Chapter Overview

Four basic economic types are found in nonindustrial societies: foraging, horitculture, agriculture, and pastoralism. Food production eventually supplanted foraging in most world areas. Among foragers the band is a basic social unit. Ties of kinship and marriage link its members. Men usually hunt and fish. Women usually gather.

Horticulture and agriculture are two forms of farming, representing different ends of a continuum based on land and labor use. Horticulture always has a fallow period, but agriculturalists farm the same land year after year. Agriculturalists also use labor intensively, in irrigation and terracing, and by maintaining domesticated animals. The mixed nature of pastoralism, based on herding, is evident. Nomadic pastoralists trade with farmers. Among transhumant pastoralists, part of the population farms, while another part takes the herds to pasture.

Economic anthropologists study systems of production, distribution (exchange), and consumption. Economics has been defined as the science of allocating scarce means to alternative ends. Western economists assume the idea of scarcity is universal--which it isn't--and that in making choices, people strive to maximize personal profit. However, people may and do maximize values other than individual profit.

There are three forms of exchange. Market exchange is based on impersonal purchase and sale, motivated by profit. With redistribution, goods are collected at a central place, with some eventually given back to the people. Reciprocity governs exchanges between social equals. Reciprocity, redistribution, and the market principle may coexist in the same society. The primary exchange mode in a society is the one that allocates the means of production.