Week 5 · Readings & resources

Week 5 — Readings & Resources

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 5 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 11 items (5 readings and 6 videos). Allow 72–88 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (17–20 min total)

① Five ways to get food, side by side

Chapter 5, Section “Name the model: five subsistence strategies” · Session 1, Segment 1, “Five ways to get food” · Remember: the five subsistence strategies are a model for comparing ways of getting food, and real communities mix them.

How Do We Produce Food? Crash Course Geography #43 — CrashCourse — an animated episode that sorts the world's food systems by scale, from farming mainly to feed a household to industrial agriculture, with one country's story as its case; notice that the episode uses the word subsistence for farming to feed one's own household, a narrower meaning than this course's subsistence strategies. (video, 12 min) (captions: creator)
Is the Maya Forest Garden the key to sustainable agriculture? — Odyssey Earth — a short documentary in which Maya farmers in Belize and southern Mexico described the milpa cycle: clearing a small plot, planting corn, beans, squash, and many other crops with a sharp pole and no plow, then letting the forest grow back for years before the plot was farmed again; as you watch, match each step to the chapter's definition of horticulture, and listen for one farmer's answer to a visitor who asked where the Maya went. (video, 8 min) (captions: creator)
Nomadic Herding on the Tibetan Plateau — Smithsonian Folklife — a short festival video on herding families of the Tibetan Plateau who move their animals from pasture to pasture; as you watch, connect the moves to the chapter's definition of pastoralism and to the model table's settlement moves. Use it while completing the Week-5 module overview. (video, 2 min) (captions: automatic)
Everything you ever wanted to know about rangelands and pastoralists — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — a feature story in five short parts on the grazing lands of the world and the herders who live on them; read part 3, on who calls rangelands home, for how herders move their animals with the seasons so the land can recover. (reading, 5–8 min)
A Shepherdess from Southern Spain Speaks — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — an interview in which a herder in the mountains of southern Spain describes how moving herds has changed in her lifetime and why she rejects the idea that herding belongs to the past; read it beside the chapter's warning against treating any strategy as an earlier stage. (reading, 5–8 min)

② How people began to grow food

Chapter 5, Section “Trace the shift to food production” · Session 1, Segment 2, “The shift to food production” · Remember: domestication began independently in several world regions after the last ice age, so no single place invented farming.

The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1 — CrashCourse — a fast, joke-filled history episode on how people moved from hunting and gathering to farming, with the trade-offs of each; as you watch, listen for how many places it says farming began and check that against the chapter's point that domestication began independently in several regions. (video, 11 min) (captions: creator)
The Anthropology of Farming Simulator — SAPIENS — an archaeologist who studies food asks why people who have never farmed love a farming video game; read the section headed The Deep History of Farming, which says domestication was invented independently in different parts of the world and that early farming was hard work. This builds on Week 1's holism: notice how farming reshaped whole ways of life, not one part. (reading, 8–12 min)
The 2000-Year-Old Farmers Saving the Amazon Today — SciShow — a science explainer on Amazonian Dark Earth, very fertile soil found where Indigenous communities lived in the Amazon basin long ago; notice that it says researchers still disagree whether people made the soil on purpose for growing plants or as a by-product of everyday living, and that most of the video is about using such soil to help regrow forest, so ask what it can and cannot tell you about how those communities got their food. (video, 6 min) (captions: creator)

③ How hard did foragers work?

Chapter 5, Section “Weigh the debate: the Ju/'hoansi and foragers' working hours” · Session 2, Segment 5, “The debate about foragers' work” · Remember: the debate is about which tasks count as work, so each side gets its strongest case and no verdict.

Original affluent society, Criticism — Wikipedia — an encyclopedia article on the debate; read the section on work time and leisure time and then the Criticism section, and sort each claim into Sahlins's side or the critics' side. The article uses older outsiders' labels, which this course replaces with Ju/'hoansi. Stop here before any talk of gifts, trade, or reciprocity; next week takes that up. (reading, 8–12 min)
The Real Paleo Diet — SciShow — a short science explainer on what researchers think past foragers actually ate; as you watch, notice how much those diets varied from place to place, which is one reason the chapter refuses the stereotype of foragers as always hungry or always idle. (video, 3 min) (captions: creator)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

Humans Change the World — Smithsonian Human Origins Program — a museum reference page with a timeline of how people began to produce food; read only the part headed The Turning Point and notice how many different world regions appear in it, then skip the later entries on cities and disease. The course says the shift in words and keys none of the timeline's dates. (reading, 4–6 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

Provenance: Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com