Social Anthropology

SOCIO-ANTHROPOLOGYGETTING FOOD

By Eduard L. Alcantara

FOOD COLLECTION

Food collection may be generally defined as:

« « all forms of subsistence technology » all forms of subsistence technology » in which food-getting is dependent on naturally

occuring resources, that is, wild plants and animals.

THE FORAGERSAccording to Dennis O'Neil :

Foragers are “ people who live in more or less isolated, small societies and obtain their food by foraging wild plants and hunting wild animals. ”

This places are called the marginal areas of earth namely deserts, the Artic, and dense tropical forest which do not allow easy exploitation by modern agricultural technologies.

GETTING FOODStudying the food-collecting

societies are still available for observation because these groups may help us understand some aspects of human life in the past, when people were foragers.

But we must be cautious in drawing inferences about the past from our observations of contemporary food collectors because of the following reasons:

FOOD COLLECTION

FIRST. Early foragers lived in almost all types of environments, including some very bountiful ones.

SECOND. Contemporary foragers are not relics of the past.

THIRD. Recent and contemporary foragers have been interacting with kinds of societies that did not exist until 10,000 years ago – agriculturalists, pastoralists, and intrusive powerful state societies.

Let us now examine two areas of the world with very different

environments…

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES:

They are native people of Australia who probably came from somewhere in Asia more than 40,000-60,000 years ago. (Columbia University)

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

On the average day, the camp begins to stir just before sunrise, while it is still dark.

Children are sent to fetch water, and the people breakfast on water and food left over from the night before.

In the cool of early morning, the adults talk and make plans for the day.

Then talking goes for a while. Where should they go for food – to the places they recently have been or to a new places?

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

For example, one woman may want to search for plants whose bark she needs to make new sandals. When the woman decide which plants they want to collect and where they think those plants are most likely to be found, they take up their digging sticks and set out with large wooden bowls of drinking water on their heads. Their children ride on their hips walks alongside.

Meanwhile, the men may have decided to hunt Emus, 6-foot-tall ostritchlike birds that do not fly.

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

By noon, men and women are usually back at camp, the women with their wooden bowls each filled up to 15 pounds of fruit or other plant foods. The men more often than not with only some small game such as lizards and rabbits.

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

The men’s food getting is less certain of success than the women’s so most of the Ngatatjara aborigine’s diet is plant food.

The daily cooked meal is eaten toward evening, after an afternoon spent resting, gossiping, and making repairing tools.

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINESTraditionally they are NOMADIC.Their campsites are ISOLATED and INHABITED only a

small number of people, or they were clusters of groups including as many as 80 persons.

They NEVER ESTABLISHED a campsite right next to a place with water. If they are too close, their presence would frighten game

away and might cause tension with neighboring bands, who also would wait for game to come to scarce watering spots.

TODAY…AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINESMany aborigines live in small settled villages. As experienced by

Victoria Burkbank in 1980s in a village she called “Mangrove” in the Northern Australia.

The once nomadic aborigines now lives in a village of about 600 which was founded in the 1950s.

Their houses have stoves, refrigerators, toilets, washing machines, and even television.

Their children attend school full time, and there is a health clinic.They still do some foraging, but most of their food comes from

the store. Some earn wages, but many manage to live on the government welfare checks.

Next is… The Inuit (Eskimo)

THE INUIT (ESKIMO)

THE INUIT (ESKIMO)

Inuit (plural; the singular Inuk means "man" or "person") is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska. (Wikipedia)

THE INUIT (ESKIMO)

The Inuit (Eskimo)

The Inuits depend almost entirely on sea and land mammals as well as fish.

Inuits, the term is preferred by many of the Artic groups particularly those now living in Canada.

Collecting food depends mostly on the season, but their critical resources are sea mammals.

The Inuit (Eskimo): Men

TWO TECHNIQUES USED IN HUNTING SEA MAMMALS:

1. Hurl a toggle harpoon into a sea mammal from a kayak.

2. Locate a breathing hole and then wait, immobile and attentive (winter).

THE INUIT (ESKIMO)

The Inuit (Eskimo): Women• The women butcher the animal,

prepare it for eating or storage, and process the skin. – The skin is used to make clothing sewn

by the women. – They also hunt small animal such as

hares, and do much of fishing.• Various techniques are used – hook and

line, spearing, and ambushing with nets and dams.

– Make the fishing nets, and it takes the better part of a year to make one.

The Inuit (Eskimo): FamilyRelated families usually live together

and move camp by boat or sled to be in the best place to intercept the migratory animals and fish.

A network of interrelated families lives and moves in a territory of thousands of square miles, moving outside only when they have made arrangements with other groups to do so.

TODAY…INUIT (ESKIMO)They live in villages or town with many

modern conveniences such as electricity, telephones, and television sets.

Dog teams have been replaced by all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles.

Many men and women have full time wage-paying jobs.

There is still a preference for traditional foods, so they still hunt and fish on weekends.

GENERAL FEATURES OF FOOD COLLECTORS

• Most live in small communities in sparsely populated territories and follow a nomadic lifestyle, forming no permanent settlements.

• They do not recognize individual land rights.• Generally, they don’t have classes of people and

tend to have no specialized or full-time officials.• Divisions of labor in food-collecting societies is based

largely on sex and gender.• Men hunt large marine and land animals and usually

do most of the fishing.

GENERAL FEATURES OF FOOD COLLECTORS

• Women usually gather wild plant foods.

• Anthropologists have assumed that foragers typically get their food from gathering than from hunting.

• Women contribute more than the men to subsistence because women generally do the gathering.

http://anthro.palomar.edu/subsistence/sub_2.htm http://www.wikipedia.org

THE END

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