How was survival and subsistence related with the establishment of societies?

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

From the beginnings of anthropology in the mid 19th century, researchers have tried to classify the cultures of the world in a meaningful way. They have sought to develop categories of cultures that would help explain a wide range of behavior patterns. However, initial attempts at doing this were not very useful.

19th century European stereotype of "primitives"
(left: Koreans; right: Australian Aborigines)

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the educated public in Europe and North America generally divided the world's people into two categories--primitive and civilized. This fell far short of describing the full range of differences between cultures. It was also prejudicial and very misleading. It generally emphasized technological and social characteristics. For instance, a society was considered primitive if its people did not wear much clothing, did not have elaborate machinery, and practiced polygamy. In other words, if people were very different from Europeans, they were considered primitive. This ignored the fact that some of the so-called primitive peoples had complex social systems and religions.

Late 19th century anthropologists, such as Edward B. Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States, developed classification schemes that were only slight refinements over the primitive-civilized distinction made by non-anthropologists. Their systems included three main categories of cultures--savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples. While each of these categories was sub-divided into smaller ones in order to be more precise, this was still a naive, simplistic, and quite ethnocentric
approach due to the fact that it was largely based on a comparison with European cultures.

By the 1930's, enough first hand ethnographic
data about the cultures of the world had been gathered for anthropologists to understand that there is a better way of categorizing them. They based their distinctions primarily on differences in subsistence patterns--i.e., sources and methods a society uses to obtain its food and other necessities. This focus on economic differences proved to be useful because much of the rest of a culture is directly related to its economy. If you know what the subsistence base is, it is possible to predict many of the other basic cultural patterns. There is a surprisingly high positive correlation between the type of economy and such things as population sizes and densities, social and political systems, scale of warfare, and complexity of science, mathematics, and technology. Using this approach, anthropologists divided the cultures of the world into four basic subsistence types:

1. Foraging
(hunting and gathering wild plants and animals)

2. Pastoralism
(herding large domesticated animals)

3. Horticulture
(small-scale, low intensity farming)

4. Intensive agriculture
(large-scale, intensive farming)

This classification system is still used in anthropology today due to its usefulness for understanding human cultural diversity. However, the last category, intensive agriculture, is sometimes nuanced by expanding it to include 20th and 21st century industrial and post-industrial economic systems.

Return to Menu Practice Quiz Next Topic

A subsistence pattern – alternatively known as a subsistence strategy – is the means by which a society satisfies its basic needs for survival. This encompasses the attainment of nutrition, water, and shelter. The five broad categories of subsistence patterns are foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture, and industrial food production.[1]

Foraging is the oldest subsistence pattern, with all human societies relying on it until approximately 10,000 years ago.[2] Foraging societies obtain the majority of their resources directly from the environment without cultivation. Also known as Hunter-gatherers, foragers may subsist through collecting wild plants, hunting, or fishing.[1] Hunter-gatherer communities are frequently small and mobile, with egalitarian social structures.[2] Contrary to the common perception of hunter-gatherer life as precarious and nutrient-deficient, Canadian anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee found that "with few conspicuous exceptions, the hunter-gatherer subsistence base is at least routine and reliable and at best surprisingly abundant."[3]

Horticultural societies typically engage in small-scale gardening with simple tools. These methods allow for higher population densities but still depend on the availability of plentiful, undeveloped land.[2] A common type of horticulture is slash-and-burn cultivation, wherein regions of wild foliage are cut and burnt, producing nutrient-rich biochar in which to grow crops. Traditional, small-scale slash-and-burn cultivation—such as that practiced by the Guaraní people in South America – can be efficient and sustainable, with the natural environment eventually reclaiming and reintegrating old garden plots.[4]

Pastoralism is the herding and breeding of domestic animals. Pastoralism is common in arid geographic regions, or those with fluctuating rainfall. In such places, raising herbivores is often a more reliable lifestyle than farming, and the livestock convert wild vegetation that is indigestible to humans into meat and dairy products.[5] Pastoral communities are generally nomadic to accommodate for the needs of their herds as the seasons and the availability of pasture changes. Pastoralism remains fairly popular today, with 21 million pastoralists in Africa and Asia alone.[1]

Agriculture is the intensive maintenance and cultivation of land for food production. It is distinct from horticulture in its use of more diverse and complex technology to plant, irrigate, plow, fertilize, and harvest from considerably larger tracts of land.[1] Agriculture may also involve raising livestock, with variants ranging from mixed farming to exclusive ranching. Agrarian societies are often larger and more complex than foraging, horticultural, or pastoral ones; the combination of high carrying capacity and stationary farmsteads enables dense populations and the development of cities peopled with nonproducing specialists.[1][2]

Industrial food production is a variation of agriculture common among industrial societies. It is characterized by even greater, energy intensive use of modern mechanical, chemical, and biological technologies to maximize production. Only a small fraction of people in industrial societies are farmers; the rest obtain money to buy their food by engaging in the complex business and service economy.[1] A significant part of the energy cost of industrial food production arises from the packaging and shipping of products to the increasingly urban consumer base.[6] The energy costs, pesticide use, and widespread erosion implicit in many forms of industrial food production have led to concerns about its long-term sustainability as a pattern of subsistence.[6]

^ a b c d e f Haviland, William; Prins, Harald; McBride, Bunny; Walrath, Dana (2014). "Seven". Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge (14 ed.). Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning. pp. 151–173. ISBN 978-1-133-95742-3.
^ a b c d Spradley, James; McCurdy, David (2008). Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology (13 ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 83–87. ISBN 978-0205645855.
^ Lee, Richard; DeVore, Irven (1968). Man the Hunter (1 ed.). Aldine Transaction. ISBN 9780202330327.
^ Reed, Richard (2009). Forest Dwellers, Forest Protectors: Indigenous Models for International Development (2 ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 39–52. ISBN 9780205628117.
^ Peoples, James; Bailey, Garrick (2009). Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (8 ed.). Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning. pp. 130–133. ISBN 978-0-495-50874-8.
^ a b Barlett, Peggy (1987). "Industrial Agriculture in Evolutionary Perspective". Cultural Anthropology. 2 (1): 137–150. doi:10.1525/can.1987.2.1.02a00110. JSTOR 656400.