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Introduction
to Cultural Anthropology
SOC401
VU
Lesson
12
FOOD
AND CULTURE (continued)
Food
Collection
Food
collection involves (systematic
exploration) of natural plants and
animals available in given natural
environments.
People have been foragers
for an overwhelming majority of time, and
have only developed
other
options to secure food in the
last 10,000 years or
so.
Food
Collectors
Most
societies prefer to produce food,
but half a million people in
different cultures live by
foraging even
today.
There are considerable variations in the
life patterns of current foragers
but it is possible to
make
some
generalizations about
them.
Contemporary
Food Collectors/Foragers
Food
collecting societies have low
population density. They are
usually nomadic or semi-nomadic
rather
than
sedentary since their prey
often migrates. The basic
social unit amongst food
collectors is a family or a
band,
a loose federation of families.
Contemporary food collectors occupy
remote and marginal
habitats,
due
to pressure from food
processing people with their
dominating technology and thirst
for more land
While
food collectors hunt as well
as collect wild plants, vegetation
provides almost 80% of their
food
intake.
Food collecting people live in a wide variety of
environments including deserts, tropical
forests,
mountains
and the polar regions of the
Artic and Antarctic
circles.
Unlike
food producers, food
collectors possess inbuilt
mechanisms (low population
and little use of
technology),
which prevents it from
becoming too efficient and
completely destroying their own source
of
food.
Do
Foragers Live
Well?
Despite
inhabiting the most unproductive
parts of Earth, foragers are
well off and dubbed `the
original
affluent
society' by anthropologists. They enjoy leisure time,
have enough food and use
remarkable
intelligence
and ingenuity in securing
their food.
Most
contemporary foraging societies remain
small scale, unspecialized,
egalitarian and non-centralized.
The
Khung
in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia
and the Inuit in the Artic region,
provide good examples
of
hunting
and gathering peoples
today.
Food
Production
About
10,000 years ago, humans
made a transition from collecting to
producing food by cultivating
crops
and
keeping herds of animals. The
earliest cultivation occurred in the
Fertile Crescent of the Middle
East.
Archeologists
think this transition was
due to demographic and
environmental pressures. Early
farmers paid
a
high price for this new
food strategy. They did
not switch convinced by the superiority
of agriculture,
which
was more monotonous, less
secure and required more
labor and time. Evidence reveals
early
cultivators
also experienced a decline in
nutritional and health standards
because they had to shift
from
collecting
to growing food.
Changes
Resulting From Neolithic
Revolution
Food
production resulted in the first
population explosion. Fertility rates
also increased since
children could
make
an economic contribution. People
became sedentary and civilizations
began to develop. As farming
became
more efficient, people had
more free time and began
making farm implements and pottery,
leading
to
the division of labor and
specialization. The egalitarianism of
foraging societies was
replaced by social
inequalities
and the thirst for private
ownership.
30
/98-12_files/98-1200002im.jpg" width="695"
height="1066" useMap="#Map">
Introduction
to Cultural Anthropology
SOC401
VU
Useful
Terms
Population:
number of people in
a given area
Sedentary:
settlement,
or settled down in one
place
Strategy:
a
thought out method to obtain
some objective or goal
Monotonous:
boring
Nutritional
value: amount of
energy
Suggested
Readings
Students
are advised to read the
following chapters to develop a better understanding
of the various
principals
highlighted in this hand-out:
Chapter
7 in `Cultural
Anthropology: An Applied Perspective' by
Ferrarro and/or Chapter 16 in
`Anthropology' by
Ember
and Pergrine
Internet
Resources
In
addition to reading from the
textbook, please visit the
following web-site for this
lecture, which
provide
useful
and interesting information:
Anthropology
of Food
http://www.archaeolink.com/anthropology_of_food_general_res.htm
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