Week 5 · Chapter

Chapter 5 — Making a Living: Subsistence Strategies

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~25–35 minutes · Objective 4 (compare how societies make a living and exchange goods: the subsistence strategies as a model, generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange, the obligations a gift creates, and documented cases such as the kula and the potlatch) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, and the quiz all build on it.

In plain language

Every group of people has to eat, and anthropologists ask how they get their food. The ways a group gets its food are called subsistence strategies (the everyday work of getting food, sorted into five broad kinds). This week you will learn the five kinds as a model, from foraging (hunting, gathering, and fishing without farms or herds) to buying food with wages. You will see how people first began to grow crops and raise animals, read a small table that compares four model communities, and weigh a long-running debate about how hard foragers worked. By the end, you will be able to look at any food system, including your own, and say how it works without ranking it.

Why you already care about this

Picture a family's weekly grocery run (an illustrative scene). One adult pushes a cart down 12 aisles, a teenager grabs 3 boxes of cereal, and a card pays for 40 items at the register. The family drives home with a week of dinners. Almost nothing in the cart was grown, caught, or raised by anyone they know.

That trip feels ordinary because you have made it many times. An anthropologist sees something strange in it: a whole household eats without growing a single bean. Other people in other places get their food by hunting and gathering, by tending gardens with hand tools, by herding animals, or by plowing permanent fields. This week asks how each of those ways of making a living works, and what each one does to the size and shape of a community.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

name the five subsistence strategies and sort a new food-getting scene into one or more of them;
describe the shift to food production and explain why it was not one invention in one place;
read the illustrative subsistence comparison table and compute its density ratios, moves per year, and group-size ratios;
explain in words how a strategy links to density, mobility, settlement size, and surplus;
present both sides of the "original affluent society" debate about the Ju/'hoansi case without giving a verdict;
read the market's family-run stall as intensive agriculture meeting buyers who live by wages.

Carry this sentence with you: a subsistence model is a map for comparing, not a ladder to climb.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the anthropological perspective, Week 2 defined culture as learned, shared, and integrated, Week 3 taught fieldwork and two-column field notes, and Week 4 listened to the market's talk as language.
This week: a new unit begins on the material base of life: the five subsistence strategies as a model, the shift to food production, the subsistence comparison table, and the debate over foragers' working hours.
How they connect: Week 1's holism said the parts of a way of life fit together; this week shows how the way people get food shapes where and how they live.
Where we're going next: Week 6, Exchange and Economic Systems, asks how people share and trade what they produce.

Week 1 named holism, the habit of looking at how the parts of a way of life fit together, and Week 2 called culture integrated, meaning a change in one part ripples through others. Food is where that ripple starts. How a group feeds itself shapes how many people can live in one place, how often they move, and what they can store. Week 3 also gave you the course's running fieldwork site, an illustrative, unnamed weekly neighborhood farmers' market of 24 stalls. This week you return to it and ask where its food comes from and who buys it.

1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies

Think about three places you might get dinner. You could pick berries along a trail, pull carrots from a backyard garden, or buy a bag of rice at a store. Each is a different way to get food, and each takes a different kind of work.

Anthropologists sort those differences into a model. Subsistence strategies are the ways a group gets its food, taught in this course as a model of five strategies: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture, and industrial and postindustrial economies; real communities mix strategies.

Here are the five, side by side.

The five subsistence strategies in this course's model, with the tools and land use typical of each
Strategy	How food is gotten	Typical tools and land use
Foraging	Hunting, gathering, and fishing	No domesticated plants or animals
Horticulture	Gardening	Hand tools; fields often left to rest
Pastoralism	Herding domesticated animals	Herds moved, often with the seasons
Intensive agriculture	Farming	Plows, irrigation, draft animals or machines, permanent fields
Industrial and postindustrial economies	Buying food with wages	Wage work, increasingly in services and information

And here is each definition, set off so you can find it again.

Foraging is getting food by hunting, gathering, and fishing, without domesticated plants or animals.
Horticulture is gardening with hand tools, with fields often left to rest and recover before they are planted again.
Pastoralism is making a living mainly by herding domesticated animals, often moving with the seasons.
Intensive agriculture is farming with plows, irrigation, draft animals or machines, and permanent fields that are worked year after year.
Industrial and postindustrial economies are economies in which most people buy their food and work for wages, increasingly in services and information rather than in growing food.

Worked example — sorting the grocery run and a community garden (illustrative). Use the model on two scenes from everyday life.

The grocery run. The family buys every item with money earned at jobs. That is the industrial and postindustrial pattern: food is bought, and the adults work for wages.
A community garden. On the same street, neighbors tend vegetable beds with trowels and hoes, and one bed rests each year. That looks like horticulture: hand tools, and ground left to recover.
Putting them together. The same family that shops at the store also keeps a bed at the garden. One household uses two strategies at once.

In words: the family's food comes mostly from wages and partly from a hand-tool garden, which is why the model sorts strategies, not whole people.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) List three foods you ate this week and trace how each one reached you. Which strategy produced it, and which strategy did you use to get it?
(b) Think of someone you know who grows, catches, or raises some of their own food. Which two strategies does their household mix?

Misconception check. Students often think the five strategies are a ladder, with every society starting at foraging and climbing toward industry. That is tempting, because the list is usually written in one order and that order looks like a staircase. But the model is a tool for comparing, and real communities mix strategies and change in many directions. The cure: read the five as a map of different ways to make a living, with no top and no bottom.

2. Trace the shift to food production

Walk through any produce section and every bin holds a crop that people have planted, picked, and replanted for many generations. Each one began as a wild plant. People shaped it, season after season.

That long process has a name. Domestication is people shaping wild plants and animals, over many generations, into kinds that depend on human care; it began independently in several world regions after the end of the last ice age. The shift to food production is the change from getting food only by foraging to also growing plants and raising animals, which happened independently in several world regions rather than as one invention in one place.

Two words in that definition carry the weight: independently and several. People in different parts of the world, with no contact between them, each began to tend and select plants and animals. The course names this in words. It keys no date, because the timing differed from region to region.

This is one of the places where the cultural course borrows from archaeology, the subfield you met in Week 1. Archaeologists study past ways of life through the remains people left behind, such as seeds, bones, and tools.

Worked example — reading the shift as a pattern, not a single story. Compare two ways to tell what happened.

The single-story version. One group invented farming in one place, and everyone else copied it. This version is easy to remember.
The several-regions version. Domestication began independently in several world regions after the end of the last ice age. Different plants and animals were domesticated in different places.
Which one the course teaches. The several-regions version. It matches the discipline's standard account, and it is why the course never names one birthplace for farming.

In words: food production was started more than once, by different peoples in different regions, which is why no single place gets the credit.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Pick a food your family eats often. What would you want to know about its history before you said where it was first grown?
(b) Why might people like a story with one inventor better than a story with several starting points? What does the simpler story leave out?

Misconception check. Students often think the shift to food production was a single invention, made once in one place and then spread everywhere. That is tempting, because many inventions in your own life, such as a phone or an app, do have one maker. But domestication began independently in several world regions. The cure: say "independently in several regions" every time, and resist naming one birthplace for farming.

3. Read the model table: density, mobility, and group size

Imagine four model communities, each living by a different strategy. You want to compare them fairly, so you ask the same three questions of each. How crowded is the land? How often do people move their homes? How many people live together in one camp, village, or town?

Those three questions use three terms. Population density is the number of people living on each square kilometre of land. Settlement mobility is how often a community moves its homes, for example several times a year, once every few years, or not at all. A typical local-group size is how many people usually live together in one camp, village, or town.

Here is the course's illustrative subsistence comparison table (Dataset D). The four communities are illustrative, constructed for this course, and the whole-number values are engineered to teach with. It is a model, not a description of any real people.

Dataset D, the illustrative subsistence comparison table: four model communities with engineered values for density, settlement moves, and local-group size
Community (illustrative)	People per square kilometre	Settlement moves per decade	Typical local-group size
Foraging	1	60	30
Pastoral	4	40	60
Horticultural	20	2	150
Intensive agricultural	200	0	3,000

Worked example — the density ratios. Compare how crowded the land is.

Horticultural against foraging. Divide the horticultural density by the foraging density: 20 ÷ 1 = 20. So 20 times as many people live on each square kilometre.
Intensive against horticultural. Divide: 200 ÷ 20 = 10. The intensive agricultural density is 10 times the horticultural density.
Intensive against foraging. Divide: 200 ÷ 1 = 200. The intensive agricultural density is 200 times the foraging density.

In words: in the model, each square kilometre feeds 1 forager versus 200 people in the intensive agricultural town, a 200-fold difference that comes from permanent fields.

Worked example — moves per year. Turn moves per decade into something easier to picture. A decade is 10 years.

The foraging group. 60 ÷ 10 = 6. It moves 6 times a year.
The pastoral group. 40 ÷ 10 = 4. It moves 4 times a year, with the seasons.
The horticultural village. It moves 2 times a decade, so it moves about once every 10 ÷ 2 = 5 years, as its fields need rest.
The intensive agricultural town. It makes 0 moves. It stays put.

In words: a herding group in the model packs up 4 times a year, versus about once every 5 years for the horticultural village. The herders decide when to move by the seasons, and the gardeners decide by their fields.

Worked example — group size. Compare how many people live together.

Intensive against horticultural. 3,000 ÷ 150 = 20. The intensive agricultural town's typical local group of 3,000 is 20 times the horticultural village's group of 150.
Pastoral against foraging. 60 ÷ 30 = 2. The pastoral group of 60 is 2 times the foraging group of 30.

In words: the town's group is 20 times the village's, so a town council has to plan for thousands of neighbors where a village elder knows every face.

Now the honesty note, which matters as much as the arithmetic. This table is a model with engineered numbers. Real communities mix strategies, and real foraging densities are often well under 1 person per square kilometre. Use the table to compare patterns, never to describe a real people.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Think of the most crowded place you have lived and the least crowded. How did density change everyday life, such as how many neighbors you knew?
(b) Imagine moving your home 6 times a year. What would you own, and what would you leave behind?

Misconception check. Students often read Dataset D as facts about real groups, as if every foraging people lived exactly 1 person per square kilometre and moved exactly 6 times a year. That is tempting, because a table of numbers looks like measured data. But the values are engineered for teaching, and a limitation of any model table is that it smooths over how much real communities differ. The cure: say "in the model" each time you read the table.

4. Link food to settlement: surplus and staying put

Think about a pantry. If your household could store a whole season of food, you could stay in one home all year and still eat. If nothing kept, you would have to go where the food was.

Anthropologists link subsistence to settlement through that idea. A surplus is food produced beyond what the producers need right away, which can be stored, traded, or used to feed people who do not produce food. Permanent fields let a town stay put, store food, and grow large. Foraging and herding favor small groups that move.

Worked example — reading the links in words. Read Dataset D again (illustrative), this time as a chain of causes.

Food in one place. The intensive agricultural town works permanent fields, so its food grows where it lives.
No need to move. Its settlement moves per decade are 0.
Room for more people. Its density is 200 people per square kilometre and its typical local group is 3,000.
Food to spare. Permanent fields and storage make a surplus possible, which can feed people who do other work.
The other end. The foraging group follows its food, moves 6 times a year, and lives in a group of 30.

In words: when food stays in one place and can be stored, people can stay too, and the group can grow; when food moves with the seasons, small groups move with it.

A fresh case shows the same link. Picture a fishing town's seasonal calendar (illustrative). In the spring run, boats bring in far more fish than the town can eat, and families smoke and salt the extra. In the quiet months, they live on what they stored. The stored fish is a surplus, and it is what lets the town stay in one harbor all year.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Name one thing your household stores so it does not have to shop every day. How does that storage change your weekly routine?
(b) Think of a job that does not produce food, such as a teacher, a nurse, or a mechanic. What has to be true about food production for that job to exist?

Misconception check. Students often think a "simpler" society, such as a small foraging group, is an earlier stage of their own society, as if foragers were living in the past. That is tempting, because some nineteenth-century scholars ranked societies on a ladder, and the habit lingers. But foragers are living people in the present, with their own histories, and a small group that moves is a different way of making a living, not a step behind. The cure: compare strategies side by side and never call one earlier, simpler, or less developed.

5. Weigh the debate: the Ju/'hoansi and foragers' working hours

How many hours a week do you spend getting food? Count only shopping and you might say two. Count cooking, washing dishes, and packing lunches and the number grows fast. What you decide to count changes the answer.

That counting question sits at the center of a famous debate. In the 1960s, Ju/'hoansi foragers in the Kalahari region (an older outsiders' label, "!Kung", is given once here) were the subject of studies of work, food sharing, and mobility. Those studies fed into a larger argument about foraging life. The course calls it the original affluent society debate. On one side is Sahlins's argument, collected in 1972, that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers. On the other side are later critics who counted food processing, tool-making, and household work and found the hours longer.

The source is Sahlins (1972), Stone Age Economics. Its title uses the period's wording, which this course quotes only as a title and never uses in its own voice.

Here is the case each side can make at full strength.

The case for shorter hours. If you measure only the time spent getting food, many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers spent. On this view, a picture of foragers as always hungry misreads their lives.
The case for longer hours. Getting food is only part of the work. Critics counted food processing, tool-making, and household work, and with those tasks included, the hours were longer. On this view, a short count of food-getting hours leaves out real labor.

Worked example — reading the debate as a measurement question. Lay out what each side counts.

What both sides agree on. Foragers met their needs through food-getting work, and the 1960s Ju/'hoansi studies looked at work, food sharing, and mobility.
What Sahlins's side counts. Hours of food-getting work, compared with farmers.
What the critics add. Food processing, tool-making, and household work.
Why the answers differ. The two sides draw the line around "work" in different places.

In words: the "original affluent society" debate is a disagreement about which tasks count as work, so the course teaches both sides and keys no verdict.

Notice the past tense and the decade. The Ju/'hoansi studies describe what researchers recorded in the 1960s. Like every community, the Ju/'hoansi have changed since then, and they speak for themselves.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Estimate the hours your household spends on food in a week, first counting only shopping and then counting cooking and cleanup too. Which count feels more honest, and why?
(b) Which side of the debate do you find stronger, and what one piece of evidence would change your mind?

Misconception check. Students often think foragers were always hungry, or the reverse, that they were always idle. That is tempting, because both make a simple story. But the debate is about how much time and which tasks count as work, not about a stereotype in either direction. The cure: state the measurement question, give both sides their strongest case, and leave the verdict open.

6. Return to the market: strategies meeting in one place

Walk back into the running fieldwork site on a market morning. The market (Dataset A, illustrative, constructed for this course, not a real place) has 24 stalls and is open once a week from 8:00 a.m. to noon. Buyers arrive with cards and cash. Growers arrive with crates from their farms.

Worked example — the subsistence reading of the family-run stall. Read the stall the way the chapter has taught you.

The opening hours. The market runs from 8:00 a.m. to noon, so 12 − 8 = 4 hours once a week.
What was observed. Field-note entry 6, 8:50 a.m., family-run stall, records an older woman who directs a man and a teenager who restock the bins while a younger woman runs the card reader. The stall may be run by one family across three generations.
The sellers' strategy. The stall sells from the family's own farm, with permanent fields, which is intensive agriculture.
The buyers' strategy. The buyers mostly live by wages and buy their food, which is the industrial and postindustrial pattern.
The comparison. Set beside Dataset D, the farm belongs with the intensive agricultural town that does not move. The buyers belong to a wage economy that the four model communities do not show.

In words: the market's family-run stall is intensive agriculture meeting buyers who live by wages, two strategies mixing in one place, not two rungs on a ladder.

Here is the bigger lesson. Your own town is not one strategy. It holds wage work, store-bought food, farm stalls, and community gardens, and some households fish or hunt for part of their food. The model gives you words for each piece so you can describe the mix.

Pause and think. Choose one option and answer it in two or three sentences:

(a) Name one place near you where two subsistence strategies meet, such as a farm stand, a fishing pier, or a garden plot. What does each side bring?
(b) If the family-run stall's buyers all started growing their own vegetables, what would change for the family's farm?

Misconception check. Students often think a modern city has left the older strategies behind, so farming belongs to the past and buying belongs to the present. That is tempting, because most city shoppers never see a field. But the market shows intensive agriculture and a wage economy working together every week. The cure: look for the mix, because real communities, including yours, combine strategies.

Key terms

Subsistence strategies — The ways a group gets its food, taught in this course as a model of five strategies: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture, and industrial and postindustrial economies; real communities mix strategies. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Foraging — Getting food by hunting, gathering, and fishing, without domesticated plants or animals. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Horticulture — Gardening with hand tools, with fields often left to rest and recover before they are planted again. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Pastoralism — Making a living mainly by herding domesticated animals, often moving with the seasons. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Intensive agriculture — Farming with plows, irrigation, draft animals or machines, and permanent fields that are worked year after year. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Industrial and postindustrial economies — Economies in which most people buy their food and work for wages, increasingly in services and information rather than in growing food. (first used: 1. Name the model: five subsistence strategies)
Domestication — People shaping wild plants and animals, over many generations, into kinds that depend on human care; it began independently in several world regions after the end of the last ice age. (first used: 2. Trace the shift to food production)
Shift to food production — The change from getting food only by foraging to also growing plants and raising animals, which happened independently in several world regions rather than as one invention in one place. (first used: 2. Trace the shift to food production)
Population density — The number of people living on each square kilometre of land. (first used: 3. Read the model table: density, mobility, and group size)
Settlement mobility — How often a community moves its homes, for example several times a year, once every few years, or not at all. (first used: 3. Read the model table: density, mobility, and group size)
Surplus — Food produced beyond what the producers need right away, which can be stored, traded, or used to feed people who do not produce food. (first used: 4. Link food to settlement: surplus and staying put)
Original affluent society debate — The debate over Sahlins's argument, collected in 1972, that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers, against later critics who counted food processing, tool-making, and household work and found the hours longer. (first used: 5. Weigh the debate: the Ju/'hoansi and foragers' working hours)

Summary

Subsistence strategies are the ways a group gets its food.
The five strategies are a model for comparing, not a ladder.
Domestication began independently in several world regions, with no date keyed.
In the model table, intensive agricultural density is 200 times foraging density.
Permanent fields and stored surplus let a settlement stay put and grow.
The "original affluent society" debate is about which tasks count as work.
The market's family-run stall is intensive agriculture meeting a wage economy.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

In an illustrative river-valley model, a gardening village has 12 people per square kilometre and a plow-farming town nearby has 300. How many times as dense is the town, and which strategy does each community illustrate?
An illustrative herding camp in a separate model moves 30 times a decade. How many times a year does it move, and why should you not treat that number as a fact about any real herding people?
A classmate says, "Foragers live the way our ancestors did, so studying them is like studying our own past." Using this week's concepts, explain what is wrong with that claim.
Another classmate says, "The 1960s studies proved that foragers worked fewer hours than farmers." What is missing from that statement?

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Divide the town's density by the village's density: 300 ÷ 12 = 25. The town is 25 times as dense. The gardening village with hand tools illustrates horticulture, and the plow-farming town illustrates intensive agriculture. Notice that this is a fresh model, not Dataset D.
A decade is 10 years, so divide: 30 ÷ 10 = 3. The camp moves 3 times a year. The number comes from an illustrative model, and real communities mix strategies and differ widely, so a model value describes a pattern for comparison, not a real people.
The claim treats a foraging society as an earlier stage of the speaker's own, which is ladder thinking. Foragers are living people with their own histories, and foraging is one way of making a living in the present. The model compares strategies side by side and never ranks them as earlier or later.
It leaves out the other side of the debate. Sahlins's side argued that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers, but later critics counted food processing, tool-making, and household work and found the hours longer. The answer depends on which tasks count as work, so the course gives both sides and no verdict.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week, the model of reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange asks how people share and trade what they produce.

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