Subsistence strategies

The essentials

Subsistence strategies are the ways a society obtains food. Anthropologists classify them broadly into food collection (hunting, gathering, fishing) and food production (pastoralism, horticulture and agriculture). The strategy a group follows influences its population size, settlement pattern, property ideas, division of labour and political organisation.

Key points

• Hunting and gathering (foraging): obtaining wild plants and animals. Groups are usually small, mobile bands with few possessions, sharing of food and relatively equal social relations. Examples: San (Kalahari), Inuit (Arctic), and in India the Chenchu (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), the Birhor (Jharkhand), and the Onge and Jarawa of the Andaman Islands.
• Pastoralism: herding domestic animals, often with seasonal movement (transhumance). Examples: Toda (buffalo, Nilgiris), Gaddi (sheep and goats, Himachal), Raika/Rebari (camels, Rajasthan).
• Shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn): forest is cut and burned, cropped for a few years, then left fallow to recover. Called jhum in north-east India and podu in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. Used by many tribal groups.
• Settled (intensive) agriculture: permanent fields, plough and draught animals, irrigation and manure. Supports dense populations, surplus, specialisation, towns and states.
• Division of labour in simple societies is often based on age and sex; specialisation increases with surplus.
• Reciprocity (exchange of gifts), redistribution (collection and redistribution by a central figure) and market exchange are forms of economic exchange (Karl Polanyi).

Exam tips

• Remember regional names for shifting cultivation: jhum, podu, bewar (Madhya Pradesh).
• Link economy to political form: foragers–bands, intensive farmers–states.

Common mistakes

• Assuming foragers are always starving; many spend modest time obtaining food.
• Calling shifting cultivation "nomadism"; cultivators often have fixed villages and rotate fields.