Week 5 Discussion — Who Counts the Work, and Does the Model Fit? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

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

Hook

Think about the last meal you ate and how many people, places, and kinds of work it passed through before it reached you. This week you met the five subsistence strategies as a model, the shift to food production, the illustrative subsistence comparison table, and the debate over how hard foragers worked.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Count every hour your household spends on food in a week, first counting only shopping and then adding cooking, cleanup, and packing lunches. In the 1960s, Ju/'hoansi foragers in the Kalahari region were studied for their work, food sharing, and mobility, and those studies fed the "original affluent society" debate. Sahlins's side argued that many foragers met their needs with fewer hours of food-getting work than farmers; later critics counted food processing, tool-making, and household work and found the hours longer. Which side's way of counting do you find more convincing, and why? Use foraging, subsistence strategies, and the idea of a model, give each side its strongest case, and say what would change your mind.

Option B: At the running fieldwork site, an illustrative weekly market, the family-run stall sells from the family's own farm, with permanent fields, to buyers who mostly live by wages. This week's model reads that as intensive agriculture meeting the industrial and postindustrial pattern. Some argue that sorting ways of making a living into five strategies helps you see how any community feeds itself; others argue that a model of types hides how much real communities mix and change. Using the stall and one place you know (a neighborhood, a family farm, a campus, a workplace), where do you land? Use at least two of the five strategies and say what each side gets right.

There is no single right answer. The working-hours debate turns on which tasks count as work, and a model can sharpen a comparison while also smoothing over real variety; Pick the option you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Working on your own: this version of the discussion is written entirely from your own reasoning, in your own words.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, report your household's two counts and say which way of counting foragers' work you find more convincing; for Option B, say whether the five-strategy model helps more than it hides, using the family-run stall and one place you know.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (subsistence strategies, foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, intensive agriculture, industrial and postindustrial economies, surplus) correctly.
• Give your judgment, with a reason, and give the other side its strongest case.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: point out where a classmate slipped into calling one strategy earlier or simpler, offer the strongest case for the side they did not take, or name a second strategy mixing in the place they described. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option B. My aunt's neighborhood has a weekend farm stand, a community garden, and an office park, so the model helps me see three strategies at once: intensive agriculture at the stand, horticulture in the garden, and the wage pattern in the offices. But the other side has a point, because the gardeners also work for wages, so one household mixes strategies the model lists separately. I would still check how many garden households buy most of their food.

Notice how it names places by their kind, uses the strategies as a map rather than a ladder, gives the other side its due, and says what it would still check. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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