Complex Societies (5) Flashcards
2 truths and a lie: which statement is false?
(1) Agriculture also has a joined relationship with pastoralism
(2) agriculture is the basis of power systems
(3) The importance of agriculture in provisioning societies
2
Where did urban societies first establish and when?
Palestine; 8000 years ago
What is the neolithic revolution?
The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible.
10,000 BCE
What did the establishment of agricultural states mean for societies?
-more settled, permanent, hierarchical, and populous societies
-But such populations are also more vulnerable to disease, war, disaster, and climate change
-Agrarian societies make people work: whether that be through slavery or surfdom
-More recently, David Graeder and David Wengrow have argued that growth of agriculture and complexity did NOT always lead to hierarchical authority (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
True or false? Complex does not always mean better.
True– moving away from these cultural evolutionary narratives
Describe the system of socio-political control over water resources in Bali.
Collective planting and irrigation schedules based on temples for the Hindu gods
Festival gatherings twice a year at the temples where decisions are made to ensure that the water is distributed fairly and that crop rotation between rice, vegetables, and fallow periods will help to control pests.
What were some of the social effects of the Green Revolution?
Agricutlural scientists developed genetic variations of wheat, rice, and corn and promoted to farmers throughout developing world
(1) Increased disparities between rich and poor
(2) Big winners were companies involved in selling chemical fertilizers and designer seeds
(3) Favour industrial agriculture over subsistence agriculture, foraging, or horticulture
(4) Increased scale and cost of farming
(5) Favoured wealthy landowners and global firms
(6) Reduced sustainability and mixed cropping
World hunger is not primarily a problem of food production, but also of food distribution and food sovereignty
According to Townsend, how did ecological anthropologists deal with larger units in complex societies?
Many anthropologists working in complex societies took small rural communities within them as their units of study.
Some did not. For example, Frederik Barth focused on the 500,000 people that lived in Swat State in Pakistan. He studied how each of the castes in Swat State occupied a different ecological niche.
How does Townsend define large societies?
Politically organized as states rather than bands, tribes, or chiefdoms and depend on intensive agriculture. They consciously reshape their environments to a far greater degree than small societies.
Who introduced the concept of ecological niche from biology to anthropology?
Frederik Barth
In biology, different niches are occupied by different species, whereas Barth applied it to different ethnic groups of the same species, Homo sapiens.
Who introduced the concept of ecosystem into anthropology?
Clifford Geertz in his research on swidden and sawah agriculture in Indonesia
Sawah: flooded paddy rice fields, irrigation systems
Swidden: slash and burn agriculture
Summarize Netting’s work in villages in the Swiss Alps (Törbel).
Netting continued to call what he was doing “cultural ecology”, in the tradition of Steward. His work shared an interest in equilibrium in ecosystems with the newer ecological anthropology of Rappaport and others. What was new was his addition of the historical dimension.
Slow changing society, high mortality and late marriage or celibacy controlled population growth, grain and later potatoes for staples in their diets
Who proposed the term political ecology and what does it mean?
Eric Wolf (also did his work in the Swiss Alps)
Cultural adaptation by considering other societies as part of the environment, as well as features of the biophysical environment such as climate and terrain.
What does Netting propose smallholders (small-scale farmers) do in the face of the increasing intensification of agriculture?
Adapt to changing population and market forces and that households have a variety of off-farm production strategies
What does Netting state is a feasible solution to the problems of resource exhaustion, pollution, and environmental degradation that so often accompany large-scale, energy-intensive agriculture?
Indigenous smallholder systems that show favourable energy input-output balance, achieved by the application of labour and management ratehr than large amounts of unrenewable energy
