Modes of subsistence

People have material needs, especially food. So people will always depend on nature, and usually that means depending on their immediate natural environment. In considering this fact, anthropologists have conventionally used specialized terminology to identify the main ways that societies engage in subsistence¹:

• Foraging or “hunting and gathering,” which is based on the collection of wild foods and game (fish and meat).
• Pastoralism, or the tending of herds of domesticated animals, e.g. cows, reindeer, sheep, camels, yaks.
• Horticulture, the cultivation of several different food crops in small plots and usually using simple hand tools.
• Agriculture
  • Agriculture is often distinguished from horticulture by the size and scale of production, thanks to the use of specialized steel tools and draught animals, if not machines.
  • Peasant agriculture is a mixed type in which families produce their own food, and sell surpluses of commodity crops.
  • Industrialized agriculture is the intensive production of commodity crops like rice, corn, wheat specifically for sale and usually for use in the industrial manufacture of food.
    • Peasants are partly integrated into a market economy and specialized division of labor. Industrial farms feed people in societies with a complex division of labor, and today, capitalist, market economies.

Outside of anthropology, these terms have also become common, and often get used as stereotypes for cultural differences. When anthropologists describe a society using terms for its mode of subsistence, they do not imply that one is more advanced or developed than another, or that a society can only engage in one mode because it has not invented or discovered another, better one. Consider that:

• Hunting-and-gathering societies, like Alaska Native communities, use snowmobiles to hunt caribou and seal (Bravo 1994).
• Horticulturalists in Papua New Guinea clear new garden plots in the forests using rented chainsaws (Allen et al. 2002).
• Pastoralists in Kenya track their herds with mobile phones (Butt 2015).

To embrace this complexity, anthropologists have to treat any typology of modes of subsistence skeptically. Most anthropologists avoid a position of environmental determinism, or the claim that a society’s natural environment determines what kind of organization and structure it will have. Instead, anthropologists are interested in the different ways that societies adapt to a specific environment. It is common for very different societies with different patterns of life and different modes of subsistence to adapt to the same kind of environment in different ways. Each society defines for itself what counts as a valuable resource in its environment, and this shapes how they engage in subsistence. In any one society, the mode of subsistence will be structured by the social construction of nature, rather than the reverse.

Indeed, subsistence in most actual societies consists of a mix of different modes. In the contemporary world, many people and communities rely both on self-produced food in a variety of modes alongside consumption of commodities circulating in a global capitalist agricultural food system. When a society is marginalized within this capitalist system and lacks the cash to consume commodity foods, different modes of subsistence supplement their diet. And many societies based historically in one mode of subsistence use the material culture of global industrial capitalism to continue other ways of meeting needs.