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Every society has patterned ways of making a living - doing the activities that result in food, shelter, safety - the satisfaction of what the people of that society understand to be their needs, as well as their wants and desires.

Often enough there is more than one pattern - but there is usually one general way of making a living that is widespread, dominant, traditional. It is around this way, this particular patterned survival (Kottak calls it 'adaptive) strategy, that many of the relationships specific to the society can be understood: how parenting gets done; how marriages come about; how work groups form; relational patterns within groups, power distributions; and also the stories that explain, justify, and stand as 'training guides' - symbolic maps or templates for the different roles, obligations, activities, expectations, distributions and circulation of a societies stuff - tools, techniques, and produce. Most specific mythologies, theologies, and stories (not all) affirm, model and re-inforce the usual ways that serve to satisfy the material needs of a people.

Because making a living figures so prominently as a motivation for members of society, we name some of the patterns and look for correlations with other dimensions in a society (beliefs, language, gender construction, kinship forms, institutions, agencies, structured stratifications (chiefs, slaves, dukes and earls, shamans, middle managers, preferred shareholders etc etc etc)

Foraging, (Hunting/gathering).

Usually band organization, gatherings of multi-bands for exchange, marriages, unity rites - affirmation of fictive and factual kinship relationships. Foragers are mobile, toolkit light. Classless, some social statuses based on gender, age, proficiency - but structurally often egalitarian.

 

Transhumance - a way of making a living by associating with wild herds of aninals ( some define as a variant of pastoralism - nomadically moving with domesticated aninals). Think of the Lakota Sioux (Dances with Wolves), or of the Reindeer following Laplanders. Land is not controlled but some assumption of dominion over the subject wild beasts often granted by deity.

 

Pastoralism - major dependence on managing domesticated grazing animals - sheep, goats, Llama, cattle. The animals providing most of the nutrients, clothes, maybe even tools and building materials necessary for the way of life (eg Maasai, Maa peoples of East Africa). Often control or domination or monopoly of a territory -grazing places - is correlate

 

Horticulture (hoe, midden, slash and burn).

simple portable tools, no permanent fields, often movement of settlements to be near cultiivated fields - defense of crop rather than defense of territory

 

Agriculture (plow, irrigation/drainage, towns, markets, armies) - permanent fields, intensively cultivated, domesticated animals for traction, heavy labor, increases in specialization of jobs, differences in status, stratification - permanent dwellings, larger settlement. Complex societies - (those organized on scales beyond tribal, chieftainship, 1000 people, permanent status/straticifation) are correlates of this way being the dominant way of making a living - other correlates - permanent markets, towns, cities (Catal Huyuk), hydraulic public works/organizations, accounting (ie writing, histories, ideograms, sound-symbols leading to alphabetic writing), slavery, inheritance problems and solutions (marriage, families) various -archies (matri-, patri, mon-, olig-). Land/property and its defense become social need, generating warriors, militias then standing armies.

All civilizations are variants on this way of makinng a living - at least until merchantile innovations of late middle ages (Marco Polo and Venetians), Chris Columbis and Iberian tradings.

Industrialism Then the industrial revolution - development of domestic production for trading, new means of transport, explosion of use of non-human, non-animal power sources.

Techno-servile - what to call what is going on now - information, management, smart tools, elaboration of services becomes greater proportion of social product than extractive (growing food, mining, forest exploitation), or manufacture (building houses, cars, ships and planes). Global, high dependence on markets, trade, movement of capital around world - mass media, mass education, commodification of cultural elements and reciprocal relationships (mothering becomes childcare, burying the dead becomes funeral services, sing-a-longs become MTV, confidants become psychotherapists.

Social Theorists re dominance of productive relations shaping social relations:

Marx - Mode of Production dominates, sometimes determines social relations. "Ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class."

Weber Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism

Polanyi - studied the patterns of exchange within socieities: Reciprocal ways of making a living, Tributary (redistributive) ways of making a living, market principle ways of making a living.

Jacques Ellul - La Technique - - modern imperative of maximization economizing, greatest 'returns', highest and best use - the opposite of the gift

Illich - the war against subsistence, destruction of the Commons, radical monopoly, coutnerproductivity of modern institutions, the regime of scarcity

Kottak - absence of 'scarcity' among Betsileo - the creation of scarcity as precondition for economy. Economy the production, circulation, distribution of what is, or can be made to be, SCARCE.