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Week 5 · Module overview

Week 5 — Making a Living: Subsistence Strategies

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 5 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A public-health student and a future planner working with a community garden both ask this week's question: how do people get their food?

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.

  • Already covered: Weeks 1 to 4 gave you holism, culture, fieldwork, and language.
  • This week: five subsistence strategies as a model, food production, and the model table.
  • How they connect: how people get food shapes where and how they live.
  • Where we're going next: Week 6, Exchange and Economic Systems.

Focus

How do groups get their food, and what does that do to where and how they live?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] name the five subsistence strategies as a model, not a ladder
  • [ ] compute the model table's density and moves-per-year ratios
  • [ ] give both sides of the foragers' working-hours debate
  • [ ] read the market stall as two strategies meeting

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 5 (about 30 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: explain why the five strategies are a map, not a ladder.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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