Edmund Leach's study of the Kachin in Highland Burma in the late 1930s

(From Wilder and King)

In this time he paid some attention to their ecology as a limiting but not a determining factor of their social and political order. He (1954) argued that in general 'hill peoples can only be expected to yield a surplus under exceptional conditions of low population density and specially favourable terrain'. Among the Kachin, Leach distinguished three kinds of upland agriculture (taungya is the Burmese term for hill field):

Monsoon taungya

Firstly (slash and burn?) the vegetation is cleared, left to desiccate during the dry season and then burned. The burned debris provided an ash fertiliser of phosphates and potassium. The ground was dibbled and drilled among the ash and sown with a variety of crops , principally hill rice, with maize, millet and buckwheat, and in this region the opium poppy as a cash crop. Usually after a year's cultivation, the area was abandoned and allowed to lie fallow and recover (usu. for 12-15 years). Gradually secondary forest established itself, then it was farmed again. Leach says that if this cycle was followed 'then there is no deforestation and negligible soil loss'. This is an extensive agricultural system because at any one time there are substantial tracts of fallow land in various stages of regrowth as the fields are used in rotation. Leach notes that Kachin villages were usually small in size, scattered and close to their fields. Shifting cultivation therefore might be put under pressure with population growth. A shortening of the fallow period, esp on hill slopes prone to erosion, might not permit the land to recover sufficiently and the vegetation to provide cover to prevent soil leaching and to yield sufficient amounts of ash fertiliser when burned.

Grassland taungya

In these regions of Burma described by Leach, the climate has less considerably rainfall than the areas which receive monsoons, so instead of forests the land is covered by pine stands, scrub and grasslands. This environments made for difficulties in ensuring sufficient rain and heat for hill rice. Beans were a favoured crop on cleared grasslands, followed by various other crops such as maize, buckwheat, millet, wheat and barley, planted in rotation on the same patch of land. The fields were then left to revert to grasslands. The poorer prospects for food crops also resulted in the cultivation of cash crops such as tea and the opium poppy.

Irrigated rice terraces

These were constructed in areas 'when local population densities are great enough to create a serious shortage of land' and where communities were relatively fixed, often for military and political reasons to control trade routes. Nevertheless, these terraces required considerable effort and energy to construct and maintain, and wherever possible the Kachin preferred to practise shifting cultivation.

Horticulture and Palm Harvesting in Southeast Asia

Ellen suggests that the availibility of wild sago may have limited horticultural development because there 'is little incentive to alter a landscape at some effort and adopt new and untried techniques when a living can be had by simply extraacting resources from an unmodified environment'. In his study of the Nuaulu of Seram, Ellen presents a detailed description and analysis of the combination of a hunting-gathering economy and a horticultural in which root tubers are cultivated by shifting agricultural methods (1978). For the Nuaulu sago gathering provides the most important source of staple food while gardens are planted with such tubers as taro, manioc and yams. Usually gardens are farmed for a year and then left fallow, tho crops such as manioc and fruits such as banana and papaya continue to be taken from the same plot in the second and third years. In some cases garden land is turned over for long-term cultivation of sago palms and cash crops such as cloves and coconuts, which Ellen term 'silviculture', and which results in land being taken out of the swidden-fallow cycle altogether and, in effect, used for permanent cultivation of tree or palm crops.

Ellen also indicates that lowland sago is vitally important in the Moluccas (mainly on the islands of Seram, Halmahera, Buru, Aru and Bacan), and has been the primary source of carbohydrate since at least the fifteenth century.  It is a remarkably productive palm, has 'year-round availibility'. Vegetables can be intercropped with sago, and the palm also provides a source of liquor, firewood, medicines and raw material for utensls and other items. Usually along the Melanau (in Borneo) there was a gender division of labour with men clearing, cutting and rasping the palms to obtain the sago pith, and women, cleaning, processing and drying the flour, and making it into biscuits and other foodstuffs.

This cottage/home-based industry in Sarawak also used to provide flour for export, but rasping and processing subsequently became mechanised, factory-based and controlled by Chinese companies. It resulted in increasing unemployment in some of the sago districts and native sago producers became wage labourers for others, and tied into credit-debt relations with Chinese dealers. In the Moluccas, Ellen also draws attention to the importance of sago flour and biscuits in exchange netweorks, and from the 15th century its close relationships to clove production in that the areas which concentrated on spices for export needed to import sago to meet their basic food needs.

Hunting and Gathering in S-E. A.

(from Wilder and King)


As rainforests have been cleared and gov'ts aim to (re?)settle and modernise forest nomads, this form of ecological adjustment to the environment has been placed under severe pressure. Many nomads have, in contact with neighbouring farmers, settled down and adopted horticulture or rice agriculture, or have been resettled in gov't land schemes. So forest-based activities dependent on hunting, gathering and fishing are not as widespread to day as they were, say, 30 years ago.

Once agriculture or horticulture was introduced, a vital characteristic of those who remained as hunter-gatherers was that they have never been isolated populations, but have always lived in contact with agriculturalists with whom they have long-standing trade relations and are culturally related (Eder; King). Traditionally nomads were largely self-sufficient but through trade acquired such items as rice, cloth, iron, copper wire, salt, tobacco, beads, necklaces and bracelets, metal earrings, tattooing needles, ceramic jars and brass gongs. In return the hunter-gatherers supplied rattan, resins, wild rubber, medicinalplants, hornbail casques and feathers, beeswax, birds' nests, honey, bezoar stones, gold, antler horns, clouded leaopard skins and rinoceros horns, many of them for a wider Asian market.

Indeed, Hoffman argued that the explanation for nomadic life in Borneo lay in the specialisation in the commercial collecting and hunting of forest products. He went further by proposing that nomadic society arose specifically to service the Chinese market with luxury tropical goods, and to do so hunter-gatherers entered into relations with agriculturalists who served as intermediaries. For Hoffman trade was essential to the nomadic way of life. However, this rather one-sided view has been criticised by Rousseau and Sellato, who contend that, tho nomads trade, so do so more than others and they do not depend on agriculturalists for anything of importance. It was often difficult for the intermediaries to persuade nomads to collect produce because they were often too preoccupied with meeting their own subsistence needs.

Several recent studies have documented the process of sedentarization. Eder (1996), for example, in his work on the Batak, a foraging community of central Palawan in the Philippines, finds that they "no longer earn their subsistence exclusively by hunting and gathering. Rather, trade, shift cultivation, and wage labor have come to be important sources of cash and subsistence, reflecting growing articulation with lowland Philippine economy and society over the past one hundred years." Nevertheless, hunting-gathering still comprised a significant part of Batak economic activity in the 1980s, undertaken on a seasonal basis as other activities, particularly rice agriculture, permitted. For some part of the year the Batak resided in forest camps, tho their main residence was closer to their rice-field; the camps were also smaller in size and much more temporary than in the hunting-gathering past and the range of fauna and flora utilised much reduced. In this transitional phase from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture in which the Batak spread their energies over several activities, Eder argues that their part-time foraging 'is not as remunerative or successful as it once was'.

Borneo nomads traditionally occupied primary forest and formed settlements in caves, lean-tos and raised farm-houses near sources of drinking water. There were also variations in the degree of permanence of camps and settlements. Generally, population densities were very low and nomads were organised in bands from 30-40 people up to 15 or 200. These roamed separately over recognised territories, tho they did not move at random but in a cyclical fashion around a base-camp. From time to time nomads also migrated long distances to new territories.

Nomadic economy in Borneo was based on the felling of the inland sago palm and extracting flour from the edible pith which is eaten with sago and other palm shoots; it is calculated that a band of 25 people needed 20 palms per week for a normal diet, and that, given that a palm stand usually comprises 50 to 100 trees, of which about half are mature, bands would have to move to a new stand every week or two weeks. Other food comprised forest vegetables such as yams and mushrooms, ferns, honey, vegetable tallow, wild fruits like durian and rambutan, and animal protein from wild boar, deer, macaques, civets, squirrels, reptiles, jungle fowl and birds, as well as from fish, molluscs and crustaceans. Hunting of ground animals was undertaken by men using spears and dogs, or traps, while tree-dwelling creatures and birds were killed with poisoned darts from the blowpipe. Women usually gathered forest products near the camp.

Self, Spirits and Authority

Belief in spirits and in viruses are equatable because neither can be seen but the effects can be felt
- the local has inspired global movements
- Joseph Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion; his novel The Hero With A Thousand Faces expounds the regular feature in many stories of a hero leading others to safety based on his subject areas
- visible tension between reductive, naturalising vs contextualising, and phenomenological approaches
- on this topic, Lambek says: 1. context is neceassary for contemporary experience to be mediated by past myth models and 2. individual intentions are externalised and given voice

Star Wars as a tale of shamanic journey
- Leia as the sould to be saved
- by the shaman apprentice that is Obi Wan
- who is aided by Chewbacca

A definition of spirit possession
from Boddy, J. (1994) "Spirit Posession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality" in Annual Review of Anth. 23: 407-34
"..commonly refers to the hold exerted over a human being by external forces or entities more powerful than she. These forces may be ancestors or divinities, ghosts of foreign origin, or entities both ontotlogically and ethnically alien"
- this denial of agency does not fit with Western notions of self-control

A definition of shamanism
- origin: Tunguistic (Siberian) word; meaning a mediator between the human world and the world of the spirits, between the living and the dead, and between animals and human society (D'Anglure 1996)

Historical development
- particular interest towards Siberian Shamanism by early romantic intellectuals opposed to scientific rationality, such as Diderot, Herder, Goethe
- regarded as the intermediary stage between magic and religion (late 19th century)
- French sociological school saw shamanism as having derived from totemism

Techniques of ecstasy
- ethnographically led psychological approaches 
- Eliade (sociologist of myth) (1951) produced a comprehensive, historical account influenced by religious psychology

Contemporary literature
- mental states that shamonism constitutes
- ecstasy and !Kung dances release opium peptides which, when transferred to other people by sweat?, spreads/shares the experience
- psychologizing - mental illness, ASC, SSC
- neuropsychological - shamans and endorphins
- social psychological approaches: see Sikala
- shamanism as therapy - placebo, psychotherapeutic, metaphorical

Neo-shamanism
- from abnormal psychology to universal psychobiological capacities - 1960s popular understandings of consciousness
- oldest form of religion since hunter-gatherer subsistence method was predominant
- Harner (1990) The Way of the Shaman: Harner worked with the head-hunters in Ecuador and wanted to make their practise more acessible and better understood (see The Foundation for Shamanic Studies)

Persecution of shamans
- 17th century Swedish Lappland (Sami people), shaman's drums were confiscated
- Russian Orthodox Church had classified 'shamanic spirits' as maleficient daemons of lower rank
- then an enforced mass baptism was sanctioned by Peter the Great
- but this failed to eradicate the practice, esp as many people had traditionally turned to shamanic practitioners for advice, and choosing not to reject this custom kept the practices alive

Spirit Possession
- may be inherently pathological
- Lewis suggests that to declare being possessed may be instrumental, e.g. status-deprived individuals could use it as a guise for their (unconscious?) protests
- Crapanzano sees it as a creative idiom for articulatin a certain range of experiences..
- accroding to Obeyesekere cultural symbols inform individual exp/psychoanalytical processes
- Lambek puts forward the notion that each genre is coupled with its own interpretative conventions, e.g. spirit possession does not tend to be a welcomed activity in tales

Ethnography forces us to examine the descriptive power of spirit possession
- the declaration of interaction between a person and spirit(s) is contestable
- Tevolo (ritual of herbal medicine applied by a specialist) also describes/expounds inappropriate behaviour, but reality of spirits is not questioned

Lambek: from disease to discourse
- critique of naturalist paradigms; recolonising terrain for culture and cultural explanations
- trance vs possession
- violates our cultural distinctions
- possession as text that is the experience symbolically articulated
- ongoing, historically located process consituting self and objectivity
- we shouldn't try to theorise the events of spirit possession, but observe and analyalyse the context in which they occur

Amerindian shamanism as a critique of Western epistemology
- perspectivism - the ways humans, animals and spirits see both themselves and each other
- recognise the Amerindian profound cosmological inclusiveness of animals (ecosophic knowledge)
- constructivist viewpoint - the point of view creates the object
- Amerindian view - point of view creates the subject

from a clip of Medicine Men Go Wild
(medical anthropologist twins based at UCL)
- sure hallucinogens provoke creative thoughts and grand ideas, but these have never been shared/transmitted
- too fleeting to be properly explained or documented

Solopsism - philosophical idea that the self is all a person can be sure exists
- 'I think, therefore I am'
- Amerindian thought on the other hand - it exists, therefore it thinks

Shamanism and Episemology (see De Castro)
- 'Our traditional problem in the West is how to connect and universalize: individual substances are given, while relations have to be made. The Amerindian problem is how to separate and particularize: relations are given, while substances must be defined.'
- sluicing poisonous leaves into the river to asphyxiate the fish and make them easier to catch is a traditional fishing method of the Achuar
- fish poison is defined be cultural relativity, and is a substance that mixes nature and culture
- cultural relativity introduces culture into nature

Place and Pilgrimage

These notes are framed like an essay to answer the question 'how do places become sacred? The structure:
- personally and ethnographically led answer
- sacred/profane dichotomy
- wisdom sits in places: how one learns from places; in different settings different ideas occur
- the case of tourism, the sacred journey
- the political dimension: tourist vs. pilgrim
- ethnographic example: El Rocio, Andalusia
- ultimate tourism; possible future research

Sacred places include
- locations with sentimental value - where you were most experimental or emotional
- home - where you were born, where you grew up, where you've spent most of your life, where your family live
- a palce in nature - beach, field, hills, river bank
- particular city, lane, café

Such places are constantly remembered and used as a point of reference as they are timeless and give perspective to situations.

Waikiki Beach, Hawaii
- supposedly the most famous beach in the world
- there are no coconuts on their coconut trees because they have all been emasculated to keep beach visitors safe
- this is symbolic of the separation/change of the beach from Hawaiian traditional life before mass tourism
- the beach used to be a place of recreation for the Hawaiian royalty and where fisherman would leave in their boats

How should a beach best be understood or appreciated (as space or place, like an ethnographic study)?
- historically, geographically, geologically.. in relation to other beaches
- virtually as an aesthetic experience distanecd from emotional responces
- pragmatically as an area to collect food, shelter materials or as a tourist destination
- politically: are locals allowed full access or has land be taken and made private property?
- phenomenologically - how is it experienced physically/bodily?
- experience as the instigator of knowledge?
- in terms of its particular relationship with certain people

Basso's study on the Apache in Arizona
- people are never alone in places because they carry the knowledge of other people with them
- "when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the mind may lead is anybody's guess" p.55
- Apache strongly associate land with a sense of themselves for the land stores wisdom
- story of 'old man owl': Basso overhears a conversation between t3 cattle herders and Talbot Paxton (who's been on a binge for the past three weeks) that confuses him
"So! You've returned from Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills!"
"So! You've smelled enough burning piss!"
Talbot replies, "For a while I couldn't see."
- eventually Basso finds out the story of Old Man Owl who runs up and down between two hills fruitlessly trying to burn down trees while the fires a re put out by a woman peeing from above, which he thinks is rain because he cannot see her
- there are many stories scattered about the landscape involving ancestors, past relatives and their activities

Tourism vs Pilgrimage
- conventional understanding: superficiality vs profundity (insight)

Tourism: The Sacred Journey, Graburn as key theorist, theoretical inspirations:
- Durkheim (1912): notion of the sacred-nonordinary experience
- Leach (1961): sacred-profane alternations characteristic of important periods of social life
- Mauss (1898): alternation between sacred and profane is key to understanding rituals of sacralisation (leaving the ordinary) that elevates participants. Marvellous things happen.

Tourism and Time
- tourism as the 'modern equivalent for secular societies to the annual and lifelong sequences of festivals for more traidional God-fearing societies' (Graburn 1989: 25)
- contrast between ordinary/compulsory state at home vs nonordinary/voluntary away from

Criticisms of The Sacred Journey
- is the idea of sacred being contested?
- is there something missing from our experience as either tourists or travellers?
- or the way we create an identity being connected to a place through being 'travellers'?
- are there no political issues?
- status of tourist and pilgrim depends on where you stand

Ethnographic case example of how pilgrims and tourists interact in the same place
- El Rocio - Andalusian pilgrimage in Spain (according to Crain)
- cult to the Virgin Mary, 13th century
- 78 brotherhoods converge on El Rocio, 7-8 days
- great festivities at the shrine: singing, dancing, eating, meeting old friends
- climax: appearance of the Virgin idol from the shrine
- great number of tourist spectators, pilgrims and film crews
- exotic Spain: popular for growing middle class (signifier of distinction) and transnational interest foreign traditions

How to keep the 'sacredness' under the threat of consumer capitalism
- 'outsiders' are labelled 'yupeez', even those who may be returnees from overseas and urbanites with properties in villages
- relates to label of 'yuppies' in America on Young Urban Professionals that were mostly hedonistic and materialistic because they wanted to show off their status/wealth
- emphasis on the pilgrimage as a religious ritual and should not be an acitivity where tourists are invited to spectate or take part
- people that do no participate in the proper way get teased
- focus is on the spiritual experience, and locals' connection with the land/region

Place, Pilgrimage and Power (Mines)
- tourism and pilgrimage are privileges often denied to many
- do we account for those that have no place at all or very little sense of belonging? e.g. homeless, orphans, seniors in retirement/nursing homes
-how do people fight to belong and have a claim on a place?

Ultimate and imaginary tourism
- other areas of possible: space travel, ultimate tourism (e.g. climbing great mountains)
- utopic imaginary worlds: LAN computer games, Second Life

Ritual and Personal Transitions

- blurred boundaries between ritual and theatre
- rituals as transformations from within a group

A definition of ritual
"a performance, planned or improvised, that effects a transition from everyday to an alternative context within which the everyday is transformed" - Alexander 1997: 139, in Bowie p.140

Ritual as a dominant/defining feature of religion?

Ritual of theatre? efficacy vs entertainment
- see Schechner 1994: 120 and Bowie p.146
- Kacek (monkey) dance of Bali originally part of religious ritual that induces trance/exorcism, reworked in the 1920s around the myth of Ramayana, and in 1970s categories of sacred ritual or performance influenced what could officially be shown to tourists and what should be saved  (Picard 1990)

Van Gennep
- it should be said that when a person moves from one space to another, the transition transforms their usualy patterns - of movement and understanding
- like stepping into a movie theater and allowing yourself to believe in the world the story is set

Turner on the installation of King Kanongesha
- he undertook rituals to remind him that the people wanted him to be king (he was chosen to take up the position) and to ensure that he would empathise with them: preparing him for the obligations of the role
- sexlessness and anonymity
- servile posture
- ordeals and humiliations

Imbalu - male circumcision initiation ritual practised by the Bagisu in Uganda
- tradition carried on because of belief that uncircumcised men will be the cause of the demise of the people
- during the initiation, men must not show that they are in pain (in full view of the public, which includes friends and family giving encouragement) otherwise they shall dishonour themselves and the family

Liminality and Communitas
- film The Terminal, based on the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport because he was not allowed to enter France proper and could not leave to go elsewhere
- liminality - autonomy, anti-structure, creative; likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisiblity, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness (Turner 1991: 95)
- communitas - 'emerges where structure is not'; egalitarian bonds, unstructured, celebrates human relatedness

Female initiation
- degrees of coercion and control exercised upon the initiates is great
- single/individual initiation rather than in groups means experience is not shared and sense of communitas is then absent; isolated
- dressing and decoration, rather than stripping
- attitude/emphasis to acitivities rather than context
- political implications: who initiates the women?
- health factors differ between male and female circumcisions
- less need in practice to humble the ritual or to make the females civilised (part of the society, as boys are regarded as proper men with rights after they undergo initiation)
- Ellen Grunbaum points out that protests from the West of foreign practices results in backlash because the context is not properly understood by those not immersed in the societal values, but there is some change amongst the society's attitudes parallel to changes in economy and politics

Romanticising initiation
- ayahuasca vine has hallucinogenic properties, and to the Santa Daime following the preparation of this (drug) is itself a ritual
- when documenting, the focus is on the pain and physical transformation, rather than indigenous psychology and looking for the reason they undergo such pain
- is there a need for initiation rituals in the West where personal development is separated from responsibility and commitment?

Voluntary Starvation

- apart from not eating because they suffer from a condition that makes it difficult for them to do so
- fasting as a detox (toxins are flushed out because the body needn't direct great amounts of energy to digestion)
- reasoned to help achieve enlightenment, clear headedness and purity

Female saints in the 1600s - see http://www.fastingresearch.org/fasting/saints.cfm to supplement notes
- eating as making the body impure
- after fasting they could do miraculous things with their body, e.g. lactate spontaneously
- preparation of food as a woman's main domestic duty, and detaining from eating was the only choice available to them; this excused them from chores

Evolutionary bases of anorexic behaviour
- ability to tolerate starvation and so have the energy to flee from famine
- may explain why anorexics can survive for long periods of time with little or no food and maintain high energy levels (a mixture of hyperactivity and optimistic outlook)
- anorexia occurs among wild animals also, thus it is not merely a result of the human psyche
- but these notes do not explain why teenage girls and young women are more often affected than males and menopausal women

Gendered food habitus in Western, industrial societies
- stereotypically women are more reserved than men when eating
- she will eat less and make little noise, and finish with a cleaner plate
- while he may shovel in food as he speaks and guffaws from deep i nthe belly
- but it's not a given that men need to eat more although of course the average man tends to be bigger than the average woman; activity dictates calorific needs
- mothers instinctually give their children more food if/when they ask for more

Anorexia nervosa - causes 150-2000 women to die each year
- media images and advertising: Naomi Wolf found that average model weighss 20% less than compared to average woman
- media portraying social trends
- diet and cosmetic surgery industries allowing such images to be continuously used and displayed; playing on insecurities

Susan Bordo: late capitalist consumer culture
- different institutions monitor the ideals, which include:
- control over the body; masterinf internal drives and desires
- avoiding hedonistic or gluttonous activities
- the aim is to not merely become thin, but also not flabby - tight, solid, somewhat like a bodybuilder, ene though loose skin is bound to be flabby (e.g. above the elbow)
- on the other hand, being fat or having fat relatives shows that they are wealthy: that they have the wealth to feed these people
- however this image was broken down in Western society with the rise in the 'fat cat' image; wealth should be kept reserved

Conflicts between production and consumption
- follow Protestant work ethic; delay gratification/luxury to allow for prosperity
- must spend to keep the economy going: enough demand, enough jobs

Why women and why food?
- instinct to nurture and be good mothers
- associations between femininity and the body
- it is possible to become thin enough to look pre-pubescent and even stop menstruating; this allows for an androgenous identity

Food Definitions and Taboos

Food vs. non-food
- classification is based on more than edibility (whether a person can ingest the substance)
- one culture's delicacy may be another's abomination
- manioc/tapioca/cassava - starchy tuber, low fat; leaves considered a delicacy in Indonesia but the vegetable is regarded as a poor man's food in other places, and in S. America (where it was first cultivated) it is not even thought to be edible

Disgust - word originated from term meaning to empty the digestive tracts
- a concept learned
- ideas of what is disgusting change over time
- a toddler will have no food preferences but will become picky within a few years if they have not been introduced to a wide range of food
- organs of animals as meat has become increasingly unpopular in the last few decades
- in Western cuisine meat tends to be cooked in savoury dishes but may be complemented by fruit in Middle Eastern foods

Food avoidances - difficult to explain/reason
- some may be based on sanitation and toxicity
- natives of Tazmania were very shocked to find that European explorers would eat fish
- archaeologists found that there had been outbreaks of fish poison due to a change in the fishes' diet that caused them to produce toxins; so fish was avoided and the reasons for doing so had been forgotten within a few generations because it was so ingrained
- some may be explained by symbolic logic systems - Mary Douglas
- to the Ulu Trengganu in Malaysia, foods that are bisa will enhance underlying problems
- the list of such fish is far longer than that of the fish the people would eat, but further inspection reveals that the avoided fish are brightly coloured or spiked to ward off predators while there is greater abundance of the safe fish (also making them easier to catch)

Humoral classifications
- derives from Greek and Arabic medicinal conceptions to do with balance of fluids and properties of the body: hot and cold dichotomy, and proscriptions depend on bodily states
- Holly Matthews, research in Latin America: if a food eaten by a person suffering from fever cures them it would be classified as a cold food, but this may not work for everyone
- the guidelines are not expected to be followed by everyone: when healthy and well they may not be watched as closely as person's already unbalanced and do not want their condition to worsen

Food taboos - failure to adhere to these may lead to a punishment as severe as ostracism
- kindness to particular animals, perhaps to allow populations to thrive or case of cattle's sacred status
- untrue that some dietary laws prohibit the eating of pigs because they were difficult to raise in the arid Middle East where the laws originated because neighbouring Christian communities were successful at raising pigs; instead it is because they do not fit into categories since they are cloven-hoofed but do not chew cud as other cloven-hoofed mammals do

Cannibalism
Survival
- for example, as illustrated by the film Alive of a plane crash in the Andes and people were stranded with limited resources, so eventually they had to eat those that did not survive

Autocannibalism - eating parts of yourself
- not strictly whole parts, e.g. limbs, but includes chewing on hair and eating bogies
- eating the placenta came about with home birth movement: most of the followers of this movement were vegetarians and did not want to see this meat go to waste after fulfilling its purpose
- during childbirth the mother may lost lots of blood, so eating this iron-rich substance may aid her recovery

Psychopathological - documented cases of individuals' activities
- a man advertised an invitation for people to be eaten for dinner

Innocent - being unaware of eating humans
- for example, the fillings of the pies in Sweeney Todd

Endocannibalism - eating people within your own group
- for example, to allow the people to remain together even after death

Exocannibalism - getting people from outside your group specifically to eat
- Errans (1979), institutional cannibalism made false and was based on untrustable sources
- perhaps a societal custome that is not necessarily followed by all members
- malicious rumours (exaggerated and extended to far flung societies) to justify colonialism and other horrid acts: allowing people to act against them
- eating killed enemies as a sign of disrespect: likening them to animals

Windigo (native North American) myth
- people that develop a taste for human flesh that is insatiable to the extent that they may chew their lips  in hope of satisfying the desperate need

Kuru - degenerative neurological disorder = brain disease
- epidemic in PNG
- tended to effect women
- gastro-politics of funeral ritual endocannibalism where women would get the brain where the prion was effected

Social Meanings of Food and Eating

Gastro-politics
- relates to preparation, cooking and serving of food
- operates everyday in households all over the world
- also seen in community/religious rituals and as a form of political protest

Gastro-politics of brahman Hindu households
- elaborate unwritten (social) rules; maintains rank
- women cook for men, children and themselves in that order of priority
- they would also serve and through this role show preference, make statements, e.g. by keeping the best cuts of meat for their own children
- households may be extended beyond nuclear family

Typically women cook for the household/family. Although there are cases where the man of the household would do the cooking if the woman is menstruating for it is believed that she may contaminate the others if she handles food.

Argoba, Ethiopia
- it is so important for the man in the relationship to eat at home and for the wife to cook their meals that if she didn't she would be publicly ridiculed. Also, if the man doesn't come home for dinner he too would be publicly humiliated
- this means that their domestic problems are publicly shared
- people mostly follow vegetarian, grain-based diet out of economic choice
- serving guests meat (usually chicken) indicates a wish for a better relationship within the party

According to Anna Waldstein's research in a rural area of Mexico
- women would do all the food preparation
- when everyone was called into the kitchen for mealtime the men and guests sit at the table while the women of the household sat around the cooking fire

Consider the politics of seating arrangements at feasts
- a separate table for the more important/honoured guests at a position for all to see
- a children's table
- the table at which the married couple and their parents sit
- sitting to the left or right of someone at the head of the table

Food can be eaten or acquired in ways that protest against global capitalism and oppression
- movement of punks in Seattle that prefer to erat raw, locally produced food (esp. grown by themselves or associates) rather than that which is industrially mass produced. Food that has been thrown out (or stolen) is acceptable because it reduces waste and does not fuel the industrial machines
- ital food (derived from the phrase 'vital food') is natural, pure and clean food: for a Rastafarian it means no salt, no chemicals, no flesh, no blood, no alcohol, no cigarettes and no drugs (herbs are not considered drugs)
- Rastafarian dietary laws are similar to the laws followed by Jews in Leviticus 11: Fish must be less than a foot long, no shell fish or fish without scales, pork is especially condemned
- it is so important to not put the wrong thing in your body that some Rastafarians never cook in aluminum pots as it is said to leave traces of metal in the food that can get in your body, and so cooking in a clay pot is popular among Rastafarians

Food and Identity
- people are often identified by what they eat
- many native Americans identify themselves as people of corn (their original staple)
- eating with others creates a sense of solidarity and shared identity
- sharing of limited resources amongst relations deemed to have personal importance
- sharing food also means that a group of people are fuelled and nutritioned by the same substances
- the way a food is prepared may also be a marker of identity; for example, the people neighbouring the Argoba society also grow the same staple grains and to differentiate their food the Argoba specialise in stews
- the tortilla is Mexican

Seder meals: Jewish ceremonial dinner held on the first night of Passover
- begins with ceremonial read of the tale of Passover
- ritual/symbolic foods on display, not for eating
- bitter herb symbolises the hardship of slavery
- lamb/chicken bone symbolises the destruction of temples
- egg symbolises mourning
- unleavened bread shows how they had to flee so suddenly they could not wait for their bread to rise

Food habits and preferences

Lactose intolerance
lactose - a sugar in milk
lactase - enzyme that breaks down lactose

Babies will have the enzyme needed to digest their mother's milk and this capability is only maintained if they continue to drink milk after weaning, otherwise the body stops producing lactase thereby making the person lactose intolerant.
- herding culture and traditions of consuming milk discourages development of bodily intolerance to lactose

Are humans better off with vegetarian diets?
- ethics of killing animals tends to have greater prominence in the reasoning of the choice than dietary benefits
- more efficient to produce cropes to eat than for animal feed
- but then will our diets revert to being low quality and high in volume?

Craving what your body needs
- for fruit after binge drinking
- for calcium-rich foods when pregnant
- for sugar or caffeine when tired

The Evolution of Human Dietary Behaviour

General primate diet
- generalist, omnivorous: herbivory, frugivory, minimal carnivory (usu. of insects)
- the tarsier is the only totally carnivorous primate: living entirely off of insects

In comparison to many other mammals, primates are adapted to be sustained by a diet of relatively high quality foods. But there is still a continuum even within primates:
- from low quality, high volume diets
-- where the nutritive challenges include the abundance of phytochemicals (chemical compounds naturally occurring in plants but are not nutritive) and structural carbohydrates (e.g. cellulose and lignin)
-- of course the digestive physiology adapts to the diet; for example, the colobus monkey's stomach has an extra lobe: alkaline forestomach contains cellulolytic bacteria
- to high quality, low volume diets consisting of nutrient dense insects and fruit, which are required for shorter digestive systems (GI tracts) and fewer mechanisms to break down fibrous foods as demonstrated by the vervet monkey
-- and nutritive challenges to this lifestyle includes seasonality of food abundance and patchy distribution leading to high energy expenditure

Human Digestive Physiology
- relatively small digestive tract overall but with relatively large small intestine (that is 56% of total tract, compared to 14-29% in other apes)
- the facts of the size relativity suggests that the human gut is adapted to rich, high quality (readily digestible) foods, while other apes, mostly herbivores, have great large intestines and short small intestines due to the need for space to break down cellulose
- strong correlation between HQ-LV diet and high brain size:body weight ratio because high quality diet allows for great energy for neural development, increasing cognitive abilities and better understanding of food acquisition, which then further allows for diet quality to increase

Early hominids had relatively high brain size:body weight ratio
- Homo hablis (2.1 - 1.7 mya) 509-810ml
- Homo erectus (1.8-0.2 mya) 750-1250ml
- modern humans (100kya - present) avg. 1350ml
- hallmarks of human evolutionary theory: expansion of brain and reduction of dentition

Human Nutrition

Protein - building blocks
- tissue production and maintenance
- made of amino acids: there are 20 types, and only 10 can be produced by the human body while the remaining 10 must be acquired through the diet because failure to do so results in degradation of the body's proteins (e.g. muscles) in order to obtain all required amino acids

Carbohydrates - energy source for bodily functions
- immediate energy needs met first and excess  is converted and stored as fat
- dietary sources: simple (sugars) and complex (starches)

Vitamins - necessary for bodily functions
- malnutrition: deficiency of niacin leads to pellagra, while deficiency of vitamin C leads to scurvy
- there are two kinds of vitamins: water soluble and fat soluble
- water soluble vitamins need to be replenished daily as they dissolve in water and excess/unused amounts are flushed out through urine, e.g. B-complex vitamins and vitamin C
- fat soluble vitamins can be stored in fat and liver cells and overdose is possible (e.g. pregnant women are advised against eating liver for obtaining high amounts of vitamin A correlates with birth defects)

Minerals - inorganic elements
- found in rocks and soil, absorbed by plants as they grow and through these plants we obtain minerals
- without minerals the body would be unable to:
-- build new tissues
-- contract muscles
-- process nerve reactions
-- clot blood
-- keep your body pH neutral
-- regulate body processes
-- release energy from food

Dihydrogen monoxide - humans are 60-75% water and it is important for:
- transporting nutrients
- lubrication
- shock absorbers in joints
- medium of metabolism
- regulation of body temperature

Taste

Flavour is a combination of taste, smell, texture, sight and physical characteristics. A sense of taste is neurological feedback on chemical properties of a substance. Prior to ingestion, it is a screening process to check whether the food is edible, ripe, or toxic. This ability for taste is adaptive.

Are taste preferences linked to food selection?
- both sweet and salty are innate/natural and universal
- there is widespread dislike for bitter and sour flavours
- umami is universal but not well-known

Universal elements of human relationship with food
- omnivorous diets
- foodstuffs may require preparation (e.g. nuts cracked, animals killed) (even before cooking) in order to transform it into being truly edible
- elaborate food system, including social taboos on top of personal preferences

Biocultural evolution of food systems
"Interrelationship of biological and social forces in shaping human food use and nutritional status of individuals and populations." Pelto et al 2000

Gellner (1983) Nations and Nationalism

Nationalism: a political principle which holds that the state (political formation) and the nation (people) should be congruent; i.e. maps directly on to the other, occupies the same space

- for every nation (people) there should be a state

- he was not satisfied by Weber's definition of the state (as having the monopoly on exercising violence), as plenty of quasi-legitimate violence is carried out: division of labour, institutions specifically concerned with keeping social order (wearing uniforms/badges of authority so that others may not impersonate these roles)

Examples of nations ruled by non-nationals

- Netherlands under Spanish rule in 17th century: Philip II of Spain, most famous Dutch paintings found in Madrid

- George I was from Bavaria, did not learn to spleak English, spoke broken Latin to his Parliament

Not all peoples have a state

- e.g. Australian aboriginal peoples, although they have been encapsulated

- not necessary for all peoples to have a state, because, say, they may be an acepahlous society and the position of ruler is foreign to their social structures

- EU as a super state

Most nation state boundaries were made after the 18th century

- before then, empires were the dominant force; Roman empire and Egypt as ancient states

- Roman empire spanned from N. Africa to Middle East, to Hadrian's Wall - eventually to break up for the Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian (etc.) empires

Gellner cont'd - agro-literate empires

- when most of the population was illiterate, the only language used by the educated scribes was that of the ruling class, not rural dialects

- sheep, cows and pigs were kept on the farms by the common Anglo-Saxon man, whereas mutton, beef and pork were on the tables of the French/Norman aristocrats (this is how the names for these objects have come about)

- scribes were often clergymen; forbidden to marry so that they may be recruited without any familial ties

- loyalty to the ruler, not to the common person (esp. wife and children); similarly:

- all men that lived within the Chinese Imperial City, but the emperor, were castrated so that they could not reproduce Mandarins

- first man below Roman emperor in Britain, Nero, was his slave - also castrated

Eventually countries were formed by separating from empire powers after wars of liberation

- the nation-state causes nationalism when they go through an industrial revolution - bureaucratic nationalism and homogenisation

- transferable skills, general level of education achieved by exo-socialisation: the state makes a certain educational system compulsory - rather than children learning specialised knowledge and skills

- a state (power) cannot be effective if not all speak the same language - dictionaries direct the study of language vocabulary and use

- printing press allows people all over the nation to share ideas, esp. as it made written word cheaper to distribute and so leading to the growth in literacy

- standardised measuring units makes markets fair

- standard coinage and currency, with a representation of the ruler

Country bumpkins with their own language, or merely dialect, move to the industrialised towns in search of work and often found it difficult to communicate in the town

- so they must learn the local language

- but their dialect is kept alive in folk songs: nostalgic for the rural towns they had come from and made miserable by the conditions of the new town:

-- solidarity: banding together of people in the same situation, but not necessarily of the same ethnicity, tho may include folk from neighbouring rural backgrounds

--  nationalism - some aggrevaion towards the oppression by the ruling class

Criticisms of Gellner's theory

- model is too materialist and mechanical - too simple?

-- could be credited to him being an anti-communist and an expert on communism?

- inflexible - remove one component and the theory is defied

- people are not fully mobile: must cosider social constrictions (bonds and ties), wealth and opportunity restrictions as factors

- Greece - disparate communities came together without Greece going through an industrial revolution

-- justification for conscription is to turn men into Greeks, not preparation for conflict

- might nationalism have been a catalyst to industrialisation instead?

- Anthony Smith - Gellner's point was not that there weren't culture clusters that rose to nationalism but the congruence of nation and state

- Connor - patriotism vs nationalism, similar but difference should be noted; ethnonationalism

- 'ethnicity' was not a alive as a concept during the time that Gellner speaks of (postcolonialisation era) but he did not ignore it as it appears in his diagram

- Gellner does not mention particular events to exmplify his model/theory, but then anth could be said to be a generalising science (as well as being transdisciplinary)

Agriculture and the Rise of the State

Farmers' Views

- there was a time before agriculture when people gathered their food from the wild

- not farming is seen as primitive, wild and uncivilised; lawless

- but non-farmers did not not farm because of ignorance

- a god or godess was needed to teach farming and other arts and sciences, e.g. Demter in ancient Greek myth

- so farmers though themselves to be superior to hunter-gatherers

Primitive Affluence - Sahlins (1972) Stone Age Economics

- hunter-gatherer societies achieve affluence by desiring little more than they need and actually meeting them with what is available to them

- contemporary dilemma: man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his mean are limited

- separate roads to influence; the former by desiring little and the latter by producing much

- knowledge and expertise enables them to minimise the amount of time procuring food - "affluence without abundance"

- a surplus would produce problems in storage and transport

- lack of surplus also demonstrates that they trust their environment will continuously provide for them

- foraging only for immediate needs among plentiful resources means that hunter-gatherers are able to increase their leisure time

Migrations

- arrived in Europe 40,000 years ago with modern skeletons and superior weapons

- advanced cultural traits, but within a few thousand years there were no more Neanderthals

- there is little evidence of hybridisation between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons

- great leap forward - as people moved out of Africa into new environments they came and adapted the environment

Origins of Agriculture

Edward Hahn (1896; 1906) proposed that animals were domesticated for religious reasons such as ritual sacrifices

- cattle in connection with lunar goddess cult as curving horns were seen to symbolise the crescent moon

- in some places today cattle hold special statuses: holy in India, bull fighting in Spain, cattle complex African nomads

Vere Gordon Childe: domestication by crowding or propinquity theory

- in N. Africa/near East grasslands were drying up, so herd animals and humans had to withdraw to river banks and oases = more in contact with one another

- three phases development: hunter, herder, cultivator

Neolithic revolution: shift from hunting to food production, probably the most important transformation of human adaptation since controlling fire

Carl O. Sauer (1952) Agricultural Origins and Dispersal

- agriculturalists were sedentary folk

- people living in the shadow of famine do not have the means or time to discover and develop a different food supply

- so farming must have been conceptualised before it was practised

- hearths of domesticaions are to be sought in areas of marked diversity of plants and animals - not in valleys prone to periodic flooding

- origin in woodlands - open spaces for planting by deadening trees: they could not dig or sod or eradicate vigorous stoloniferous grasses

- inventors of agriculture had special skills in other areas that pre-disposed them to experiment

Esther Boserup - Agriculture as extension of gathering

- dynamic analysis embracing  all types of primitive agriculture upended the assumption dating back to Malthus: that agricultural methods determine the food supply and therefore determines the population (i.e. when the food supply is not sufficient to feed the population, the extra people will have to die)

- Boserup inverts this and argues that population determines agricultural methods - "necessity is the mother of invention"

- in times of pressure, people will find ways to increase the production of food by increasing workforce, machinery, fertilisers.. input

- increasing energy inputs results in a decrease of output per amount of energy put into the system

- so switch from meat based to vegetarian diet and so follows farming culture: cultivation of staple foods

Feast and Famine

- the cycle of deprivation and plenty and the meaning of festivities

- changes in religion, from shaman to priesthood, and priests controls seasons of planting

- cities as centres of redistribution of food

Plant Genetics - according to geneticists Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf

- food production spreads from Fertile Crescent in 8000BC to Greece and Indian subcontinent 6500BC, Egypt 6000BC, Central Europe 5400BC, southern Spain 5200BC

- exchange or migration of by independent domestication?

- wild ancestors of main crops do not occur in Egypt so they must have been imported

- domestics can be traced to one variety

- close relatives were not cultivated in Western Eurasia

- domestication of single cariety does not take place in several locations

The Axis

- developments in food cultivation and production tended to spread along east-west axis

- localities located along an east-west axis are located on the same latitude; this means that they share the same day length and seasonal variation

- they also tend to share similar diseases, temperature, rainfall and habitats; whereas there are considerable differences in climate along north-south axis

- Fertile Crescent package spread across from Eurasia, but it came to a stop in north Africa and did not cross the Sahara or Serengeti plains until the Bantu migrations; livestock and key crops reached souther Africa around 1200AD

Consequences of agricultural/sedentary life

- infectious diseases - some of the most devestating killers in history - have evolved from diseases of animals, due to close contact, and now the microbes that cause these diseases are confined to humans (living off the host, so to speak)

- from cattle we have got measles, TB and smallpox

- flu from pigs and ducks

- pertussis from pigs and dogs

- malaria from birds, esp ducks and chickens

- crowd dieases need sizeable populations to sustain themselves as they spread by passing person to person, e.g. measles needs a population of half million

- population of sedentary farmers 10-100x that of hunter-gatherers

- hunter-gatherers shift camp frequently leaving behind their excrement (with accumulated microbes and worm larvae)

- being sedentary, farmers live amongst their own sewage

- the changes in the environment created conditions that facilitate the spread of diseases

Theories to explain state formation

- hydraulic theory: state authority to construct and manage the irrigation systems

- overpopulation: rising populations give rise to greater complexity and demands better organisation

- trade: organisation and tax

- ecosystem: state arises as an efficient adaptation to the environment

- circumscription: idea that state arises where farmland is limited, e.g. Nile valley, Mesoamerica, Yellow River valley (China), Indus River valley, Mesopotamia

State formation in Egypt

- geography, technology of food production and logic of exploitation

- main function of the state is to transfer wealth from the farmers to the unproductive aristocracy

- agriculture created food surplus; increase in food production per square hectare, per worker

- labour surplus: during flood season no agricultural tasks weere required, so labour was mobilised for the construction of pyramids

- control was relatively easy as agriculture was only possible in a narrow band along the river

- where population density was high there was a complete transformation/transition to agriculture, but where it was low foraging persisted (althoug it was less rewarding)

- incipient states extended their control over unorganised parts of the Nile

- demands for grain and labour forced foragers to shift to farming

Functionalist explanations for social stratification

- elite arises by controlling trade and maintains managerial function (also links with hydraulic theory)

- but this managerial role does not explain hereditary nature of elites

- what needs to be explained is how the can stay in power and privilege even though their role is against the interest of the mass population

Bronze Age Capital Intensification (Europe)

- ploughs; horses domesticated for traction; amount of land farmer can till increases; requires and investment, and also demarcation of land owner ship.. this allowed for state formation

- Mediterranean poly-culture (multiple crops grown in a single area, akin to swidden) - vines take 3 years before bearing fruit, olive trees 15 but 20 to become fully productive and lasts for centuries

- "constitutes a capital intensification of subsistence"

- irrigation in the form of dams, ditches and terraces evident around the Med (as Childe notes) marks considerable investment

- offshore fishing - boats up to 15m long found

Non-fuctionalist explanation

- all these technologies (above) are within the grasp of households that band together

- benefits achieved by preparatory labour can be shared

- this transfers the problem of security from the material to the social field; thus reducing the opportunity for fission

- if protector exacts excessive rents choices are: to submit or leave investment to find another protector (conditions tend to favour the ruling class)

Three propositions

- capital intensificaiton of agriculture preceded social stratification

- the more intense and higher the investment, the more stratified the society: the establishment of stratification, precedes the higher order management tasks (i,e, construction of temples and urban centres)

- elites became warrior elites: to demonstrate their status and perhaps to maintain control

Goodbye Lenin, hello world system

Glasnost - 'openness'

- greater government transparency, less censorship, greater flow of information

- pre-internet, information flows were easy to control

Perestoika - 'restructuring'

- economic reform: decentralisation, dismantling of bureaucraacy and providing businesses with incentives that reward individual enterprise or labour (i.e; move towards market economy)

Decolonisation but colonially drawn borders remained

- newly independent African states were poor (because their labour was paid poorly/unfairly by the colonial businesses) and needed funding for infrastructure etc

- America and Soviet Union came along courting these countries offering (conflicting?) help

Decollectivisation

- not necessarily the same as converting back to private property..
- were collectives converting back into private property or was private propert being invented (appearing for the first time?)

- how to make restitution for non-land contributions?

- many former collevtive farms became quasi-collecive co-operatives

Economic anth was then revitalised just as NRTs and adoption shook things up for kinship studies

Industrialised area in former East Berlin became useless after decollectivisation - no one wanted to claim it as their peoperty so artists took up the area and set up cheap, beautiful bars with beer gardens that make just enough to carry on

The World System and Globalisation

Modernisation theory 1960s

- Western countries are the most developed, others (mainly former colonies) are on the same trajectory as the West and will eventually 'catch up'

- this process of development invariably moves from 'tradition' to 'modernity'

- Third World countries have fallen behind on this trajectory and need to be directed to become more advanced

Raul Prebisch - Argentine economist

- research in 1950s demonstrated that as the wealth of rich nations increased, the wealth of poor nations decreased - correllation in an inverse relationship

- his findings were developed by others into the dependency theory where poor nations
provide natural resources, cheap labour and a market for obsolete technology to rich nations that perpetuate the state of dependency through a range of policies, legal mechanisms and initiatives

Capitalism and other subsistence strategies

Property is... (for example)

- something people inherit

- something people protect because they believe it is worth protecting

- things a person has produced

- the cultivation of a land

- a relationship between people as mediated by objects

Some recipes for property

John Locke

- property = nature + labour: cultivation, agriculture

- world has limited potential for property claims

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

- property = nature + occupancy

- contingency, historical process..

Marx

- property = nature + labour + work + social org (otherwise known as 'relations of production')

- property assessed according to who controls production

- the process by which people lose ownership is inevitable

Proudhon

- property = theft

- items/goods cannot be disassociated from the people the cultivated/created/produced it, no matter how long they have been circulating in the market; thus calling it your own would be theft

Mode of production - Eric Wolf

'A specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labour is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skill, org., and knowledge'

Marxist terminology

- base: how people make their living, the material means by which people produce their livelihood (e.g. selling their labour, hunting and gathering, horticulture..)

- super structure: the social org, ethos, ideology, morals that inform how people think about the base; what makes people want to work

base: hunter-gatherer; superstructure:

- weak social distinctions, somewhat egalitarian

- kinship based

- circulation of goods through sharing (is this different to exchange?)

- small surplus expended at the will of the surplus generator

(property: personal items, cannot own land, but claim territory and rights to certain areas)

base: feudalism (leading to capitalism); superstructure:

- alienation: produce is circulated in the market without any connection to the producer

- strong social distinctions, e.g. class or caste

- individual-based or nuclear family oriented

- large surplus appropriated by dominant roles

Palm for oil

- mono-crop agriculture

- grown all over SE. A.

- cash crop for lowlands

- saps nutrients form soil; so soil would either need to be heavily fertilised or more land made clear to continue growing palm trees

- requires constant care and attention

Two ways of reckoning value

- use value: valuing something by its usefulness, function, purpose (prominent in subsistence economies)

- exchange value: price and cost dependent on market economy (supply and demand) and symbolic associations with other activities; correllates with alienation (the more hands it has to pass through, the greater the cost to allow for profit)

Domestic mode of production

- Marshall Sahlins 1960s Stone Age Economics

- non-market economies seem to under-produce (no surplus means no profit) but they only expend enough labour to meet their subsistence needs and trades to support subsistence activities

- surplus leads to waste

Carrying capacity

- School of Forest Resources and Conservation, Uni of Florida: 'The maximum number of individuals of a given species that a site can support during the most unfavourable time of year, without causing deterioration of the site'

People have unlimited wants

- underlying assumption in classical economics

- capitalism creates scarcity

4 factors in domestic modes of production

- small labour force differentiated primarily by sex

- simple technologies

- finite production objectives

- other activities besides subsistence count as 'work'

in Papua New Guinea

- people working on palm plantations may seem lazy because they only work (piecework) when they want to

- take time off for weddings, funerals etc

- must also spend time working on their gardens to grow food (horticulture)

- work on a plantation is unskilled, brings in money for things that must be bought (cannot be made by themselves), e.g. schooling and clothes

Alexander Chayanov - Russian economist (and sci-fi writer)

- On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic systems (translated into English by Sahlins 1966)

- intensity of labour in a system of domestic production for use varies inversely with the relative working capacity of the producing unit

- the more resources available, the more they would be underused