Economic Anthropology Flashcards
According to Laurel Bossen, what are four important modifications onset by new discoveries to the standard hunter-provider (gendered) model?
- In many foraging societies, meat does not provide the dietary staple, nearing not even half off all nutrition
- When meat is less important in the diet, men may still hunt much but women are the main food providers.
- Sexual divisions of labor are often flexible and overlapping in both individual and cooperative efforts.
- In evaluations of subsistence contributions, concentration on food tends to oversimplify the complexity of sexual divisions of labor.
What has research shown regarding the prevalence of hunted meat as a dietary staple in forager societies?
25% or less of sampled foraging societies have hunting as a dietary staple.
What did Lee’s study of the !Kung San show about men and women’s caloric contribution and intake to their societies?
Studies of the !Kung San in the Western Kalahara desert by Lee show that men’s combined hunting and gathering activities produced only 44% of the total weight and calories of food brought into camp, while women provided the remaining 56%. In dietary terms, women provide 27% more food and consume 22% less than men in this study.
Why was a division of labor between hunter and gatherers necessary and how do the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert give a prime example of why this division was necessary?
Differentiations of task reduced the risk of hunting. Hunger and death can ensue if there were not women simultaneously obtaining reliable goods. (!Kung San were successful in only 25% of their hunting trips).
What is a misconception as the result of a romanticization of men hunting big game and how does it undermine women’s contribution to hunting?
That only men, being more physically capable could accomplish such a task. This ignores the capturing of small mammals and as well as other animals such as turtles, insects, eggs, grub, etc. In fact, most of the game caught in this more reliable category of hunting is conducted by women, who set traps, snares, and/or kill the animals with clubs or sticks.
Did men gather food side by side with women? Is this activity less skilled? What are the necessary skills to gather?
Yes, while hunting and often side by side with women. And no it is not less skilled, it requires extensive knowledge of plant species, their growth cycles, locations, and processing techniques.
What other laboral/ economic contributions are often overshadowed if an anthropologist placed too much emphasis on food and diet?
Things like sources of fresh water, firewood, tools, bags, baskets, and pots, as may be needed in the quest, retrieval, processing, and storage of food.
In Horticultural societies, how do women’s contribution to cultivation change and what is an example of a practice which changes contributions to cultivsation? How do men’s work time change?
Practices such as shifting cultivation strongly correlate with major female contributions to cultivation. Men also increase their work times in the more intensive and densely populated farming systems
How does intensity of cultivation correlate with men and women’s principality as cultivators.
A sample of 515 studies showed that women were the main farmers in 41% of the cases and that both sexes participated equally in 37%. In only 22% were men the main cultivators. When cultigens are below 55% of the diet, women predominate, when it is between 55-75% there is relative equality, when it goes above 75%, men dominate.
What are the four factors that shape the choice that men and women make about farming and other work?
- Compatibility with childcare: locational model
- The productive sequence:economies of effort
- The daily work schedule: time and intensity
- Complementary activities and risks
What is the production sequence?
The chronology or intensity of tasks, whereby raw materials are made into consumable products. This may be combined with the locational model.
In terms of long and short distance trade, which gender usually does what?
The man conducts long distance trade and the woman conducts local trade.
Women in horticultural societies are known to work longer hours but how do men compensate for this?
Men usually expend a third more energy than women.
Is pastoralism only conducted by men?
No, it has been found that women also do expansive work domesticating and herding both large and small animals. It is only a master of the intersection of this with the location model.
What are the reasons that men take an increasing and more dominant role in agricultural societies than horticultural societies? What happen’s to women’s labor?
Women’s labor remains constant and men do not take over. Rather, the demand for more labor and sedentarism call men forth to do more work since there are seasonal harvesting seasons. On the supply side, is that women’s time for field operations reaches a limit that is generally below that of men. Military specialization also allows specialized fighting forces. Also pastoralism declines.
What are the main reasons that women’s predominance in farming decreases in agricultural societies?
- Food preservation and processing times increase substantially.
- Fertility and hence childcare requirements increase.
- Domestic animal care and related food processing increases.
- Less hunting and fewer animal pelts entails shifts of labor to growing and processing plant and animal fibers into clothing, bedding, and sacking.
What happens to clothing production as agricultural societies come about?
Women are obligated to do more, as animal pelts become rarer and population increases, more skilled labor and rapidly renewable sources of plant and animal fibers are necessary. This work is usually allocated to women as they create a textile industry.
What is one potential reason that men gain greater economic and political interests in agricultural societies?
The state must offer rewards for military and labor drafts of men. By drafting and rewarding only men for state undertakings that are DISTANT and DANGEROUS (for example military service), there is less chance that agricultural production and human reproductive levels will be disrupted. Promotion of loyalty to the state by privileges.
What is a potential reason that men dominate markets more than women?
Men produce more for exchange and women more for family consumption, men also conduct more diplomatic trade, seeing as the locational model predicts women will only exchange locally.
Why is it that some sexes sell the other’s product? Can you give an example?
Because the work and market site are incompatible, for example in Ghana, men spend their days at sea fishing; when they return women buy their catch and sell it in local markets. I. yucatan Medico, indigenous Mayan women produce cotton hammocks in home industries but distribution to urban markets are generally undertaken by men.
In complex stratified societies, what is the relationship between performance of productive labor and control over property and resources and the right to own, manage, mortage, or sell livestock, or other forms of productive property
There tends to be very little correlation, to the dismay of common thought.
Where do differences in control normally derive from?
Institutional afvantages and disadvantages based on social categories of race, class, ethnicity, and gender. These institutionalized advantages are perpetuated through systems of marriage and social reproduction.
Why is it that Anthropology has such a methodological blindspot when it comes to women?
Women mostly work in the informal and domestic spheres, where production is not so easily measured. This work is intermittent, seasonal, mobile, small-scale family or individual economic activity that may be intermingled with other economic activity.
Can cooperatives reduce cooperation and establish more authoritarian relations between men and women? Example?
Yes, in Senegal, the creation of village agricultural cooperatives where membership was 99% male “heads of household”. Women became more dependent on men for access to seed, fertilizer, and mechanical farm implements.
