Yehudi Cohen used the term adaptive strategy to describe a society's
system of economic production.
Cohen argued that the most important reason for similarities
between two or more unrelated societies is their possession of a similar
adaptive strategy.
Cohen developed a typology of societies based on correlations
between their economies and their social forms; this typology includes
five adaptive strategies: foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism,
and industrialism.
Foraging
Until 10,000 years ago all humans were foragers.
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.
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.
Throughout the world, foraging survived mainly in environments
that posed major obstacles to food production.
A few groups living in environments suitable for food production
nevertheless remained foragers because they could support themselves
adequately by hunting and gathering.
to food production.
Correlates of Foraging
People who subsist by hunting and gathering often, but not always,
live in band-organized societies.
Bands are small groups of fewer than a hundred people, all
related by kinship or marriage.
Among some foragers, band size stays roughly constant throughout
the year; in other foraging societies, bands split up during part
of the year.
Members of foraging societies typically are socially mobile,
having the ability to join any band to which they have kin or marital
links.
All human societies have some kind of division of labor based
on gender.
Among foragers, men typically hunt and fish while women gather
and collect.
Among foragers in tropical and semitropical areas, gathering
tends to contribute more to the diet than hunting and fishing
do.
All foraging societies have social distinctions based on age.
Old people frequently are respected for their special knowledge
of ritual and practical matters.
Most foraging societies are egalitarian (contrasts in prestige
are minor and based on age and gender).
Cultivation
Horticulture
Horticulture is cultivation that does not make intensive use
of land, labor, capital, or machinery.
Horticulture involves the use of simple tools and frequently
slash-and-burn techniques.
Horticulture is also called shifting cultivation because the
relationship between people and land is not permanent (i.e., 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 again).
Agriculture
Agriculture is cultivation that involves intensive and continuous
use of land.
Agriculture is more labor intensive because of its use of domesticated
animals, irrigation, and/or terracing.
Many agriculturalists use animals for transport, as cultivating
machines, and for their manure.
Irrigation
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.
Irrigation enriches soil by creating ecosystems with several
species of plants and animals, many of them minute organisms,
whose wastes fertilize the land.
Terracing is an agricultural technique that allows steep hillsides
to be cultivated and irrigated.
Costs and Benefits of Agriculture
An agricultural field does not necessarily produce a higher
single-year yield than does a horticultural plot.
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.
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).
Agricultural Intensification: People and the Environment
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.
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.
Intensive agriculture can have significant environmental effects,
such as increased disease, deforestation, and loss of ecological diversity.
Pastoralism
Pastoral economies are based on herds of domesticated animals (e.g.,
cattle, sheep, goats, camels, yaks, reindeer).
Many pastoralists live in symbiosis with their herds (symbiosis is
an obligatory interaction between groups that is beneficial to each).
Unlike the use of animals merely as productive machines, pastoralists
typically make direct use of their herds for food.
It is impossible to base subsistence solely on animals, so most pastoralists
supplement their diets by hunting, gathering, fishing, cultivating, or
trading.
Two patterns of movement occur with pastoralism: nomadism and transhumance.
In pastoral nomadism, the entire group—women, men, and
children—moves with the animals throughout the year.
With transhumance, part of the group moves with the herds, but
most people stay in the home village.
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.
Economic Systems
An economy is a system of production, distribution, and consumption
of resources, and economics is the study of such systems.
Economic anthropology studies economics in a comparative perspective.
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.
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.
In nonindustrial societies, the mode of production is kin-based;
labor usually is not bought but is given as a social obligation
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.
Production in Nonindustrial Societies
All societies divide economic labor according to gender and age,
but the nature of these divisions varies from society to society.
In nonindustrial societies there is a more intimate relationship
between the worker and the means of production than there is in industrial
nations.
Means of Production
Means (or factors) of production include land (territory), labor,
and technology.
Land
Among foragers, ties between people and land are less permanent
than they are among food producers.
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.
Labor, Tools, and Specialization
In nonindustrial societies, access to both land and labor
comes through social links such as kinship, marriage, and descent.
Mutual aid in production is just one aspect of ongoing social
relations.
In nonindustrial societies, neither technology nor technical
knowledge is as specialized as it is in states.
Craft specialization (e.g., ceramic production) does occur
in some tribal societies.
Alienation in Industrial Economies
Industrial Economies
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.
As a consequence of such alienation, the worker has less
pride in and personal identification with their productions.
Industrial workers also have impersonal relations with their
coworkers and employers.
Nonindustrial Societies
In nonindustrial societies, people usually have more personal
investment and a greater sense of accomplishment in their products
than do workers in industrial economies.
In nonindustrial societies, economy is embedded in society;
the relations of production, distribution, and consumption are
social relations with economic aspects.
A Case of Industrial Alienation
Female factory workers in Malaysia suffer from difficult
and exhausting work conditions, constant male supervision, low
wages, job uncertainty, etc.
Spirit possession of female factory workers may represent
an unconscious protest against labor discipline and male control
of the industrial setting.
Economizing and Maximization
Classical economic theory assumes that individuals act rationally
and strive to maximize profit (the profit motive).
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.
Alternative Ends
Throughout the world, people invest their scarce resources in
subsistence, replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent funds.
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.
People invest in a replacement fund, maintaining their technology
and other items essential to production and to everyday life.
People invest in a social fund, helping their friends, relatives,
in-laws, and neighbors.
Ceremonial fund refers to expenditures on ceremonies or rituals.
People in nonindustrial societies also devote resources to
a rent fund, rendering resources to an individual or agency that
is superior politically or economically.
Peasants are small-scale agriculturalists who live in nonindustrial
states and have rent fund obligations.
Peasants produce to feed themselves, to sell their produce,
and to pay rent.
All peasants live in state-organized societies and produce
food without the elaborate technology of modern farming or agribusiness.
Often the rent fund becomes peasants' foremost obligation
(even at the expense of their own diets).
Distribution, Exchange
Polanyi defined three principles orienting exchanges: the market
principle, redistribution, and reciprocity.
The Market Principle
The market principle dominates in capitalist economies.
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.
Bargaining is characteristic of market-principle exchanges.
Redistribution
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.
Eventually, goods are redistributed—that is, they flow
in the reverse direction, down through the hierarchy and back to the
local level.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is exchange between social equals, who are normally
related by kinship, marriage, or another close personal tie.
Reciprocity is dominant in more egalitarian societies (foragers,
cultivators, and pastoralists).
There are three degrees of reciprocity: generalized, balanced,
and negative.
Generalized Reciprocity
With generalized reciprocity, which is prevalent among foragers,
someone gives to another person and expects nothing concrete or
immediate in return.
Such exchanges are expressions of personal relationships,
rather than primarily economic transactions.
Balanced Reciprocity
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.
Although reciprocation need not come immediately, complete
failure to reciprocate will strain the social relationship.
Negative Reciprocity
Negative reciprocity involves exchanges with people outside
or on the fringes of a social system.
In such exchanges, which are full of ambiguity and distrust
(at least initially), each partner attempts to maximize profit
and expects an immediate return.
Coexistence of Exchange Principles
The different exchange principles can all be present in the same
society, although they govern different kinds of transactions.
Although most exchanges in the United States are govern by the
market principle, redistribution and reciprocal (both generalized
and balanced) exchanges also occur.
Potlatching
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.
Potlatching tribes (such as the Kwakiutl and the Salish) were
foragers, but they lived in sedentary villages and had chiefs.
Potlatches traditionally were viewed as economically wasteful
and driven by irrational desires for prestige.
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.
Despite the overall richness of the North Pacific coastal
environment, resources fluctuated from year to year and place
to place.
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.
Box: Scarcity and the Betsileo
Kottak describes some of his fieldwork experiences on Madagascar,
particularly in the Betsileo village of Ivato, a principle research site
where he made many friends.
People in Ivato felt that (in contrast to Americans) they had little
need of money because they produced almost everything they used, and that
they had all they needed.
The Ivatans' attitudes illustrate that the notion of scarcity
is variable, not universal.
Although shortages do arise in nonindustrial societies, the concept
of scarcity (insufficient means) is much less developed in stable
subsistence-oriented societies than in industrial societies, particularly
as reliance on consumer goods increases.
Over the past several decades, the concepts of scarcity, commerce,
and negative reciprocity have become prevalent among the Betsileo as a
result of rapid population growth, agricultural intensification (including
the cultivation of cash crops), and increasing demand for cash.
