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. This chapter focuses on the first four.
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.
Each year more and more foragers come under the control of nation states and are influenced by forces of globalization.
Correlates of Foraging
Typologies, such as Cohen's adaptive strategies, are useful because they suggest correlations—that is, association or covariation between two or more variables. Correlations, however, rarely are perfect.
People who subsisted by hunting and gathering often, but not always, lived in band-organized societies.
Bands were small groups of fewer than a hundred people, all related by kinship or marriage.
Among some foragers, band size stayed roughly constant throughout the year; in other foraging societies, bands split up during part of the year.
Members of foraging societies typically were socially mobile, having the ability to join any band to which they had 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 involves intensive and continuous use of land.
Agriculture is more labor intensive because of its use of domesticated animals, irrigation, and/or terracing.
Many agriculturists use animals for transport, as cultivating machines, and for their manure.
Irrigation allows agriculturists 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).
Pastoralists typically use 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 were 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 very specialized.
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, the worker has less pride in and personal identification with their products.
Industrial workers also have impersonal relations with their coworkers and employers.
Nonindustrial Societies
In nonindustrial societies, people usually feel more personal investment and a greater sense of accomplishment 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
For decades, the government of Malaysia has promoted export-oriented industry, allowing transnational companies to install labor-intensive manufacturing operations in rural Malaysia. This industrialization is part of a global strategy and it has had enormous impacts in communities worldwide.
Anthropologist Aihwa Ong studied the condition of female factory workers in Malaysia that suffered from difficult and exhausting work conditions, constant male supervision, low wages, job uncertainty, etc.
Spirit possession of female factory workers may have represented 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 agriculturists 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 that guide 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 the law of supply and demand determines value.
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.
The range from generalized to negative reciprocity is called the reciprocity continuum.
Coexistence of Exchange Principles
The different exchange principles can all be present in the same society, although they govern different kinds of transactions.
In today's North America, the market governs most exchanges, from the sale of the means of production to the sale of consumer goods. Yet, there is also redistribution, generalized reciprocity, and other forms of reciprocity.
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.
According to classical economic theory, the profit motive is universal, with the goal of maximizing material benefits. The potlatch contradicted this assumption.
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.
Anthropology Today: 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.
