Week 5 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 5 — Two Hundred to One: Reading the Subsistence Model — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — read the model table of four ways of making a living, compare them without ranking them, and explain it to someone who has it wrong.

This week you met the five subsistence strategies as a model, the shift to food production, the illustrative subsistence comparison table with its density, settlement moves, and group sizes, the links between food, settlement, and surplus, and the debate over how hard foragers worked. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Ethnography Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 1's holism and Week 2's warning against ethnocentrism.

The task

The illustrative subsistence comparison table (Dataset D) is a model built for this course, with engineered whole numbers, and it describes no real people. Its four illustrative communities are:

foraging: 1 person per square kilometre, 60 settlement moves per decade, a typical local group of 30;
pastoral: 4 people per square kilometre, 40 moves per decade, a group of 60;
horticultural: 20 people per square kilometre, 2 moves per decade, a group of 150;
intensive agricultural: 200 people per square kilometre, 0 moves per decade, a group of 3,000.

The running fieldwork site is an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market constructed for this course, not a real place. Its family-run stall sells from the family's own farm, with permanent fields, to buyers who mostly live by wages and buy their food; field-note entry 6, at 8:50 a.m., records three generations at work in the stall. A friend sees your notes and says, "Foragers are people who never figured out farming. They're living in the past, and one day they'll catch up." Your job is to answer the way an anthropologist would, starting from a few plain numbers in the model.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

In the illustrative subsistence comparison table, the horticultural community has 20 people per square kilometre and the intensive agricultural community has 200. How many times the horticultural density is the intensive agricultural density?
In the illustrative subsistence comparison table, the foraging group makes 60 settlement moves per decade, and a decade is 10 years. How many times a year does the foraging group move?
In the illustrative subsistence comparison table, the horticultural village's typical local group is 150 people and the intensive agricultural town's is 3,000. How many times the village's group is the town's group?
In the illustrative subsistence comparison table, the horticultural village moves 2 times a decade, and a decade is 10 years. About how many years pass between the village's moves?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

Problem 1: explain, using permanent fields and surplus, why the intensive agricultural community can hold more people on each square kilometre, and add the honesty note that the table is a model with engineered numbers in which real foraging densities are often well under 1 person per square kilometre.
Problem 2: define foraging in the course's words, and explain why a group that follows its food moves often, without describing foragers as always hungry, always idle, or earlier than anyone else.
Problem 3: link the larger group to surplus and staying put, and compare the two communities side by side as a model, without calling either one more advanced, simpler, or an earlier stage.
Problem 4: read the market's family-run stall in two columns, observed and possible interpretation, as intensive agriculture meeting buyers who live by wages, with people named only by role.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend thinks foragers are behind and will one day catch up. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains why the five strategies are a model for comparing and not a ladder, that domestication began independently in several world regions, and that foragers are living people in the present with their own histories, and that names one limit, such as that the table's numbers are engineered or that the debate over foragers' working hours is still open. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who says that grandparents who kept a backyard vegetable garden were "old-fashioned" compared with people who buy everything at a store. Model answer: "A backyard garden tended with hand tools is one way of getting food, and buying food with a paycheck is another; many households do both at once. Anthropologists treat these as different strategies to compare, not as steps where one is newer and better. One fair caveat: a garden rarely feeds a whole household, so most gardeners still shop."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the figures in the problems without guessing which figures or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to the friend, explaining why the five strategies are a model and not a ladder, that domestication began independently in several world regions, and that foragers are living people in the present, with one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the figures you used, so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled two-column sketch of the family-run stall with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe the market and the model table only as the course describes them, name people only by role, and do not borrow a custom, an hours figure, or a detail about any real people from another source without citing it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com