Chapter 8

Question 1

Q: What is unfree labour?

Answer 1

A: An all-encompassing term for the formalized coercion of men, women, and children (through need or violence) to provide their labour. Such labour can range from migrant farm work to sex slavery to the use of children as soldiers.

Question 2

Q: What is economy?

Answer 2

A: The culturally specific processes used by members of a society to provide themselves with material resources.

Question 3

Q: What is economic anthropology?

Answer 3

A: “The part of the discipline [of anthropology] that debates issues of human nature that relate directly to the decisions od daily life and making a living”

Question 4

Q: What is scarcity?

Answer 4

A: A condition under which it is assumed that resources (e.g., money) will never be plentiful enough for people to obtain all goods or services they desire.

Question 5

Q: What are institutions?

Answer 5

A: Stable and enduring cultural practices that organize social life.

Question 6

Q: What are subsistence strategies?

Answer 6

A: The patterns of production, distribution, and consumption that members of a society use to meet their basic material survival needs.

Question 7

Q: What are food collectors?

Answer 7

A: People who gather wild plant materials, fish, and/or hunt for food.

Question 8

Q: What are food producers?

Answer 8

A: People who depend on domesticated plants and/or animals for food.

Question 9

Q: What is extensive agriculture?

Answer 9

A: A form of cultivation that depends on a slash-and-burn (swidden) techniques, rainwater, human muscle power, and a few simple tools, such as digging sticks, hoes, and/or machetes.

Question 10

Q: What is what is intensive agriculture?

Answer 10

A: A form of cultivation that employs plows, draft animals, irrigation, and fertilizer to bring a large amount of land under cultivation at one time.

Question 11

Q: What is mechanized industrial agriculture?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Q: What is production?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Q: What is distribution?

Answer 13

A: The allocation of goods and services.

Question 14

Q: What is consumption?

Answer 14

A: Using up material goods necessary for human survival.

Question 15

Q: What is neoclassical economic theory?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Q: What are modes of exchange?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Q: What is reciprocity?

Answer 17

A: A mode of exchange in which individuals exchange goods and/or services (1) under the assumption that the exchanges will eventually balance out, (2) with the expectation of immediate balance, or (3) in the hope that at least one party will get something for nothing.

Question 18

Q: What is redistribution?

Answer 18

A: A mode of exchange in which a centralized social organization receives contributions from all members of the group and redistributes them in a way that provides for every member.

Question 19

Q: What is market exchange?

Answer 19

A: A mode of exchange in which the exchange of goods (trade) is calculated in terms of a multi-purpose medium of exchange and standard of value (money) and carried on by means of a supply-demand-price mechanism (the market).

Question 20

Q: What is labour?

Answer 20

A: The activity linking human social groups to the material world around them.

Question 21

Q: What is a mode of production?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Q: What are means of production?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Q: What are relations of production?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Q: What is ideology?

Answer 24

A: Those products of consciousness- such as morality, religion, and metaphysics- that purport to explain to people who they are and to justify the kinds of lives they lead.

Question 25

Q: What is cultural ecology?

Answer 25

A: The study of the ways in which human beings relate to one another and to their natural environment.

Question 26

Q: What is ecology?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Q: What is an ecozone?

Answer 27

A: The particular mixture of plant and animal species occupying any particular region of the earth.

Question 28

Q: What is ecotone?

Answer 28

A: A transition area between two different ecozones that displays characteristics of both ecozones.

Question 29

Q: What is an econiche?

Answer 29

A: The sum total of relations between a species and the plants and animals on which it relies for survival; theses relations define those places where a species is “at home.”

Question 30

Q: What is affluence?

Answer 30

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