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The Connection between Food, Economics, and Power

Chapters 13, 14, and 15

Do all people conceive of nature in the same ways?

• No. People conceive of nature and their relation to it very differently, in ways that are reflected in many other aspects of culture.

• Compare the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and Central America and the Spanish who arrived in the 1500s.

• Some natives were able to avoid the invaders by retreating into the tropical lowlands. The Spanish found this environment oppressive and wondered why the forest wasn’t simply cleared.

• This reflects essentially different worldviews: part of nature vs. dominant over nature.

• Similarly, the Itzaj Maya of Guatemala view people and nature as belonging to the same realm; forest spirits punish those who cut down too many trees or overhunt and reward those who show restraint.

How Do People Secure an Adequate, Meaningful, and Environmentally Sustainable Food Supply?

• Anthropologists consider the idea of foodways: the structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food. In social science foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.

• Cultural anthropologists have long studied modes of subsistence: how people actually procure, produce, and distribute food. • Foraging, or the search for edible things

• Horticulture, or small-scale subsistence agriculture

• Pastoralism, which means the raising of animal herds

• Intensive agriculture, or large-scale, often commercial, agriculture

Foraging= searching for edible plant and animal foods without

domesticating them

• Hunter-gatherers are foragers.

• Most foragers live mobile lives and travel to the food, rather than moving the food to themselves.

• Low population densities ensure minimal impacts on the environment.

• Foraging is often stereotyped as a brutal struggle for existence.

• This is inaccurate because foragers tend to work less to procure their subsistence than horticulturalists or pastoralists.

• Foragers also tend to view their environments not as harsh but as giving.

• Contemporary foragers tend to inhabit extreme environments where horticulture or pastoralism are not feasible.

Horticulture

Horticulture is the cultivation of gardens or small fields to meet the basic needs of a household.

• It is sometimes referred to as subsistence agriculture, cultivation for purposes of household provisioning or small-scale trade and not investment.

• The most common form of horticulture is swidden agriculture: a farming method in tropical regions in which the farmer slashes (cuts down trees) and burns small patches of forest to release plant nutrients into the soil.

• Horticulture emerged some twelve thousand years ago with domestication and gave humans selective control over animal and plant reproduction.

Pastoralism

• Pastoralist societies are groups of people who live by animal husbandry, which is the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks.

• Pastoralists mainly consume the animal milk and blood and exploit their hair or fur rather than butcher the animal for food.

• Pastoralism also requires the constant movement of herds through a landscape.

Intensive agriculture

• Intensive agriculture attempts to increase yields and feed a larger community using intensification: processes that increase yields.

• Intensification includes different processes: • Preparing the soil, with regular weeding, mulching,

mounding, and fertilizers. • Technology ranging from the simple(using a harness with

horses to plow a field), complex (a system of canals or dams to irrigate the landscape) or very complex (such as a combine harvester).

• Using a larger labor force which can sustain the nutritional and energy needs of large populations, and provide employment.

• Water management, ranging from simple systems to large- scale irrigation systems.

• Modifying plants and soils by selectively breeding plants for better yields, reduced time to mature, and creating a more edible product.

Trade-offs

(-) Intensification can create environmental problems when rearranged

ecosystems result in vulnerability to declining environmental conditions.

(+) It solves the problem of how to provide food for a large number of people and provides

a relatively steady supply of food.

Industrial Agriculture

• Industrial agriculture is the application of industrial principles and methods to farming. • Key principles include specialization to produce a single crop, and the obtaining

of land, labor, seeds, and water as commodities on the open market.

• This form of agriculture is characteristic of highly industrialized and post- industrial economies in which only 1% to 5% percent of the population engages in food production.

• Industrial agriculture vastly increases productivity by harnessing sources of energy such as steam power and petroleum.

• One consequence of industrial agriculture is overproduction.

How Are Industrial Agriculture and Economic Globalization Linked to Increasing Environmental and Health Problems?

• Changes in global economics—globalization—are driving unprecedented changes, creating environmental problems and challenging both health and sustainability.

• The complex interplay of social, cultural, natural, and political-economic factors raise two important questions: • How do people consume natural resources in their lifestyles and foodways?

• And who pays the cost of that consumption?

Population and Environment

• The interplay between population and environment has been a prominent part of philosophical and environmental discussions for a long time. Malthus in the seventeenth century and Ehrlich in the twentieth century saw overpopulation as the most serious problem we face.

The problems with this view include the absence of any confirmed case of environmental and social collapse because of overpopulation or mass consumption as well as the uncanny ability of humans to develop new technologies and agricultural methods that increase the land’s carrying capacity: the population an area can support.

Politics and Government

• Politics: those relationships and processes of cooperation, conflict, and power that are fundamental aspects of human life.

• We can’t understand diverse expressions of power if we focus exclusively on the formal political institutions of states.

• Cooperation, conflict, and power are rooted in people’s everyday social interactions, belief systems, and cultural practices.

• Some societies have centralized political authority in the form of a government: A separate legal and constitutional domain that is the source of law, order, and legitimate force.

• Others have historically lived in acephalous societies: Societies without a governing head, generally with no hierarchical leadership.

“Nasty, brutish, and short”

• The Enlightenment (1650–1800).

• English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) famously called life without formal political control “nasty, brutish, and short,” thus requiring absolute rule of a monarch.

• John Locke (1632–1704) argued for the necessity of a “social contract” and “rule of law,” still central tenets of many societies.

• A negative consequence: the assumption that similar forms of government should be forced on the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific via colonialism.

• The “burden” of colonial governance presented anthropologists with opportunities to study the maintenance of order in societies without formal governments and political leaders.

Sociopolitical Typology (Sahlins and Service 1960)

• Band: a small, nomadic, and self-sufficient group of anywhere between 25 and150 individuals with face-to- face social relationships, usually egalitarian.

• Tribe: a type of pastoralist or horticulturist society with populations usually numbering in the hundreds or thousands in which leadership is more stable than that of a band but usually egalitarian, with social relations based on reciprocal exchange.

• Chiefdom: a political system with a hereditary leader who holds central authority, typically supported by a class of high-ranking elites, informal laws, and a simple judicial system, often numbering in the tens of thousands, with the beginnings of intensive agriculture and some specialization.

• State: the most complex form of political organization, associated with societies that have intensive agriculture, high levels of social stratification, and centralized authority.

Power Distribution

Noncentralized • A political system in which power and control over

resources are dispersed between members of the society

• Bands and tribes

• In nonstate societies, leadership, if any, tends to be temporary, informal, and based on personal attributes (rather than heredity or rank).

Centralized • A political system in which certain individuals and

institutions hold power and control over resources

• Chiefdoms and states

• Power in states and chiefdoms is controlled by officials and hierarchical institutions. Formalized laws determine who may hold office, for how long, and the power that may be legitimately wielded by an official.

Nation-States

• Nation-states: independent states recognized by other states, composed of people who share a single national identity.

• Of those contemporary societies classified as bands, tribes, or chiefdoms, most exist within the geographic borders of a state.

• States employ many forms of control over their populations, from surveillance of their activities to terror and outright genocide.

Economics: Reciprocity, Redistribution, and the Market Why is gift exchange such an important part of all societies?

• In non-industrial societies, gift exchange includes many economic aspects, including the expectation of reciprocity: The give and take that builds and confirms relationships.

• Generalized reciprocity: A form of reciprocity in which gifts are given freely without the expectation of return.

• Balanced reciprocity: A form of reciprocity in which the giver expects a fair return at some later time.

• Negative reciprocity: A form of reciprocity in which the giver attempts to get something for nothing, to haggle one’s way into a favorable personal outcome.

• Delayed reciprocity: A form of reciprocity in which there is a long lag time between giving and receiving.

• Mauss focused on the function of group solidarity.

• In his view, individual self-interest was tempered by a societal notion of obligation surrounding gift exchange: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate in appropriate ways.

Malinowski and the Kula Ring

• "why would men risk life and limb to travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away what appear to be worthless trinkets?"

• Malinowski carefully traced the network of exchanges of bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, and established that they were part of a system of exchange (the Kula ring), and that this exchange system was clearly linked to political authority.

• “strong social obligations and the cultural value system, in which liberality is exalted as highest virtue while meanness is condemned as shameful, create powerful pressures to ‘play by the rules’. Those who are perceived as holding on to valuables and as being slow to give them away soon get a bad reputation”.

Redistribution

• The collection of goods in a community and then the further dispersal of those goods among members. • Ex. Potlatch, Pacific Northwest

Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to 'civilized values' of accumulation.

The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was "by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized".

“Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the "Potlatch" or the Indian dance known as the "Tamanawas" is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term not more than six nor less than two months in

any goal or other place of confinement…”

Gift Exchange in Market Economies

• Implicit rules guide exchanges.

• Political bribes are not expressed as such, just a “gift” with the implicit assumption that political favors will follow.

• Personal gifts fall on a personal–impersonal spectrum.

• Giving commodities, which are mass-produced and impersonal goods with no meaning or history apart from themselves, can generate moral dilemmas.

Conflict Resolution: Song Battles and Breakdancing as Dispute Settlement?

Breakdancing got its start in New York City in the 1970s. In its early days, street gangs in the South Bronx would battle each other—over turf, because of an affront, or simply to

gain respect—through dance.

Men were permitted to have two or three wives, ability to provide conferred prestige (respect or approval, not power) and jealousy. If man was taking additional wives to enhance

esteem, rivals would steal. Many conflicts involved wife stealing or adultery. Options –Kill the wife stealer but that

could result in lengthy blood feuds. Challenge rival to a song battle. Audience proclaimed winner but no guarantee

wife would return with the winner.