Five Ways to Make a Living

Every community has to get calories out of a landscape, and there are only so many ways to do it. Anthropologists sort those ways into five subsistence strategies — foraging, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture and industrialism. The reason the categories are worth learning is that they predict a great deal else: how many people live together, how often they move, how much stored wealth there is to fight over. What they are not is a ladder. Nineteenth-century writers such as Lewis Henry Morgan ranked them from “savagery” to “civilization”; Franz Boas took that scheme apart, and Julian Steward rebuilt the comparison as cultural ecology — different solutions to different environments, not rungs. Tap each strategy, then compare them, then try the typology on eight real communities.