ANTH 2 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Sumptuary Law, Food Energy, Cultural Landscape
Chapter 6: Sustainability
Environment and Foodways
• Sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
• Why do some societies apparently have sustainable relations with the natural world while
others seem to be more destructive?
• Different views of the natural world are closely related to distinct environmental
management and food acquisition strategies
• Do all people conceive of nature in the same way?
o What nature means to people and how they see themselves in relation to it vary
greatly around the world
• The human-nature divide
o Indigenous people don’t see a divide between nature and man, but have a
relationship of good stewardship with the environment
• The cultural landscape
o Environmental anthropologists: practitioners of subfield of anthropology that
studies how different societies understand, interact with, and make changes to
nature
o Cultural landscape: holds that people have images, knowledge and concepts of
the physical landscape hat affect how they will actually interact with it
▪ Example: Itzaj people think of nature as an extension of the social world,
with spirits that influence their every day lives, so less likely to hurt it
because that would be hurting themselves
o Different cultures can hold different views of the same landscape
o “natural resources” is culturally rooted idea that shapes how we see the
environment
o People use metaphors to think about natural environments, and these metaphors
are connected to social behavior, thought, and organization
▪ Example: in many hinting-gathering societies, they describe relationship
with nature in terms of personal relatedness, like they “court” their prey
o Whether a society has sustainable relations with nature depends on many factors
beyond how the conceptualize human-nature relations
• How do people secure an adequate, meaningful and environmentally sustainable food
supply?
o Foodways: the structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production,
distribution, and consumption of food
• Modes of subsistence: how people accurately procure, produce and distribute food:
o Foraging, or the search for edible things
o Horticulture, or small-scale subsistence agriculture
o Pastoralism, which means the raising of animal herds
o Intensive agriculture, or large-scale, often commercial, agriculture
o Societies are rarely tied to one mode
