The Diversity

of HumanitySource: Humanity An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology , By:

Peoples and Bailey, pp128- 195

Outline

ADAPTATION: FORAGING – ADAPTATION– BIOMES– PRODUCTION– FORAGERS

ADAPTATION: DOMESTICATION– THE ADVANTAGES

OF DOMESTICATION

– CULTIVATION– HORTICULTURE– INTENSIVE

AGRICULTURE– PASTORALISM

Adaptation: Foraging

Outline

ADAPTATION: FORAGING – ADAPTATION– BIOMES– PRODUCTION– FORAGERS

Adaptation

Adaptation- The process by which an organism develops physiological and behavioral characteristics that allow it to survive and reproduce.

Biomes

A Biomes is a large geographic region with similar climatic, edaphic (Soil), and vegetational characteristics.

Generally speaking, annual preciptation, temperature, and incident solar radiation determine the kind of soil and vegetation found in a biome

ProductionThe activities in which the energy and raw materials

available in a local habitat are exploited by people are called production.

Production transforms nature’s raw materials into things that satisfy people’s materials wants. Production thus takes something that is in the environment ( a resource) and makes it into something that people can use (a good production).

The Organization of Production

Division of Labor– The labor is divided is to say simply that

different kinds of tasks are assigned to different categories or groups of people. Gender and age are universal bases for division of labor, and in most societies differences in skill and knowledge also are an important basis assigning tasks to indiviual

Patterns of Cooperation– Accompanying the division of labor, and

closely related to it, are patterns of cooperation in production. Most kinds of productive activity involve some kind of cooperation: people combine their labor with that of other people because this allows them to produce more good with a given labor input.

Right of Access– A given area of land or territory, or specific resource of a

territory, is allocated to some group. Member of this group are allowed to exploit the territory’s resources, others are prohibited from doing so, or may do so only with permission.

– In preindustrial populations ownership of territory and/or resources is frequently vested in a group- most often a kinship (e.g., family) or residential (e.g., village) group.

– Individual member of the group have a right (use right) to exploit the resources of the area, but they must do so without violating the culturally legitimate rights of the other members over the territory’s resources.

Foragers Foragers, also called hunter-gatherers, are

populations who make little or no effort to control the resources that provide their subsistence but instead take what nature offers when and where nature offers it.

Twentieth century foragers were found only in a few tropical rain forests, deserts or dry savannahs, and tundras and boreal forests.

Foraging and Sociocultural Systems

They are surprisingly diverse, not only in the wild foods they exploit but also in other realms of their sociocultural lives.

Many of these characteristics are related to how hunter-gatherers organize themselves to exploit their habitats efficiently .

– Seasonal Mobility– Congregation and Dispersal– Bands-

Adaptation: Domestication

Outline ADAPTATION:

DOMESTICATION– THE ADVANTAGES

OF DOMESTICATION

– CULTIVATION– HORTICULTURE– INTENSIVE

AGRICULTURE– PASTORALISM

Domestication The “taming” of the certain species of

plants and animals to increase their value to humans- was perhaps the major technological development in the history of humanity.

The Advantages of Domestication For tens of thousands of years, foraging nourished

humanity well enough to allow our species to spread over most of the land surface of the earth.

People began to exert some control over the distribution and abundance of their food supply.

If an area’s population rose above the long-term carrying capacity, either the environment degraded because natural food resource were harvested at a rate than their rate of recovery

Cultivation Cultivators acquire their vegetable foods by

creating and maintaining an artificial community of plants that have been intentionally selected for their usefulness to humans.

Cultivation generally supports higher population densities for two main reasons.– First, the domesticated plants cultivators consume are

the product of thousands of generation of selection for their edibility.

– Second, virtually all the plants growing in an area (field) are edible for human; that is, the domesticate grow more e densely than the wild plants eaten by foragers.

A good way to distinguish the three major systems of cultivation is by the kind of energy used to create an maintain the community of domesticated plants.

The important energy input are – 1. Human Muscles– 2. Domesticated animals– 3. fuel-powered machinery

These source give rise to three categories of cultivation:– Horticulture, in which the primary energy input comes from

human muscles (often supplemented by fire);– Intensive agriculture, in which much energy comes from

animals, who pull plow, power pumps for irrigation, fertilize fields with their droppings, and so forth;

– Mechanized Agriculture, in which most of the energy used in plowing, irrigating, and other work on farms comes from nonliving sources (e.g., oil, electricity), and in which inanimate energy also is use to manufacture fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides , and other agricultural inputs..

Pastoralism Cultivators do not depend on their domesticated

animals to the same extent as do people knowns as pastoralists, or herders.

Herders acquire much of their food by raising, caring for, and subsisting on the products of domesticated animals.

We Characterize a people as “pastoral,” we mean that the needs of their animals for naturally occurring food and water profoundly influence the seasonal rhythms of their lives.

Few pastoralists subsist entirely from the products of their livestock; animal products nearly always are supplemented by cultivated foods.

Herders acquire these in one of four major ways.– 1. The practice some horticulture or agriculture themselves

(often men and boys watch the herds and women cultivate).– 2. They trade animal products for vegetable foods and other

goods with neighboring cultivators.– 3. They sell livestock, meat, hides, wool, milk, cheese, or

other products of their animals for money, which they use to buy food and other supplies.

– 4. They use their livestock partly as beasts of burden, which allows them to undertake long-distance trade from which they profit.

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