Reported by:

Andrew John B. Fernandez

 Social Scientists were and often are convinced that

basic food production is dull, routine, grubby, and

very much background activity.
The view of culture as a basic coping device for the

survival of a human population in an environment

directed attention to subsistence techniques and
strategies as adaptively interacting with social
organization and a whole range of other institutions.

Descriptions and Typologies

Morgan: cultivation was one of the key elements in

transition from savagery to barbarism, and its

development was speculatively associated with
concepts of property and with technology.

 Horticultural preceded field culture, as the garden

(hortos) preceded the field (ager) and although the

latter implies boundaries, the former signifies directly
an inclosed space.
However, tillage must have been older than the

inclosed garden.

 Agricultural succeeded pastoralism according to the

early evolutionists, and Ratzel regarded it as an

improvement because it forces on a man the
wholesome habit of labour and is followed by the
accumulation of capital, the development of trade, and
a fuller organization of the social ranks.

 Hahn repudiated such simplistic and ethnocentric

economic stages, pointing out that animal husbandry

was not antecedent of tillage.
The most intensive type of tillage was horticulture

characterized by irrigation and the use of fertilizers.

 Curwen and Hatt made a further distinction between

semiagriculture, which women were cultivators while

men hunted or herded, and two types of full
agriculture, with and without the plow directed by
men and each occuring in a number of regional
variants.

 Though questions of the origin and processes of

domestication of crops and animals may be left in the

capable hands of archeologists, geographers,
botanists, and zoologists, the more recent spread of
cultigens is a valuable addition to culture history.

 Murdocks summaries of crop complexes grouped by

origin give an added dimension to linguistic,

archeological, and culture trait distributions in
plotting prehistoric contacts and population
movements.
Questions have been raised on the dating of Malaysian

diffusion and the influence of both new tropical forest

crops and iron technology on the relatively Bantu
migrations.
Claims that introduction of the sweet potato into
Highland New Guinnea within 300 years ago.

 The earlier geographers have taken the deterministic

position that the national environment could directly

cause particular type of culture. However,
anthropologist, have noted the limitations that
climate, precipitation, topography, soils, and other
features could impose on the diffusion and adoption of
agricultural complexes.

 Meggers continues the possibilist approach,

providing environments into four types on the basis of

their subsistence potential for agriculture, and stating
the law that the level to which a culture can develop
is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the
environment it occupies.

 Perdon refines the environmental factors into more

precise ratings of temperature, precipitation, soils, and

land forms and emphasizes the cultural factors
technological, economic, and political which may
outweigh the natural surroundings in determining
agricultural potential.

 Careful attention must be given to environmental

parameters, the relevant question concerns the

conditions under which agricultural intensification
takes place and the necessary techniques and costs for
realizing various levels of potential returns.

 An exclusive focus on technology as a cross-culturally

valid determinant of agriculture has similarly resulted

in oversimplifying ecological relationships and
obscuring the processes of change between broadly
defined evolutionary stages.

 White recognizes declining subsistence returns as a

major reason for altering agricultural techniques and

harnessing new energy sources, he does not associate
such changes with declining productivity per man
hour as an economic condition of rising population
pressure on resources.

 Historian of technology discusses the introduction of

the heavy, moldboard plow, opening up clay

bottomlands for cultivations, increasing crop
production and supporting denser population, these
factors are systematically related is fascinatingly clear,
but the processes of agricultural change cannot be
referred solely to technological innovation.

Agriculture in the Ecosystem

A farmers activities and choices could not be

understood without a much more detailed knowledge

of his local environment.
Conklin set high standards in his collection of rainfall

and soil analysis data, his exhaustive step-by-step

enumeration of stages in site selection, cutting,
burning, cropping, and fallowing that make up
swidden cycle and his attention to native categories of
land usage, climate, soils, vegetation, and labor.

 Shifting cultivation as a general type of food

production with worldwide distribution has become

increasingly well defined. Pelzer cited as its main
characteristics its lack of tillage, the rotation of fields
rather than crops, clearing by means of fire, absence of
draft animals and manuring, use of human labor only,
employment of the dibble stick or hoe, and hoe short
periods of soil occupancy.

 Geertz adopts an ecological model in emphasizing the

way n which shifting cultivation is integrated into and

maintains the natural ecosystem into which it is
projected, using diversity of crops, rapid recycling of
nutrients, and duplication of the protective plant
canopy and to transform a natural forest into a
harvestable.

 Patterns of shifting cultivation well outside of the

tropics continued to be practiced on infertile European

lands till the 18th century.
Under the conditions of land scarcity, people plant

trees in their swiddens in an attempt to reproduce at

least partially the missing spontaneous woodland.

 Nye and Greenland: cropping by shifting methods

results:
Multiplication of pests and diseases
Increase weeds
Deterioration in the physical condition of the soil

Erosion of top soil

Deterioration in the nutrient status of the soil
Changes in the numbers and composition of the soil

fauna and flora.

 Allan has defined the maximum population density

the system is capable of supporting permanently in the

environment without damage to the land.
Street points out, deterioration of land is cumulative

process, and its current changes may be too slight to be

noticed.

 A truly ecological understanding of any agricultural

system requires not only the study of dynamic

interrelations with the effective physical environments
(soils, water, temperature, topography) but also
quantitative consideration of energy transfer with the
human organism.

 Various root and grain crops provide significantly

unequal caloric output and percentages of protein

from the same land area, and they may make
correspondingly different demand on soil fertility.
The relative scarcity of certain nutritional elements in

available foods may cause stress leading to

physiological changes, and such cultural responses as
supplementary collecting of wild food during the
times of drought.

Agrarian Social Organization

The most interesting aspect for cultural

anthropologists of the ecosystemic approach to

agriculture was the possibility of treating social
institutions as adaptive variables.
Julian Steward proposed to examine the basic

adjustment by which man utilizes a given environment

and the way in which a cultural core of features was
adaptively related to these subsistence activities and
economic arrangements.

 Brookfield calls agrarian geography, the study of

agriculture not only in relation to its use and

manipulation of natural resources but also to land
tenure, holding, and allocation, and to the social,
economic, and political systems within which farming
is carried on,

 Though the sexual division of labor traditionally has

been linked to agricultural type, and cross cultural

studies have shown that intensity and complexity of
agriculture do correlate with increasing assignment of
tasks to males, there now appears to be considerable
flexibility in performance of necessary labor.

 There is growing evidence that household composition

among farmers varies with the type and amount of

labor required for effective crop production.
Extended from nuclear family

 A considerably more problematical linkage is that

between type for descent group and agricultural

system.
Forde has suggested that were the scale and stability of

separate settlements are limited by the habitat or

productive techniques, descent groups are unlikely.

 The hypthesis that unilineal descent groups become

important:
The need for mobilizing large, coordinated groups for

certain tasks of the agricultural cycle

The need for laying claim to, defending, and selectively
transmitting rights in important resources.

 Demography density is not an absolute but depends on

local population distribution and the productivity of

resources.
Land is therefore sought individually, utilizing kinship

and affinity bonds, and weakening the clan as a

political unit.

 Waddell contends that the clan fills this function by

defining the territory itself in agnatic terms, and the in

general the dimensions and size of the effective
autonomous social unit can be accounted for the terms
of ecology, agricultural requirements, and defense.

 A segmentary lineage structure of greater range and

geneological depth may be effective for mobilizing

considerable military pressure against neighboring
groups, thereby making possible predatory expansion
necessary for the extension of agriculture by shifting
techniques.

 Wittfogels hypothesis that large scale irrigation

reqiured the centralization of political power to

construct and maintain the system.
Chiefly authority

State government
Council of leaders