Ch.5 MAKING A LIVING: Adaptive Strategies, Permaculture & Economic Racism

This chapter Making A Living may seem boring if you don't get the context. How humans evolved in their food production is the basis of our economic strategies and systems. Human societies, how they are organized, and what they need and work towards, they are defined by how they create and maintain their food production, generally speaking. Jason GOdesky writes that

A given a society’s mode of subsistence, accurate predictions could often be made about their level of political complexity, their kinship patterns, their population size and density, their modes of warfare, and even their religious beliefs.

This blog by Jason Godesky explains why this chapter on Making a Living is so vital and relevant to the study of anthropology. Take a moment to read the first seven paragraphs through the following sentence:

"Cohen’s typology may be slightly ethnocentrically flawed. in breaking out more types within our own adaptive strategy, the traditional typology tends to give pride of place to our own culture that may not be entirely deserved".

SOME VIDEOS TO FURTHER THIS CHAPTER
I found a few videos that brought new strategies, i.e., permaculture, and a new insight into how anthropology students might find Cohen's strategies useful and how other aspects of the chapter namely various forms of distribution and exchange, including the market principle, redistribution, and generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity, can be applied to contexts right in NYC.

VIDEO #1: Permaculture 101
Permaculture expert Penny Livingston-Stark shows how natural systems can teach us better design practices. Learning to work with the earth not only creates a healthier environment, it also nourishes the people who live in it.




VIDEO #2: Joel Salatin - Virginia 1:37"
Joel Salatin writes in his website that he is "in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture." And if you visited his farm, you'd know he means it & lives it!
He produces beef, chicken, eggs, turkey, rabbits, and forestry product. Yet, Joel calls himself a grass-farmer, for it is the grass that transform the sun into energy that his animals can then feed on. By closely observing nature, Joel created a rotational grazing system that not only allows the land to heal but also allows the animals to behave the way the were meant to -- as in expressing their "chicken-ness" or "pig-ness", as Joel would say. www.polyfacefarms.com



VIDEO #3: Witness - Forty Acres and a Dream - Part 1 10:36"
Oddly this video was produced for AlJazeeraEnglishTV rather than regular broadcast TV or cable.Photographer John Ficara captures the plight of black farmers in the United States. THe title refers to Forty Acres and a Mule - a term for compensation that was promised to be awarded to freed African American slaves after the Civil War— 40 acres (16 ha) of land to farm, and a mule with which to drag a plow so the land could be cultivated. This was their entrance into the industrial economy from which they were once the tools and machinery of the production as chattel slaves.

Ch.5 Making a Living: Commenting on Corn

Chapter Five introduces us to the adaptive strategies humans have used to make a living. Hunting, gathering (foraging), horiticulture, and agriculture. This week I want to focus specifically on the product CORN to aid us in understanding how industrialism leads to the alienation of producers from their products. Click here to learn about the zillion uses of corn including for biofuel.

By Thu Mar 6th at noon, post a comment after watching the following videos for our class discussion of Making a Living:

1. A conversation with director of the documentary KING CORN (watch all 3 parts)
2. A TED Talk about the Omnivore's Dilemma, looking at humans and the world from the plant's point of view. He introduced to me the concept of permaculture, and
3. A TED Talk about developing a commodity exchange for maize (corn) in Ethopia.

This is your homework for Thursday's class. Take notes and bring your notes to class. Also make a comment on the blog below by Thu at noon (click COMMENTS at the bottom of this post). What you could comment about is:

• How did corn become so important to us according to the director of King Corn? What do you think about that?
  
• How much corn do you think you consume in your diet? What did you learn that was new about corn in our culture?
  
• What did you think about the permaculture example Pollan presented?
  
• How might what you learned about corn from these videos provide a great example of how culture is learned, shared, integrated, all-encompassing, and/or symbolic?
• What did you learn about Ethiopia's production of corn and what it says about small farmers' knowledge of markets?
  
• Anything else you'd like to share relevant to MAKING A LIVING chapter.
  

This will help us take a look at how agriculture and the possibility of permaculture can transform our relationship to what we eat, how we eat, how consumers get what they eat and how we might transform our relationship to the environment and to agribusiness.



FOOD NEWS: A Conversation with 'King Corn' Filmmaker: Part 1

Pt. 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5bAfPsUAb8&feature=user
Pt. 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2vARSdg7bw&feature=user



TEDTalks Michael Pollan: The omnivore's next dilemma



Talks Eleni Gabre-Madhin: Building a commodities market in Ethiopia
Note: Maize is another word for corn

Sustainable Agriculture: Curing America's Eating Disorder

Chapter 6 - Making a Living

Since the beginning of human life on earth there has always been a need for making a living. Until 10,000 years ago man survived by utilizing the adaptive strategy of foraging, where people wandered around the earth searching for provisions of any kind. Because of this dependency upon nature to provide for their needs, it led naturally to the next step of human procurement: cultivation.

Two types of cultivation developed; horticulture and agriculture, both of which still exists today in industrial and non-industrial societies. Horticulture or "shifting cultivation" is the simpler of the two methods and utilizes a "slash and burn" technique for land clearing. The land is used to the point of soil exhaustion at which the family simply moves on to another plot of land. Agriculture, the more complex of the two, involves the use of modern machinery, irrigation, and mass manpower to cultivate a single plot of land continuously. Because of this, families can now have a permanent home and a more stable lifestyle.

As societies began to modernize, a new means of procurement was introduced and today's economic system was born. The purpose of this economic system was to optimize the means of production. In other words, to take into account the land, territory, labor and technology needed in order to produce a product and optimize that process.

Time has changed the way people go about making a living in terms of food production. With the information from chapter six and your own personal knowledge or experience, compare and contrast the means of producing food through cultivation (either horticulture or agriculture) or within our current economic system. Make a choice on which you would personally like to see our society gravitate towards and tell us why you would like to see this change made.

For example would you prefer to be part of an industrialized economic system that utilizes of machinery and technology? This allows for effective mass production but on the other hand this also forces the worker as an individual to live in a more rigid work routine. Due to the concept of specialization a person would have the responsibility of just one simple task which he/she must perform all day.