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adaptation
Refers to how organisms develop physiological and behavioural
characteristics that allow them to survive and reproduce in their
environment. Refers to the adjustments organisms make to their
surroundings.
- production
- Aquiring energy and materials from the environment. The patterened, organized activities by which people tranform natural resources into things (products) that satisfy their material needs and wants.
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Production has three components (factors of production)
Time and energy (labor, work)
Available tools and knowledge (technology)
Resources available
Leslie White - one of the most important ways people interact with nature is by harnessing energy and raw materials.
- organization of production
- solves problems such as who will do which productive tasks, when, where, and how.
Humanity is a social species, production is an organized social activity, involving the division of labor, patterns of cooperation, and the allocation of rights to resources.
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3 Main Factors of Organization of Production
1. Division of Labor - allocation of work, dividing tasks according to factors like age, sex and skill.
2. Patterns of Cooperation - groups usually use labor and harness resources most effeciently if members cooperate.
3. Rights to Resources - access rights/use rights.
Anthropologists distinguish ownership rights from use rights, and group rights from individual rights.
- Form of Adaptation - foraging
- Hunting and Gathering - people exploit the wild plants and animals of their territory for food
- Hunters and Gatherers do not modify their natural environments very much, but instead take what nature offers.
- Small mobile bands 10-50. Varying Seasonally. Flexibile access to resources over territories.
- Division of labor based on sex, age. Equality based on sharing.
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Division of Labor by age and sex - in majority of foraging people men do bulk of hunting, women do most of gathering of plants
Seasonal Mobility - None of Earth's environments offers the same kinds and quantities of resources year round, most foragers have to move as the seasons change.
Seasonal congregation and dispersal - some times of year more efficeint to break up into smaller groups, other times better to come together.
Bands - mobile living groups of 50+/- (flexible) to not exahust suply of wild foods too quickly. - Ju/'hoansi or !Kung - Richard Lee
Reciprocal Sharing - sharing is more or less on the basis of need; those who haev more than they can immediately use share with others. Sharing is normatively expected behaviour - those who regularly fail to share are subject to ridicule or other social pressures.
- agriculture
- Cultivation - people intentionally plant, care for, and harvest crops (domesticated plants) for food and other uses. Since agriculture began several thousand years ago,
- most peoples have relied on a combination of production strategies, depending on their technologies, local environments and what their neighbors are doing.
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Form of Adaptation - Intensive Agriculture - farmers keep fields under cultivation far longer than horitculturalists. Some intensive agriculturalists have their lands under almost constant cultivation, same fields year after year, brief fallow periods. Higher yield, some use plows and draft animals (oxen, cows, etc.) More productive per area of land than horticulture.
Cities and towns surrounded by rural "peasant" communities
Rights vested in or controlled by multi-level administrative officials responsible to the "state"
Craft and service specialization with social distinctions and major inequalities.
- Form of Adaptation - pastoralism
- Herding - people tend, breed, and harvest products of livestock (domesticated animals) for food, trade and other uses.
- The needs of their animals for "naturally occuring" food and water greatly influence the seasonal rhythyms of their lives. Herds graze on natural forage and therefore must be moved to where the forage naturally occurs. (Seasonally Nomadic) Grazing rights based on membership in families, kind groups or tribe.
- Cultivators do not depend on their domesticated animals to the same extend or in the same way as do peoples known as pastoralists or herders.
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nomadism
Commonly pastoralists are seasonally nomadic to take livestock where grasses or other forage is available. Migrating to where necessary for needs. Pastoralists are often "vertical" taking animals to highland areas to graze during hottest season of year.
- domesticationThe intentional planting and cultivation of selected plants and hte taming and breeding of certain species of animals.
- food crops, fibers
- livesock, animal products, work animals, companionship
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Availability of livestock meant men eventually gave up hunting, putting their labor into farming, crafts, warfare, metallury, ruling and other activities.
Plant and animal domestication probably had more long-lasting and dramatic effects on cultures than any other single set of changes in peoples' relationship with nature - except perhaps industrialization.
Groups settled in villages and later, in some places, towns and cities.
- Form of Adaptation - horticulture
- People use mainly or exclusively the energy (power) of their own muscles to clear land, turn over soil, plant, weed, and harvest crops. No animals or machinery, just hand tools.Some fertilize with organic matter (human/animal waste, organic compost)
- Scattered hamelts or villages of 100 or more. Largely sedentary.
- Ownership by kin groups or resiential groups
- Little specialization and inequality.
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Shifting cultivation - slash & burn - for every plot of land under cultivation at any given time, several plots are fallowed - left alone for the forest to regrow and the land to recover.
Differ from foragers - living groups (villages) are more permanantly settled, families have more defined "rights of ownership" over particular pieces of land.
Hopi - Pueblo peoples
surplus - result of intensive agriculture, abundance... farmers trade for other useful items, or money to buy other goods, if politically governed bureaucracy taken as part of tax.
peasants - farming communities, rural people who live by a combination of subsistence agriculture and market sale.
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Three forms of exchange
reciprocity - individuals or groups pass products back & forth, helping someone in need by sharing; creating, maintaining, strengthening social relationships; obtaining products made by others for oneself.
redistribution - members of an organized group contribute products or money to a common pool or fund that is divided (reallocated) among the group as a whole by a central authority.
markets - products are sold for money, which in turn is used to purchase other products, with the ultimate goal of aquiring more money or accumulating more products or both.
- Reciprocitygeneralized - those who give goods do not expect recipient to make a return at any definite time in the future. Usually emotionally attached, "obligation" to help due to relative need. ex. Parents caring for children, food, clothing, shelter, etc. Hunter-gatherers expected to share food. Ju/'hoansi - "insulting the meat"
- balanced - products are transferred to someone (recipient) and the donor expects a return in products of roughly equal value. Trade partnerships. New Guinea - "wasi" Ju/'hoansi - "hxaro" gifts have symbolic value.
- negative - both parties attempt to gain all they can from the exchange by giving up as little as possible. Similar to market exchange, though no money changes hands.
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Reciprocity and Social Distance
Marshall Sahlins, first distinguished the three varieties, noted, the kinds of reciprocity that occurs between individuals or groups depends on the social distance between them.
Social distance is the degree to which cultural norms specify persons should be intimate with or emotionally attached to one another.
As social relationships with other people change, so does the kind of reciprocity we practice with them. Changing one form of reciprocity into another can be a way of changing the nature of a social relationship.
- Redistribution
- The major difference between reciprocity and redistribution is how the transfer of products and other resources is organized.
- In modern nations, the resource (eg. money) that is redistributed takes the form of taxes on wages, profits, retail sales, property, interest, and other income and assets.
- Tribute
- Positive - redistribution to country, civic services, national defense, infastructure, EPA, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.
- Negative - who gets what and to what balance? Political agendas. arbitrary taxes.
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Markets - objects bought and sold at a price measured in money.
Requires four things:
1. Some object that serves as a medium of exchange - money.
2. A rate at which goods and services are exchanged for money - prices.
3. Prices that are determined by supply and demand.
4. Privately owned property.
Money - objects that serve as meida of exchange in a wide range of transactions of goods, services (including labor), or both. Serves as a standard of value, store of value "stores your wealth", takes on a symbolic significance, more useful as an exchange medium if it is divisible, supply must be controllable (if people can get all they want, it loses its value), Most is portable for convienience, serves as a generalized medium of exchange to acquire many kinds of goods and services.
- Market economy - practically the whole economy is organized on market principles:
- Privately owned goods and services have a monetary price.
- People make their living by selling something on the market (goods, services, labor)
- Supply and demand
- Economy is "self-regulating"
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consanguines - "blood" relatives, people related by birth: parents, siblings, grandparents, parents' siblings, cousins.
affines - "in-laws" people related by marriage: siblings' husbands or wives, spouses parents, spouses siblings, parents' siblings' spouses.
kin group - Organized, cooperative group based on kinship relationships (including fictive - "honorary" relatives or adoption).
nuclear family - consists of married couple, together with unmarried children in one kind of kin group, living together, sharing wealth and property, relying on each other for emotional support, pool labor and resources to support family...
extended family - culturally recognized relatives of varying degrees of distance, no clear social boundaries.
household - Domestic group, one or more nuclear families living in one physical space.
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incest prohibitions/taboos - rules against sexual intercourse between relatives. Specific relatives vary from people to people. Some societies prohibit sex and marriage between all first cousins, were others not only allow but prefer marriage among certain cousins.
"Marry in or Die out" - EB Tylor 19 century evolutionist.
"Inbreeding Avoidance" - cultural rationale for the taboo that is familiar.
Knowledge is instinctive not conscious
"Familiarity Breeds Disinterest" - males and females who are closely associated during childhood have little sexual desire for one another when they grow up. AKA Childhood Familiarity Hypothesis. - 19th century scholar Edward Westermarck.
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marriage - hard to define because of cross-cultural variations in relationship
Most involve:
Culturally defined relationship
Rights the couple obtains
Assignment of responsibilities
Creation of variably important bonds and relationships between families.
- functions of marriage1. Forms social bonds and creates social relationships that provide material needs, social support & enculturation of children.
- 2. Defines the rights and obligations a couple have toward each other and toward other people.
- 3. Creates new relationships between families and other kinds of kin groups.
No particular FORM of marriage or TYPE of family is universal.
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marriage rules
endogamy - "inmarriage" - an individual must marry someon in his or her own social group. Sybolically expresses and strengthens exclusiveness of the endogamous group by preventing its "contamination" by outsiders. De facto Endogamy - no formal rules or laws require inmarriage, most people marry people who are like themselves.
exogamy - "outmarriage" - an individual is prohibited form marrying within her or his own family or their own kin group, or less often village or settlement.
- monogamy - every individual is allowed only one spouse
- polygyny - one man is allowed multiple wives. Most common form of polygamy.
- polyandry - one woman is allowed multiple husbands
- group marriage - several women and men are allowed to be married, simultaneously, to one another
- Polygamy - "plural spouses" - inclueds polygyny, polyandry and group marriage. Number "allowed", not necessarily how many most people have.
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marriage alliances - lasting social relationships and bonds not just between the couple but also between their families and other relatives. In many cultures, critical for the well being and survival of the intermarried groups.
- Levirate - Preserves affinal ties if a womans husband dies, she marries one of his close kin (usually brother). Relationship is too valuable to return her to her own famliy.
- Sororate
- Preserves affinal ties if a mans wife dies, her kin is obligated to replace her with another woman from the kin group, no additional bridewealth is transferred.
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bridewealth - custom that requires a man (and/or his relatives) to transfer wealth to the relatives of his bride. Most common of marital exchanges. Rights over woman's children. If woman doesn't have children, her family must return bridewealth OR provide another wife.
brideservice - custom in which a husband is required to spend a period of time working for the family of his bride, proving he can provide through hunting and gardening 3-10 years.
dowry - when the family of a woman transfers a portion of its own wealth or property to the woman (daughter) and/or to her husband and his family. sometimes like a living inheritance.
- kinship diagrams - notational symbols to show relationship - genealogy. Reference individual is referred to as "Ego"
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postmarital residence
Patrilocal - Couples live with or near the parents of the husband. 70%
Matrilocal - Couples live with or near the wife's parents 13%
Ambilocal - Couples may choose to live with either's kin, roughly half choose this. 17%
Bilocal - Couples move back & forth between households of both parents according to preference & circumstances. 17%
Neolocal - Couples live apart from both parents, in separate dwelling and independant household 17%
Avunculocal - Couples live with maternal uncle of husband. 17%
Extended Households - typically include three or more generations of familiy members in one household. Sometimes multiple houses on same land in close proximity, but pool and shared resources.
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