Lecture: Making a Living: Subsistence Strategies
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 5
Opening
Picture your last trip to the grocery store. You pushed a cart, scanned a card, and carried a few days of dinners home. Now ask a strange question about that trip. Who grew any of it? For most of us, the honest answer is that nobody we know did.
That question is where this lecture starts. You'll meet it in many fields. A public-health student asks why a town's food supply depends on wage work. An environmental-science major compares how much land different ways of farming need. A future planner works with a neighborhood that runs a community garden. Each of them is asking how people get their food, and what that does to the places they live.
In Week 1 you met holism, the habit of seeing how the parts of a way of life fit together. In Week 2 you learned that culture is integrated, so a change in one part ripples through the rest. Week 3 gave you fieldwork and the course's illustrative farmers' market, and Week 4 listened to the market's words. This lecture opens a new unit. It asks how people make a living, starting with food.
Here's the plan. I'll start with five ways of getting food, taught as a model. Then we'll trace how people began growing crops and raising animals. We'll read a small model table and do some friendly division. After that, we'll link food to settlement and surplus, weigh a famous debate about foragers, and finish back at the market. Next, in Week 6, Exchange and Economic Systems, the course asks how people share and trade what they produce.
1. Five ways to get food
Think about three ways you could get dinner. You could pick berries along a trail. You could pull carrots from a backyard garden. Or you could buy a bag of rice at a store. Each one 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.
Let me give you each one in plain words. 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. And 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.
Here's a short story that shows the model at work. A family on one street does its weekly shopping with money from their jobs. That's the wage pattern. On the same street, neighbors tend vegetable beds in a community garden with trowels and hoes, and one bed rests each year. That looks like horticulture. And the same family that shops at the store keeps a bed at the garden. One household, two strategies.
That's why I keep saying the word "model." It sorts strategies, not whole peoples. Real communities mix them.
Pause and try this. A household keeps a few goats for milk and moves them to fresh grazing as the seasons change. Which of the five strategies does that part of their food-getting look like?
Think about animals, and think about moving.
Here's the answer. Pastoralism. Herding domesticated animals and moving with the seasons is the heart of that strategy.
The wrong turn here is reading the five as a ladder, with every society starting at the bottom and climbing. The model is a tool for comparing. It has no top and no bottom.
2. The shift to food production
Walk through any produce section. Every bin holds a crop that people 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 bigger change it made possible also has a name. 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 carry the weight there: "independently" and "several." People in different parts of the world, with no contact between them, each began to tend and select plants and animals. This is a place where the cultural course borrows from archaeology, the subfield you met in Week 1, which studies past ways of life through what people left behind.
You'll notice I haven't given you a date. That's on purpose. The course names this shift in words and keys no date, because the timing differed from region to region.
Pause and try this. A classmate says farming was invented once, in one place, and then everyone else copied it. What two words from the definition push back on that claim?
Think about how many places, and whether they were connected.
Here's the answer. "Independently" and "several." Domestication began independently in several world regions, so no single place invented it.
It's tempting to think of food production like a phone or an app, with one inventor. But this story has several starting points, and the course keeps it that way.
3. Reading the model table
Now let's compare four model communities fairly. To do that, you ask the same three questions of each. How crowded is the land? How often do people move their homes? And how many people live together in one camp, village, or town?
Those 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. And typical local-group size is how many people usually live together in one place.
The course's model table is called Dataset D. The four communities in it are illustrative, made up for teaching, with engineered whole numbers. Let me read it to you row by row. The foraging community has 1 person per square kilometre, moves 60 times a decade, and lives in groups of 30. The pastoral community has 4 people per square kilometre, moves 40 times a decade, and lives in groups of 60. The horticultural village has 20 people per square kilometre, moves 2 times a decade, and lives in groups of 150. And the intensive agricultural town has 200 people per square kilometre, makes 0 moves, and lives in groups of 3,000.
Now the division. Start with density. Divide the horticultural 20 by the foraging 1, and you get 20. So 20 times as many people live on each square kilometre. Divide the intensive 200 by the horticultural 20, and you get 10. Divide the intensive 200 by the foraging 1, and you get 200. In the model, the town is 200 times as crowded as the foraging land.
Next, moves. A decade is 10 years. The foraging group moves 60 times a decade, so 60 divided by 10 is 6 moves a year. The pastoral group moves 40 times a decade, so 40 divided by 10 is 4 moves a year, with the seasons. The horticultural village moves 2 times a decade, so it moves about once every 5 years, as its fields need rest. The town stays put.
Last, group size. The town's group of 3,000 divided by the village's 150 is 20. The pastoral group of 60 is 2 times the foraging group of 30.
And now the most important sentence in this section. This 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 try this. In the model table, the pastoral group moves 40 times a decade. How many times a year is that?
A decade is 10 years, so think about sharing 40 moves across 10 years.
Here's the answer. 4 times a year. 40 divided by 10 is 4, and the model says those moves follow the seasons.
So when you see a table full of tidy numbers, say "in the model" out loud. It keeps you honest.
4. Food, settlement, and surplus
Think about your kitchen 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'd have to go where the food was.
That's the link this section is about. 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.
Read the model table again as a chain of causes. The intensive agricultural town works permanent fields, so its food grows where it lives. It makes 0 moves. That leaves room for many people, 200 per square kilometre in groups of 3,000. And permanent fields with storage make a surplus possible, which can feed people who do other work. At the other end, the foraging group follows its food, moves 6 times a year, and lives in a group of 30.
Here's a short story from a different setting. Picture an illustrative fishing town. In the spring run, the boats bring in far more fish than the town can eat. Families smoke and salt the extra. In the quiet months, they live on what they stored. That stored fish is a surplus, and it's what lets the town stay in one harbor all year.
Pause and try this. In the model, which community's food grows right where it lives, so that it never has to move?
Think about which strategy uses permanent fields.
Here's the answer. The intensive agricultural town. Its permanent fields stay put, so the town makes 0 moves.
Now the wrong turn. It's tempting to call a small foraging group "simpler" and treat it as an earlier stage of your own society. But foragers are living people with their own histories. A small group that moves is a different way of making a living, not a step behind. Compare side by side, and never rank.
5. The debate about foragers' work
Here's a question to try on yourself. How many hours a week do you spend getting food? If you count only shopping, it might not be many. If you add cooking, washing dishes, and packing lunches, 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 were the subject of studies of work, food sharing, and mobility. An older outsiders' label for them, "!Kung", appears in older writing; from here on, I'll use only their own name. Notice the past tense and the decade. The studies describe what researchers recorded in the 1960s, and like every community, the Ju/'hoansi have changed since then and speak for themselves.
The debate has a name in this course. The original affluent society debate is the debate over 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. Sahlins collected the argument in a book called Stone Age Economics. The course quotes that title as published and never uses its period wording in its own voice.
Let me give each side its strongest case. Sahlins's side says this: measure the hours spent getting food, and many foragers met their needs with fewer of them than farmers spent in the fields. So the picture of foragers as always hungry misreads their lives. The critics say this: getting food is only part of the work. Count the processing, the tool-making, and the household work, and the hours grow longer. So a short count leaves out real labor.
Do you see what's going on? The two sides draw the line around "work" in different places. That's why the course teaches both sides and keys no verdict.
Pause and try this. The critics found longer hours than Sahlins's side did. Which three kinds of work did they add to the count?
Think about food after gathering, and the tools it takes.
Here's the answer. Food processing, tool-making, and household work. Adding those tasks to food-getting made the hours longer.
The wrong turn here comes in two flavors. One says foragers were always hungry. The other says foragers were always idle. Both are stereotypes. The debate is about how much time and which tasks count, and you can leave the verdict open.
6. Back at the market
Let's walk back into the course's running fieldwork site. Remember, the market is illustrative, made up for teaching. It has 24 stalls, and it's open once a week from 8:00 a.m. to noon. That's 4 hours. Buyers come with cards and cash. Growers come with crates from their farms.
Field-note entry 6, at 8:50 a.m., at the 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.
Now read the stall the way this lecture has taught you. The stall sells from the family's own farm, with permanent fields. That's intensive agriculture. The buyers mostly live by wages and buy their food. That's the industrial and postindustrial pattern. Set the farm beside the model table, and it belongs with the town that makes 0 moves. The buyers belong to a wage economy that the four model communities don't show.
So here's the reading in one plain sentence. 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.
Pause and try this. The stall's buyers mostly live by wages and buy their food. Which of the five strategies does that describe?
Think about how the buyers get their dinner.
Here's the answer. Industrial and postindustrial economies. Most people in that pattern buy their food and work for wages.
And notice the bigger lesson. Your own town isn't one strategy. It holds wage work, store-bought food, farm stalls, and gardens, all at once.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Subsistence strategies are the ways a group gets its food, and the five strategies are a model for comparing, not a ladder. Domestication began independently in several world regions after the last ice age, and the course keys no date. In the model table, the intensive agricultural density is 200 times the foraging density, the foraging group moves 6 times a year, and the town stays put. Permanent fields and stored surplus let a settlement stay and grow. The "original affluent society" debate is about which tasks count as work, and it has no verdict. And the market's family-run stall is intensive agriculture meeting a wage economy.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then in Week 6, Exchange and Economic Systems, the course asks how people share and trade what they produce.
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