Economic Anthropology

Question 1

According to Laurel Bossen, what are four important modifications onset by new discoveries to the standard hunter-provider (gendered) model?

Answer 1

1. In many foraging societies, meat does not provide the dietary staple, nearing not even half off all nutrition
2. When meat is less important in the diet, men may still hunt much but women are the main food providers.
3. Sexual divisions of labor are often flexible and overlapping in both individual and cooperative efforts.
4. In evaluations of subsistence contributions, concentration on food tends to oversimplify the complexity of sexual divisions of labor.

Question 2

What has research shown regarding the prevalence of hunted meat as a dietary staple in forager societies?

Answer 2

25% or less of sampled foraging societies have hunting as a dietary staple.

Question 3

What did Lee’s study of the !Kung San show about men and women’s caloric contribution and intake to their societies?

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

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?

Answer 4

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).

Question 5

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?

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Did men gather food side by side with women? Is this activity less skilled? What are the necessary skills to gather?

Answer 6

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.

Question 7

What other laboral/ economic contributions are often overshadowed if an anthropologist placed too much emphasis on food and diet?

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

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?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

How does intensity of cultivation correlate with men and women’s principality as cultivators.

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

What are the four factors that shape the choice that men and women make about farming and other work?

Answer 10

1. Compatibility with childcare: locational model
2. The productive sequence:economies of effort
3. The daily work schedule: time and intensity
4. Complementary activities and risks

Question 11

What is the production sequence?

Answer 11

The chronology or intensity of tasks, whereby raw materials are made into consumable products. This may be combined with the locational model.

Question 12

In terms of long and short distance trade, which gender usually does what?

Answer 12

The man conducts long distance trade and the woman conducts local trade.

Question 13

Women in horticultural societies are known to work longer hours but how do men compensate for this?

Answer 13

Men usually expend a third more energy than women.

Question 14

Is pastoralism only conducted by men?

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

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?

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

What are the main reasons that women’s predominance in farming decreases in agricultural societies?

Answer 16

1. Food preservation and processing times increase substantially.
2. Fertility and hence childcare requirements increase.
3. Domestic animal care and related food processing increases.
4. Less hunting and fewer animal pelts entails shifts of labor to growing and processing plant and animal fibers into clothing, bedding, and sacking.

Question 17

What happens to clothing production as agricultural societies come about?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

What is one potential reason that men gain greater economic and political interests in agricultural societies?

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

What is a potential reason that men dominate markets more than women?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Why is it that some sexes sell the other’s product? Can you give an example?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

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

Answer 21

There tends to be very little correlation, to the dismay of common thought.

Question 22

Where do differences in control normally derive from?

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Why is it that Anthropology has such a methodological blindspot when it comes to women?

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Can cooperatives reduce cooperation and establish more authoritarian relations between men and women? Example?

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

What have colonial power transformed regarding gender in colonies? What anthropologist ls have shown this?

Answer 25

Matrilineal and bilateral inheritance systems into ones that favor male ownership rights. Edith Clarke, Polly Hill, Mary Douglas, and others. Rogers (1980) found this.

Question 26

What is an instance of men being given rights to land by the state rather than women?

Answer 26

After the Sahelian drought destroyed herds, new livestock were issued to men only, ignoring traditions whereby women owned their own livestock.

Question 27

What have studies of employment in the developing world shown regarding men and women’s opportunity generally?

Answer 27

Men have a distinct advantage in obtaining a variety of formal, higher paying jobs, while women are concentrated in less profitable informal service sectors, were competition is intense.

Question 28

What ecological upsets are underdeveloped countries facing?

Answer 28

Soil erosion, deforestation, overgrazing, and loss of wildlife. This has occurrd in Bangladesh, Haiti, and the entire Sahel region of Africa.

Question 29

What are common property resources?

Answer 29

Concerned with resources shared by all the people in the society such as oceans, rivers, parks, air, publicly owned forests, and grazing lands.

Question 30

What is the common property issue?

Answer 30

According to theory, all common property will eventually be exploited. These are not owned by anyone, so nobody has an interest in taking responsibility for them.

Question 31

What do classical economic theories of self interest ignore?

Answer 31

The dilemma of the commons set forth by Garrett Hardin’s paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” whereby common property damages and losses are shared and dispersed, while individual gains from exploiting private property boom.

Question 32

What did Garrett Hardin believe was the solution to the common property issue?

Answer 32

Coercion, namely if violebce be necessary,state coercion

Question 33

Is Hardin’s theory accepted or widely challenged?

Answer 33

It is widely challenged, and rests upon questionable assumptions and it is highly culture bound. Theory does not hold cross-culturally and ate not even applicable to all situations in the United States.

Question 34

What have economists observed of private property, efficiency, wealth, and “externalities”?

Answer 34

Private property results in more effecient use and conservation of resources and greater increases of wealth than less exclusive forms of property. These benefits stem from the fact that property rights do away with “externalities”.

Question 35

Are externalities only costs?

Answer 35

No, there are external benefits, as an example, bee hive owners may be helping a owner of a nearby orchard.

Question 36

What is the relationship between private property and transaction costs?

Answer 36

Private property allows for easy identification of responsible actors, and if clear cut, establishes all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities an owner has. This allows for clean cut transactions and accountability.

Question 37

What is a proposed solution to the problems of common property?

Answer 37

Requiring taxes, levying taxes, setting quotas, charging rent, and/or issuing stock certificates. These policies force users of common property resources to pay the entire cost of using these resources, lowering exploitation rates, and increase effeciency. They in fact mimic private property.

Question 38

What ate undue assumptions Hardin makes when proposing the common property problem?

Answer 38

1. The users of common property are individualistic profit maximizers driven by economic goals to overexploit the resources on which their livelihood depends on despite thebest interest of society as a whole.
2. The users of these resources have the technical capacity to exceed the biological maximum rate of renewal of the resource.
3. Those using common property resources and the local level communities they live in cannot or will not erect effective institutions to protect the resources they live on.
4. The exploitation of collectively owned resources can be halted only by either instituting private property or the government taking action.

Question 39

What is a Horticultural society?

Answer 39

A horticultural society is one in which people subsist through the cultivation of plants for food consumption without the use of mechanized tools or the use of animals to pull plows. This makes horticultural societies distinct from agrarian societies, which do use these tools, and from pastoral societies, which rely on the cultivate of herd animals for subsistence.

Question 40

What is the practice of shifting cultivation?

Answer 40

a form of agriculture, used especially in tropical Africa, in which an area of ground is cleared of vegetation and cultivated for a few years and then abandoned for a new area until its fertility has been naturally restored.