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A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence (the provision of food, clothing and shelter) rather than to the market.
| Part of a series on |
| Economic systems |
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Major types |
A subsistence economy is an economy directed to basic subsistence (the provision of food, clothing and shelter) rather than to the market.
"Subsistence" is understood as supporting oneself and family at a minimum level. Basic subsistence is the provision of food, clothing, shelter. A subsistence economy is an economy directed to one's subsistence rather than to the market. [1] Often, the subsistence economy is moneyless and relies on natural resources to provide for basic needs through hunting, gathering, and agriculture. In a subsistence economy, economic surplus is minimal and only used to trade for basic goods, and there is no industrialization. [2] [3] In hunting and gathering societies, resources are often, if not typically underused. [4]
The subsistence system is maintained through sharing, feasting, ritual observance and associated norms. [5] Harvesting is an important indicator of social capital. [6] Subsistence embodies cultural perspectives of relationships to places, people and animals. [7]
In human history, before the first cities, all humans lived in a subsistence economy.[ citation needed ] As urbanization, civilization, and division of labor spread, various societies moved to other economic systems at various times.[ citation needed ] Some remain relatively unchanged, ranging from uncontacted peoples, to marginalized areas of developing countries, to some cultures that choose to retain a traditional economy.[ citation needed ]
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members.
Nomads are communities without fixed habitation who regularly move to and from areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world as of 1995.
A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, especially wild edible plants but also insects, fungi, honey, bird eggs, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most vertebrates that are omnivores. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.
Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The animal species involved include cattle, camels, goats, yaks, llamas, reindeer, horses, and sheep.
An agrarian society, or agricultural society, is any community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland. Another way to define an agrarian society is by seeing how much of a nation's total production is in agriculture. In agrarian society, cultivating the land is the primary source of wealth. Such a society may acknowledge other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses the importance of agriculture and farming. Agrarian societies have existed in various parts of the world as far back as 10,000 years ago and continue to exist today. They have been the most common form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history
In the classification of archaeological cultures of North America, the Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures spanned a period from roughly 1000 BCE to European contact in the eastern part of North America, with some archaeologists distinguishing the Mississippian period, from 1000 CE to European contact as a separate period. The term "Woodland Period" was introduced in the 1930s as a generic term for prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers and the agriculturalist Mississippian cultures. The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covers what is now eastern Canada south of the Subarctic region, the Eastern United States, along to the Gulf of Mexico.
In cultural anthropology, sedentism is the practice of living in one place for a long time. As of 2024, the large majority of people belong to sedentary cultures. In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism takes on a slightly different sub-meaning, often applying to the transition from nomadic society to a lifestyle that involves remaining in one place permanently. Essentially, sedentism means living in groups permanently in one place. The invention of agriculture led to sedentism in many cases, but the earliest sedentary settlements were pre-agricultural.
Sociopolitical typology refers to four types, or levels, of a political organization: "band", "tribe", "chiefdom", and "state", created by the anthropologist Elman Service.
The expression adaptive strategies is used by anthropologist Yehudi Cohen to describe a society's system of economic production. Cohen argued that the most important reason for similarities between two unrelated societies is their possession of a similar adaptive strategy. In other words, similar economic causes have similar sociocultural effects.
Intensive gathering describes the tending-to of edible wild plants to assure their continuous availability at known, convenient locales. Intensive gathering methods include weeding, discouraging predators, pot-irrigation, and limited harvesting to ensure reproduction. The same system of methods is involved in cultivation, a process which additionally requires systematic soil preparation and planting to tending and harvesting. This human manipulation ultimately results in the domestication of involved plant life.
Prehistoric Korea is the era of human existence in the Korean Peninsula for which written records do not exist. It nonetheless constitutes the greatest segment of the Korean past and is the major object of study in the disciplines of archaeology, geology, and palaeontology.
Yaylak is a summer highland pasture associated with transhumance pastoralism in several Central and West Asian Turkic communities. There are different variants of yaylak pastoralism forms of alpine transhumance, some of which are similar to seminomadic pastoralism, although most are similar to herdsman husbandry. However, in the Eurasian steppes, the Middle East and North Africa, yaylak pastoralism often coexists with seminomadic pastoralism and pastoral nomadism. The term had been commonly used in Soviet anthropology.
Nutritional anthropology is the study of the interplay between human biology, economic systems, nutritional status and food security. If economic and environmental changes in a community affect access to food, food security, and dietary health, then this interplay between culture and biology is in turn connected to broader historical and economic trends associated with globalization. Nutritional status affects overall health status, work performance potential, and the overall potential for economic development for any given group of people.
Indigenous horticulture is practised in various ways across all inhabited continents. Indigenous refers to the native peoples of a given area and horticulture is the practice of small-scale intercropping.
The Kwegu are an ethnic group that lives on the western banks of the Omo River in the newly formed South Ethiopia Region. Some members of the Kwegu also live on the eastern banks of the river among the Mursi. Previously they were hunter-gatherers, but today they are engaged in a mixed economy of hunting, farming, beekeeping, and fishing.
Peasant economics is an area of economics in which a wide variety of economic approaches ranging from the neoclassical to the marxist are used to examine the political economy of the peasantry. The defining feature of the peasants are that they are typically seen to be only partly integrated into the market economy -— an economy which, in societies with a significant peasant population, is typically found to have many imperfect, incomplete or missing markets. Peasant economics treats peasants as something different from other farmers as they are not assumed to be simply small profit maximizing farmers; by contrast, peasant economics covers a wide range of different theories of peasant household behavior. These include various assumptions about the maximization of profits, risk aversion, drudgery aversion, and sharecropping. The assumptions, logic, and predictions of these theories are examined and the impact of subsistence is typically found to have important implications in terms of producers decisions about supply, consumption and price. Chayanov was an early proponent of the importance of understanding peasant behaviour arguing that peasants would work as hard as they needed in order to meet their subsistence needs, but had no incentive beyond those needs and therefore would slow and stop working once they were met. This principle, the consumption-labour-balance principle, implies that the peasant household will increase its work until it meets (balances) the needs (consumption) of the household. A possible implication of this view of peasant societies is that they will not develop without some external, added factor. Peasant economics has been seen as being an important area of study by some development economists, agricultural sociologists, and anthropologists.
The Pastoral Neolithic refers to a period in Africa's prehistory, specifically Tanzania and Kenya, marking the beginning of food production, livestock domestication, and pottery use in the region following the Later Stone Age. The exact dates of this time period remain inexact, but early Pastoral Neolithic sites support the beginning of herding by 5000 BP. In contrast to the Neolithic in other parts of the world, which saw the development of farming societies, the first form of African food production was nomadic pastoralism, or ways of life centered on the herding and management of livestock. The shift from hunting to food production relied on livestock that had been domesticated outside of East Africa, especially North Africa. This period marks the emergence of the forms of pastoralism that are still present. The reliance on livestock herding marks the deviation from hunting-gathering but precedes major agricultural development. The exact movement tendencies of Neolithic pastoralists are not completely understood.
The Jeulmun pottery period is an archaeological era in Korean prehistory broadly spanning the period of 8000–1500 BC. This period subsumes the Mesolithic and Neolithic cultural stages in Korea, lasting ca. 8000–3500 BC and 3500–1500 BC, respectively. Because of the early presence of pottery, the entire period has also been subsumed under a broad label of "Korean Neolithic".
A subsistence pattern – alternatively known as a subsistence strategy – is the means by which a society satisfies its basic needs for survival. This encompasses the attainment of nutrition, water, and shelter. The five broad categories of subsistence patterns are foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, agriculture, and industrial food production.
The beginnings of agriculture in the Near East can be traced back to the early Neolithic period, between 10,000 and 8,000 BC, when a series of domestications by human communities took place, primarily involving a few plants and animals. In these regions, this gradually led to the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry and their expansion to other parts of the world. The Neolithic is commonly defined as the transition from a “predatory” economy of hunter-gatherers to a “productive” economy of farmer-breeders, which places the question of plant and animal domestication at the heart of the upheavals brought about by this period.
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