fund, working to replace the calories they use in their
daily activity.
b. People invest in a replacement fund, maintaining their technology
and other items essential to production and to everyday life.
c. People invest in a social fund, helping their friends, relatives, in-
laws, and neighbors.
d. Ceremonial fund refers to expenditures on ceremonies or rituals.
e. People in nonindustrial societies also devote resources to a rent fund,
rendering resources to an individual or agency that is superior
politically or economically.
2. Peasants are small-scale agriculturalists who live in nonindustrial states and
have rent fund obligations.
a. Peasants produce to feed themselves, to sell their produce, and to pay
rent.
b. All peasants live in state-organized societies and produce food
without the elaborate technology of modern farming or agribusiness.
c. Often the rent fund becomes peasants’ foremost obligation (even at
the expense of their own diets).

VI. Distribution, Exchange

A. Polanyi defined three principles that guide exchanges: the market principle,
redistribution, and reciprocity.
B. The Market Principle
1. The market principle dominates in capitalist economies.
2. With market exchange, items are bought and sold, using money, with the
goal of maximizing profit, and value is determined by the law of supply and
demand.
3. Bargaining is characteristic of market-principle exchanges.
C. Redistribution
1. Redistribution operates when goods, services, or their equivalent move from the local
level to a center, usually through a hierarchy of officials who may consume some of
the goods.
2. Eventually, goods are redistributed—that is, they flow in the reverse
direction, down through the hierarchy and back to the local level.
D. Reciprocity
1. Reciprocity is exchange between social equals, who are normally related by kinship,
marriage, or another close personal tie.
2. Reciprocity is dominant in more egalitarian societies (foragers, cultivators,
and pastoralists).
3. There are three degrees of reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative.
4. Generalized Reciprocity
a. With generalized reciprocity, which is prevalent among foragers,
someone gives to another person and expects nothing concrete or
immediate in return.
b. Such exchanges are expressions of personal relationships, rather than
primarily economic transactions.
5. Balanced Reciprocity
a. With balanced reciprocity, exchange occurs between people who are
more distantly related than are members of the same band or
household, and reciprocation is expected.
b. Although reciprocation need not come immediately, complete failure
to reciprocate will strain the social relationship.
6. Negative Reciprocity
a. Negative reciprocity involves exchanges with people outside or on
the fringes of a social system.
b. In such exchanges, which are full of ambiguity and distrust (at least
initially), each partner attempts to maximize profit and expects an
immediate return.
E. Coexistence of Exchange Principles
1. The different exchange principles can all be present in the same society, although they
govern different kinds of transactions.
2. Although most exchanges in the United States are governed by the market
principle, redistribution and reciprocal (both generalized and balanced)
exchanges also occur.
F. Potlatching
1. Potlatches, practiced by tribes of the North Pacific Coast of North America, are a
widely studied ritual in which sponsors (assisted by members of their communities)
gave away resources in exchange for greater prestige.
2. Potlatching tribes (such as the Kwakiutl and the Salish) were foragers, but
they lived in sedentary villages and had chiefs.
3. Potlatches traditionally were viewed as economically wasteful and driven by
irrational desires for prestige.
4. Cultural ecology (a theoretical school that attempts to interpret cultural
practices in terms of their long-term role in helping humans adapt to their
 environment) suggests instead that customs such as the potlatch are cultural
adaptations to alternating periods of local abundance and shortage.
a. Despite the overall richness of the North Pacific coastal
environment, resources fluctuated from year to year and place to
place.
b. Potlatching linked villages together in a regional economy—an exchange system that
distributed food and wealth from wealthy to needy communities, and rewarded potlatch sponsors
and their villages with prestige