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Perhaps the most important relationships between a species and its environment focus on the processes of food acquisition. For humans, the ways in which societies acquire their food—their subsistence patterns—are so central that we may use them to categorize types of cultures. Thus, we speak of a society as food collecting or food producing. A synonym for the former is foraging. Within the latter are the subcategories of horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture. Many, if not most, of the other basic features of a cultural system can be seen as more or less related to subsistence pattern. Generalizations are possible with regard to such things as mobility, population size, basic economics, social stratification, labor specialization, kinship, and religion. |