Chap. 6 ANTH 212 EE

Raymond Hames Author

08/18/2017 Added

200 Plays

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Chapter 6 Narrated Powerpoint for ANTH 212

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[00:00:00.949]Okay, now we're on to Chapter Six,
[00:00:03.196]something very basic, Getting Food.
[00:00:05.309]And these are the topics that we're gonna consider.
[00:00:07.869]Foraging, sometimes called hunting and gathering
[00:00:10.266]is the oldest method of food extraction
[00:00:13.175]that humans have engaged in
[00:00:15.944]for about 98% of their history as a species,
[00:00:19.099]and it's essentially living off the land
[00:00:21.189]and taking plants and animals
[00:00:25.968]as they are encountered.
[00:00:27.976]Food production talks about the origins of agriculture,
[00:00:30.488]we talk about several different kinds
[00:00:32.400]of production systems.
[00:00:34.096]We'll take a look at environmental restraints
[00:00:36.111]on food getting, for example,
[00:00:37.660]no use growing rice in the desert, can't sustain it,
[00:00:43.239]but it's more complex than that.
[00:00:45.421]The origins of food production is interesting because
[00:00:48.150]we were hunter-gatherers for a long period of time.
[00:00:50.935]We developed simple agriculture,
[00:00:54.913]and one of the curious responses was that
[00:00:58.069]the stature of the average human shrank.
[00:01:01.703]It was a really tough time for us.
[00:01:03.409]Later, we recovered.
[00:01:04.738]Then the spread and intensification
[00:01:06.610]of food production around the world.
[00:01:09.187]And here, we essentially see a process
[00:01:11.391]where more intensive forms of agricultural,
[00:01:13.965]agriculture production have essentially
[00:01:16.681]pushed out people who rely on what we call
[00:01:19.838]horticultural or pastoralism
[00:01:22.028]and that's the kind of food production system
[00:01:25.062]that we have today, industrial agriculture.
[00:01:27.839]So foraging, sometimes called hunting-gathering,
[00:01:32.359]is a kind of food collecting.
[00:01:34.235]It's generally defined as the food getting strategy
[00:01:36.685]that obtains wild plants and animal resources
[00:01:39.755]through gathering, hunting, scavenging or fishing.
[00:01:44.035]And here are some examples of classic hunter-gatherers.
[00:01:48.091]The top picture of Australian aboriginals.
[00:01:51.239]Australia was a continent that was
[00:01:54.563]completely filled with hunters and gatherers.
[00:01:57.984]A very dry climate, not much in the way
[00:02:00.869]of agricultural potential, but when Europeans moved in,
[00:02:04.146]then agriculture was established there.
[00:02:06.708]And unfortunately it pushed out
[00:02:08.686]a lot of the native groups there.
[00:02:11.185]But you see, they have very kind of simple technology.
[00:02:15.071]We actually can't see it, but trust me,
[00:02:17.547]they do have simple technology.
[00:02:18.957]Then if you look at the Inuit or Eskimo,
[00:02:21.814]you can see by their dress,
[00:02:23.484]much more technologically sophisticated,
[00:02:26.310]and clothing is part of technology,
[00:02:28.278]so be aware of that.
[00:02:31.107]They again, live in a very tough environment.
[00:02:34.462]But they have an extremely ingenious form
[00:02:38.671]of technology in the way, whether it ranges from
[00:02:44.682]snow houses that protect them from the elements,
[00:02:47.310]various kinds of spears, bows, and arrows,
[00:02:50.230](unclear), harpoons, kayaks, which you all know,
[00:02:56.347]maybe many of you like kayaks.
[00:02:57.819]Well, they were invented by the Inuit
[00:03:00.199]and as well as the down parka.
[00:03:04.204]That again is an invention of the Inuit
[00:03:07.525]that we've taken advantage of
[00:03:09.198]and so you can see that technology
[00:03:11.316]can vary tremendously depending on the kind of
[00:03:13.806]environment that hunter-gatherers live in.
[00:03:18.306]Some general features of foragers,
[00:03:20.228]they typically live in small communities,
[00:03:22.972]twenty five to thirty five people in a group
[00:03:26.773]is about average, about maybe five families or so.
[00:03:31.103]They tend to move around quite a bit, that is,
[00:03:34.333]they essentially move to a place, collect the resources,
[00:03:39.137]when those resources become scarce
[00:03:40.781]they move to another area where resources are richer,
[00:03:44.683]and the process begins again.
[00:03:46.936]And they have a division of labor
[00:03:48.340]that's essentially based on age and gender.
[00:03:50.750]Now that is, classically,
[00:03:52.658]men do nearly all of the hunting,
[00:03:55.044]women do much of the gathering,
[00:03:57.459]although men will also gather.
[00:03:59.547]Women do a lot of the food preparation
[00:04:02.148]and other activities, but this is kind of
[00:04:05.192]a classic division of labor.
[00:04:07.426]Man the hunter, woman the gatherer
[00:04:09.964]is well represented in this kind of
[00:04:14.004]food extraction system.
[00:04:15.653]Just to give you an idea of the kind of
[00:04:19.078]ranges they have to exploit,
[00:04:22.430]here's a group called the Netsilik.
[00:04:25.261]We're gonna talk about a group called the Netsilik,
[00:04:27.004]they're an Inuit or Eskimo group,
[00:04:28.925]and essentially the area that this one group
[00:04:31.799]of about maybe...
[00:04:34.887]Sixty people exploit is in that red center there
[00:04:38.716]in Nebraska, that red square in Nebraska.
[00:04:43.153]And what this means is that you could probably
[00:04:45.168]only put about four or five Netsilik groups
[00:04:49.150]in the area of Nebraska
[00:04:50.590]and that just kind of gives you an idea
[00:04:54.136]of, you know, living in the Arctic,
[00:04:55.884]resources aren't dense.
[00:04:57.341]And so what it really puts a premium on
[00:04:59.440]is an incredible knowledge, geographic knowledge,
[00:05:04.091]of the environment and, you know,
[00:05:06.002]imagine knowing where all the resources are
[00:05:08.841]in such a large area.
[00:05:11.749]And that kind of knowledge is really essential to
[00:05:14.755]your ability to survive, so you've gotta be pretty smart
[00:05:19.892]to be a hunter-gatherer in this kind of environment
[00:05:23.084]or most other kinds of environments.
[00:05:25.411]Complex foragers.
[00:05:26.462]Now sometimes, especially in the northwest coast
[00:05:29.074]of North America, southern Alaska, Washington, and Oregon,
[00:05:35.671]and parts of northern California,
[00:05:37.093]that kind of coastal area there,
[00:05:39.350]some hunter-gatherers depend heavily on fishing,
[00:05:42.736]especially salmon runs that go up the rivers
[00:05:45.545]such as the Klamath and other rivers in the area.
[00:05:50.781]And they're able to have really large communities
[00:05:53.440]and they're pretty much semi-permanent.
[00:05:55.646]They had a great deal of social inequality,
[00:05:58.778]that is, there were chiefs and commoners.
[00:06:01.143]Typically among hunter-gatherers
[00:06:03.227]such as the Inuit you saw earlier
[00:06:06.975]or the Australian aborigines
[00:06:08.427]that we have kind of equality or
[00:06:11.011]an egalitarian kind of society.
[00:06:12.625]Here we had a tremendous amount of
[00:06:14.285]social ranking and inequality, and so
[00:06:17.826]some hunter-gatherer societies could become quite complex.
[00:06:21.355]And here's just kind of an example
[00:06:22.729]of some of their artistic traditions.
[00:06:24.988]The mask there that they're famous for
[00:06:28.305]in this really kind of interesting
[00:06:29.670]what we call "split representation."
[00:06:31.633]And also if you take a look at a plank house,
[00:06:35.092]we have here a shot taken in 1899,
[00:06:39.228]when these houses were still present
[00:06:42.178]and with the iconic totem poles.
[00:06:44.337]Again, it derives from this kind of society.
[00:06:47.567]You can see that it was a very kind of
[00:06:50.417]technologically sophisticated,
[00:06:51.977]artistically complex form of society.
[00:06:58.890]So some hunter-gatherers can be very complex,
[00:07:01.792]but typically they're not.
[00:07:03.200]If we were to kind of look at,
[00:07:04.938]we're gonna look at foragers and
[00:07:06.703]horticulturalists and pastoralists
[00:07:08.152]and intensive agriculturalists a little bit later
[00:07:10.384]but we're moving essentially from,
[00:07:12.698]as we move from foragers to pastoralists
[00:07:16.500]to intensive agriculturalists,
[00:07:17.913]what we're talking about is that
[00:07:19.810]people are extracting more and more
[00:07:22.272]food energy out of the land.
[00:07:24.675]As a consequence, their populations are larger.
[00:07:27.996]As we move from foraging to intensive agriculture
[00:07:31.560]then mobility decreases,
[00:07:33.114]people begin to live in permanent houses.
[00:07:38.091]What's really interesting about hunter-gatherers
[00:07:40.593]is that food shortages are very infrequent
[00:07:43.662]but as we move to pastoralists
[00:07:45.353]and intensive agriculturalists
[00:07:46.746]the possibility of some kind of famine increases
[00:07:52.534]and that's because people are living on the edge.
[00:07:54.917]They're squeezing every last calorie they can
[00:07:58.275]onto the environment
[00:07:59.262]and as a consequence, any kind of
[00:08:01.595]climatic changes can cause problems.
[00:08:03.869]So that's kind of an interesting difference
[00:08:07.033]in food security that we have.
[00:08:10.539]And so, take a look at this chart.
[00:08:12.159]It kind of gives you some good general trends
[00:08:14.388]as we move from very low levels of extraction foragers
[00:08:20.605]to the highest levels of
[00:08:22.309]extraction intensive agriculturalists.
[00:08:25.188]Food production began about ten thousand years ago
[00:08:29.402]and although it was most early,
[00:08:33.064]it was found earliest in the middle east,
[00:08:36.017]and area we call the fertile crescent
[00:08:37.957]in Iraq and parts of Turkey,
[00:08:42.299]it was independently invented as the tech shows
[00:08:46.826]in North America, South America, India, Asia,
[00:08:53.822]especially China, and southeast Asia, and so,
[00:08:58.203]but pretty much, as the world began to fill up
[00:09:00.173]with hunter-gatherers,
[00:09:01.424]and they could no longer successfully live
[00:09:04.698]by just living off the land,
[00:09:06.419]they had to invent something we call food production,
[00:09:10.012]our general agriculture,
[00:09:12.698]to essentially support increasingly dense populations.
[00:09:16.607]And so we're gonna go through a couple of different
[00:09:19.135]kinds of post hunting and gathering or foraging systems.
[00:09:23.738]Horticulture, intensive agriculture, and pastoralism.
[00:09:26.706]And horticulture is the simplest form of agriculture.
[00:09:32.540]It's relatively simple.
[00:09:35.634]Sometimes it's called slash and burn agriculture.
[00:09:39.012]That is, people will clear areas of forest.
[00:09:42.023]They burn the debris,
[00:09:45.314]that provides a little bit of fertilization.
[00:09:47.679]They plant, they're able to cultivate the area of land
[00:09:51.140]for a couple of years, after which
[00:09:54.054]either soil nutrients begin to get deplenished
[00:09:57.241]or weeds become more and more tough to eradicate
[00:10:02.588]until such a time it's better to start all over again
[00:10:05.821]in a new area of land.
[00:10:07.730]That sometimes is called shifting agriculture
[00:10:10.034]in that it moves from place to place to place
[00:10:13.476]through time as people give up on land,
[00:10:15.965]clear new areas of land.
[00:10:17.572]The land that they've left begins to regenerate again
[00:10:20.816]and so it's a kind of a stable system.
[00:10:23.366]And there are two horticultural societies described,
[00:10:25.256]the Yanamamo and the Samoans,
[00:10:27.375]and by the way, I've done a lot of work
[00:10:29.209]on the Yanamamo.
[00:10:30.084]Some of my work is cited there in terms of
[00:10:33.006]how their horticultural system works
[00:10:35.482]and some time allocation studies
[00:10:38.224]in terms of how much time they spent
[00:10:40.442]hunting, gathering, fishing, and cultivating.
[00:10:44.030]For a lot of these groups, simple horticultural groups,
[00:10:48.012]although they do plant, they do depend also a lot
[00:10:51.728]on hunting, gathering, and fishing
[00:10:54.868]to supplement their diet,
[00:10:55.810]mainly by getting high quality protein into the diet.
[00:10:59.183]Intensive agriculture, here we have a change
[00:11:02.799]that we have permanent field cultivation.
[00:11:06.839]The soil is turned over with plows
[00:11:10.471]or extensive hoeing, sometimes irrigation,
[00:11:16.168]sometimes drainage is part of the system.
[00:11:18.589]For example, in New Guinea where you get a lot of rain,
[00:11:20.973]what you have to do is have raised beds.
[00:11:22.821]And so again, the fields tend to be permanent,
[00:11:26.565]or they're rotated with different crops
[00:11:29.716]or let to lay fallow for a couple years.
[00:11:33.054]But this is intensive agriculture
[00:11:34.779]and it supports a higher population density
[00:11:39.247]and two groups are illustrated in the text
[00:11:43.601]in rural Greece and then in rural Vietnam
[00:11:46.841]along the Mekong Delta
[00:11:48.240]with the rice cultivation.
[00:11:49.586]And so take a look at those kinds of systems.
[00:11:52.319]They're very similar,
[00:11:54.922]even though they grow different crops
[00:11:56.819]but in terms of how they do their cultivation.
[00:12:00.180]They rest land, and they irrigate,
[00:12:02.238]and they fertilize, and things of that nature.
[00:12:05.592]In fact, you know, irrigation and fertilization
[00:12:07.892]are absent typically in horticultural groups
[00:12:10.249]but they're present in agricultural groups.
[00:12:13.070]And, also, what we have too in both these groups
[00:12:15.902]is they used domesticated animals as tractors.
[00:12:20.082]That is, traction animals,
[00:12:21.984]that is, they're needed to help turn over the ground
[00:12:26.001]to kind of mix nutrients and enhance the quality
[00:12:30.965]of the soil to allow roots to penetrate
[00:12:33.136]more easily and more deeply into the soil.
[00:12:35.805]So again, putting more labor into a
[00:12:37.977]constant area of land is a hallmark
[00:12:39.620]of what goes in as we move from
[00:12:43.480]these different forms of food getting.
[00:12:48.292]And then pastoralism is a subsistence technology
[00:12:51.065]involving primarily the raising of large herd of animals.
[00:12:53.865]Typically in pastoralism,
[00:12:56.245]agriculture is possible to some extent
[00:12:59.647]but it's not very reliable.
[00:13:01.165]As a consequence, they rely on animals
[00:13:03.714]who are well adapted to the local environment
[00:13:06.195]and the kind of food products they get
[00:13:09.770]from these animals is not really the meat.
[00:13:11.716]They typically slaughter old animals,
[00:13:14.285]and they may use that for the meat,
[00:13:18.621]and sometimes occasionally younger animals,
[00:13:20.899]but it's mainly the dairy products
[00:13:23.024]or blood products that are used
[00:13:24.818]because, you know, if you kill a cow
[00:13:27.550]then you can't milk it anymore.
[00:13:29.517]And so what they used these animals for
[00:13:32.182]is, you know, what they produce
[00:13:34.005]in the way of milk and blood.
[00:13:38.087]And there are two examples given.
[00:13:39.429]One are the Lapps, who live in,
[00:13:41.994]they're sometimes called the Sami, S-A-M-I,
[00:13:45.104]who live in Finland, and they rely on reindeer milk
[00:13:51.988]and then the Basseri who are, you know,
[00:13:54.824]a middle eastern group who raise
[00:13:59.963]a variety of different animals.
[00:14:01.803]Again, except for the Lapps, they're an exception,
[00:14:05.826]they don't do any cultivation at all
[00:14:07.096]cause they can't, given the kind of
[00:14:09.002]environment they live in.
[00:14:10.611]Most of these groups do some agricultural,
[00:14:15.260]but it's not very reliable
[00:14:17.014]and so typical with these pastoral societies
[00:14:20.578]is that they rely on trading relationships
[00:14:23.446]with settled agricultural groups
[00:14:27.676]where they exchange meat and dairy products
[00:14:30.319]for grains that the agriculturalists cultivate, or produce.
[00:14:40.708]Environmental restraints on food-getting, you know,
[00:14:43.008]how much does the physical environment
[00:14:44.724]affect food-getting?
[00:14:45.740]The physical environment normally exercises
[00:14:48.355]restraining rather than a determining influence
[00:14:50.670]on how people in an area get their food.
[00:14:53.254]For example, if you're an Inuit,
[00:14:55.396]you live in the Arctic, well agriculture is out,
[00:14:58.786]but in some areas of the Arctic,
[00:15:00.335]for example, the Lapps, they're able to herd reindeer.
[00:15:05.217]And so the environment, you know, kind of
[00:15:10.186]blocks off the certain kinds of strategies
[00:15:12.153]that you can pursue
[00:15:13.270]and forcing or allowing others to be utilized
[00:15:19.533]to get food.
[00:15:21.141]And, you know, we see, back to pastoralism now,
[00:15:24.896]steppes, prairies, and savannas,
[00:15:27.266]these dry areas that are rich in grasses,
[00:15:30.852]they're unforested or if they're forested they have
[00:15:34.098]what we call parkland forest,
[00:15:35.358]kind of outcrops of trees here and there
[00:15:37.250]like you might see in a park.
[00:15:41.021]And again, the reliance is on animals
[00:15:44.170]that are well adapted to these kind of
[00:15:47.477]low rainfalls kinds of environments.
[00:15:53.893]The origins of food production again,
[00:15:55.902]population growth.
[00:15:58.038]And that's essentially the motor that allows,
[00:16:05.399]or forces agriculture to be developed.
[00:16:09.044]And again, one of the really interesting phenomena
[00:16:11.445]that we found were that agriculture was invented,
[00:16:13.971]soon after it was invented, it turns out that
[00:16:16.716]stature reduced by four or five inches for men and women.
[00:16:20.442]Lots of evidence of malnutrition.
[00:16:23.462]But once it gets going, they get a better
[00:16:26.294]balanced diet, more reliable food production
[00:16:29.354]then these sorts or problems disappear
[00:16:32.624]and the growth patterns begin to increase
[00:16:38.955]as they were among hunter-gatherers.
[00:16:40.733]You know, global population growth is a
[00:16:44.208]kind of main factor, all the world essentially
[00:16:48.326]is being filled up with people who cultivate
[00:16:53.411]and they displaced hunter-gatherers through time
[00:16:56.880]and part of the factors that may have had
[00:17:03.668]led to food production was the emergence of
[00:17:08.165]hotter, dryer summers and colder winters
[00:17:10.685]about ten thousand years ago
[00:17:12.333]so there may have been a kind of climatic push
[00:17:15.773]that led people to engage in agriculture.
[00:17:20.006]And again, as I mentioned
[00:17:23.646]in competition for land between
[00:17:24.811]food producers and food collectors,
[00:17:26.691]food producers may have had a significant advantage.
[00:17:30.399]I'd say they absolutely had an advantage
[00:17:32.344]in most places because essentially
[00:17:35.102]if you have technological parity
[00:17:38.574]and warfare is going on,
[00:17:40.268]then the group that can put the most warriors
[00:17:43.245]into the field is going to win the battle
[00:17:47.432]if they're all using the same weapons.
[00:17:49.180]And in this case, agriculturalists were able to do so.
[00:17:55.588]A good example, many of you are probably aware of,
[00:17:58.369]whether it's not technological parity,
[00:18:00.933]for example, Genghis Khan and other nomadic people,
[00:18:04.877]given their use of bow and arrow and horses
[00:18:10.664]were able to defeat a lot of settled groups
[00:18:12.784]even though they didn't have a numerical advantage
[00:18:17.084]but the speed and maneuverability of cavalry
[00:18:21.260]allowed them to essentially overcome, for a time,
[00:18:24.788]a number of more complexly organized agricultural groups.
[00:18:30.740]Here are, you know, this is essentially
[00:18:33.794]for me adding stuff into the textbook.
[00:18:37.572]Here are some of the general trends
[00:18:39.094]in the food extraction systems.
[00:18:42.587]So we move from hunters and gatherers
[00:18:44.701]to intensive agriculture, we're talking about
[00:18:46.913]extracting food energy from the environment.
[00:18:49.542]So what you get through time as you move
[00:18:51.690]from hunter-gatherers to intensive agriculture
[00:18:54.027]to indeed petrochemically dependent agriculture.
[00:18:58.607]Increased landscape modification,
[00:19:00.605]that is, the land is converted from a wild scape
[00:19:03.811]to an agricultural landscape,
[00:19:07.101]lowered biodiversity, lack of conservation,
[00:19:10.272]that is, you simplify the environment
[00:19:13.482]by planting acres and acres of pure strands of rice
[00:19:19.071]or wheat or whatever crop you happen to be growing.
[00:19:21.441]Increased energy output per unit area,
[00:19:23.976]you're pulling more energy out of
[00:19:26.774]a hectare or acre of land.
[00:19:30.195]That's what allows you to produce
[00:19:32.203]or support a greater population.
[00:19:34.106]Increased energy input per unit area,
[00:19:37.358]you're putting more energy in every unit
[00:19:41.097]of square meter or hectare or acre of land
[00:19:45.392]as you, you know, kind of manipulate it
[00:19:48.341]to the maximum by bringing water to it,
[00:19:51.267]adding fertilizer to it,
[00:19:53.035]turning the soil over with traction animals.
[00:19:55.765]You get specialization and monocropping,
[00:19:58.697]that is, again, instead of hunter-gatherers
[00:20:02.018]relying on, you know, maybe a couple dozen food resources
[00:20:06.625]but intensive agriculturalists only rely on
[00:20:10.015]a couple kinds of resources so you get
[00:20:12.374]this kind of monocropping that goes on.
[00:20:14.766]Decreased use of wild resources,
[00:20:17.070]this is fairly obvious,
[00:20:18.213]that if you convert most of the landscape to
[00:20:20.500]agricultural lands, well there's not much in the way
[00:20:22.677]of wild resources to depend on
[00:20:24.412]to make the diet more varied and to,
[00:20:29.397]you know, fill in all your nutritional needs.
[00:20:32.279]And then greater energy input per unit output.
[00:20:35.707]Actually, with petrochemical resources
[00:20:40.078]for every one calorie of food energy
[00:20:45.271]we create through cultivation, we have to expend
[00:20:48.887]eight calories of energy.
[00:20:52.291]And most of this is petrochemical energies
[00:20:55.575]and clearly it's an unsustainable system
[00:20:58.880]because it depends on a resource,
[00:21:00.820]oil, largely, that declines through time.
[00:21:05.784]So these are the main trends that have happened
[00:21:08.221]as we move from the hunting and the gathering
[00:21:11.576]to intensive agriculture, which is the heart of
[00:21:14.729]what is in chapter six.

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Chap. 6 ANTH 212 EE

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