Economic Systems - Text Flashcards
What is an economic system?
The production, distribution, and consumption of goods
What do economic systems ensure the survival of?
Survival of human groups and their cultures.
What is the anthropological variable of culture necessary to understand in any given economic system?
How the schedule of wants and demands of a given society is balanced against the supply of goods and services available. Economic processes cannot be interpreted without culturally defining the demands and understanding the conventions that dictate how and when these demands are satisfied. Economic sphere of behaviour is not separate from the social, religious, and political spheres.
Describe the economic system among the Trobriand Islanders?
- yam production
- man spends a great deal of time and energy raising yams
- for his sisters and married daughters
- the reasons a man gives yams to a woman is to show her support for her husband and to enhance his own influence
- ays are loaded not her husband’s yam house, symbolizing that he is a man of power an influence in his community
- a yam house like a bank account; when full, a man is wealthy and powerful.
True or False: yam exchange are as much social and political transactions as they are economic ones.
true
How do contemporary small-scale cultures operate?
Not in isolation; today each group of people is connected to a larger economic system – namely, the market economy – and a political organization – the state.
what are the productive resources a social group uses to produce desired goods and services?
raw materials,labour, and technology
What does every human culture have a division of labour based on?
sex and age
What is good about dividing labour by sex?
Increases the changes that learning necessary skills will be more efficient, since only half the adult skills need to be learned by any individual
What is good about dividing labour by age?
provides sufficient time for developing those skills
Where do tasks most often regarded as “women’s work” take place?
tend to be carried out near the home
Where are tasks most often regarded as “men’s work” take place and involve?
Tend to require strength, rapid bursts of energy, frequent travel away from home, and higher levels of risk and danger
What are the three configurations of gender division of labour?
- one featuring flexibility ad sexual integration
- one involving rigid segregation by sex
- one combining elements of the other two
In flexible/integrated pattern of labour, where is it most seen? What percent of both sexes perform activities with approximate equal participation?
- foraging and subsistence farmers
- 35%
How do sexually segregated cultures define work? Where is this pattern found?
- rigidly define almost all work as either masculine or feminine
- in such cultures, it is inconceivable that someone would do something considered the work of the opposite sex
- this pattern is often found in pastoral nomadic, intensive agricultural, and industrial societies, also in the Inuit, where men’s work keeps them outside the home for much of the time.
How is work defined in ordual sex configuration? Where was this common?
- Men and women carry out their work separately, but the relationship between them is one of balance rather than inequality. Interests of both men and women are represented at all levels and neither sex exerts dominance over the other.
- Common among first nations peoples, who economies were based on subsistence farming, as well as among several West African kingdoms, including the Dahomeans
How does the role of children in the economy in terms of work and responsibility differ between nonindustrial cultures and modern North America?
Children may make a greater contribution to the economy in many nonindustrial cultures
How many child labourers are there is South Asia alone?
likely about 15 million
Where does cooperative work date back to?
foraging times
True or False: Cooperative work groups amy still be found in nonindustrial as well as industrial societies.
True
What is the basic cooperative unit in most human societies? Describe. How does this differ in industrial societies?
The household. It is a unit of both production and consumption; only in industrial societies have these two activities been separated.
How does craft specialization differ between industrial and nonindustrial societies?
In nonindustrial societies, ach person in the society has knowledge and competence in all aspects of work appropriate to his or her age and sex. In modern industrial societies, by contrast, many more specialized tasks are performed and no individual can begin to learn them all.
Where is specialization more like to occur?
Among people who produce their own food
What do all cultures have that determines the way and resources are allocated?
regulations
How do each of the 5 subsistence patterns determine the way land resources are allocated?
- Foragers: determine who can hunt game and gather plants and where these activities take place
- Horticulturalists: decide how their farmland is to be acquired, worked, and passed on.
- Pastoralists: require a system that determines rights to watering places and grazing land, as well as the right of access to land they move their herds over.
- Intensive agriculturalists: must have some means of deterring title to land and access to water supplies for irrigation.
- Industrialized Western societies: a system of private ownership of land and rights to natural resources general prevails.
How is land often controlled in nonindustrial societies?
controlled by kinship groups such as the lineage or band, rather than by individuals
Who is the practice of defining territories on the basis of core features typical among? What is the benefit
- foragers, though territorial boundaries are left vaguely defined at best
- the size of band terrifies, as well as the size of the bands, can be adjusted to keep in balance with availability of resources
What is technology?
Tools and other material equipment, together with the knowledge of how to make and use them.
Why are foragers and pastoral nomads apt to have fewer and simpler tools than more sedentary farms?
Because a great number of tools would decrease their mobility
What are the primary tools among horticulturalists?
the axe, machete, and dining stick or hoe
What is marine transhumance?
Seasonal migration of people from one marine resource to the next.
