Chapter 10 Economic Systems And Subsistence Anthropology 201

Front 1

scarcity

Back 1

The assumption that resources (for example, money) will never be plentiful enough for people to
obtain all the goods they desire.

Front 2

institutions

Back 2

Stable and enduring cultural practices that organize social life.

Front 3

economy

Back 3

The material-means provisioning process in cultural systems.

Front 4

subsistence strategies

Back 4

The patterns of production, distribution, and consumption that members of a
society employ to ensure the satisfaction of the basic material survival needs of humans.

Front 5

food collectors

Back 5

Those who gather, fish, or hunt for food.

Front 6

food producers

Back 6

Those who depend on domesticated plants or animals for food.

Front 7

extensive agriculture

Back 7

A form of cultivation based on the technique of clearing uncultivated land, burning
the brush, and planting the crops in the ash-enriched soil, which requires moving farm plots every few
years as the soil becomes exhausted.

Front 8

intensive agriculture

Back 8

A form of cultivation that employs plows, draft animals, irrigation, fertilizer, and
such to bring much land under cultivation at one time, to use it year after year, and to produce
significant crop surpluses.

Front 9

mechanized industrial agriculture

Back 9

Large-scale farming and animal husbandry that is highly dependent
on industrial methods of technology and production.

Front 10

production

Back 10

The transformation of nature’s raw materials into a form suitable for human use.

Front 11

distribution

Back 11

The allocation of goods and services.

Front 12

consumption

Back 12

The using up of material goods necessary for human survival.

Front 13

neoclassical economic theory

Back 13

A formal attempt to explain the workings of capitalist enterprise, with
particular attention to distribution.

Front 14

modes of exchange

Back 14

Patterns according to which distribution takes place: reciprocity, redistribution, and
market exchange.

Front 15

reciprocity

Back 15

The exchange of goods and services of equal value. Anthropologists distinguish three forms
of reciprocity: generalized, in which neither the time nor the value of the return are specified; balanced, in which a return of equal value is expected within a specified time limit; and negative, in
which parties to the exchange hope to get something for nothing.

Front 16

redistribution

Back 16

A mode of exchange that requires some form of centralized social organization to receive
economic contributions from all members of the group and to redistribute them in such a way that
every group member is provided for.

Front 17

market exchange

Back 17

The exchange of goods (trade) calculated in terms of a multipurpose medium of
exchange and standard of value (money) and carried on by means of a supply-demand-price
mechanism (the market).

Front 18

labor

Back 18

The activity linking human social groups to the material world around them; from the point of view
of Karl Marx, labor is therefore always social labor.

Front 19

mode of production

Back 19

A specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labor is
deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.

Front 20

means of production

Back 20

The tools, skills, organization, and knowledge used to extract energy from nature.

Front 21

relations of production

Back 21

The social relations linking the people who use a given means of production
within a particular mode of production.

Front 22

ideology

Back 22

Those products of consciousness—such as morality, religion, and metaphysics—that purport to
explain to people who they are and to justify to them the kind of lives they lead.

Front 23

ecology

Back 23

The study of the ways in which living species relate to one another and to their natural
environment.

Front 24

ecozone

Back 24

The particular mix of plant and animal species occupying any particular region of the earth.

Front 25

affluence

Back 25

The condition of having more than enough of whatever is required to satisfy consumption
needs.