Anthropology Optional by Dr. Sudhir

Model Answer

Question #1. Describe various theories of the beginning of food production. Also discuss its consequences.

The beginning of food production was a watershed moment in the history of human evolution. There have been many views on why for thousands of years, human beings followed a scavenging and hunting gathering routine and within a span of 10000 years, global economic system moved to agriculture.

1. Climate change: 

It seems clear from the evidence now available that the climate of the Near East about 13,000 to 12,000 years ago became more seasonal; the summers got hotter and drier, and the winters became colder. These climatic changes may have favored the emergence of annual species of grain that archaeologically we see today

Gordon Childe: 

According to Childe, the postglacial period was marked by a decline in summer rainfall in the Near East and northern Africa. As the rains decreased, people were forced to retreat into shrinking pockets, or oases, of food resources surrounded by desert. The lessened availability of wild resources provided an incentive for people to cultivate grains and to domesticate animals, according to Childe

1. O. Henry; Mc Corriston and Hole

Change to a more seasonal climate might also have led to a shortage of certain nutrients for foragers. In the dry seasons, certain nutrients would have been less available. For example, grazing animals become lean when grasses are not plentiful, and so meat from hunting would have been in short supply in the dry seasons. 

So, it is possible that some foragers in the past thought of planting crops to get them through the dry seasons when hunting, fishing, and gathering did not provide enough carbohydrates and fat for them to avoid starvation.

Criticism: 

Robert Braidwood criticized Childe’s theory for two reasons. 

• First, Braidwood believed that the climate changes may not have been as dramatic as Childe had assumed, and therefore the “oasis incentive” may not have existed. 
• Second, the climatic changes that occurred in the Near East after the retreat of the last glaciers had probably occurred at earlier interglacial periods too, but there had never been a similar food producing revolution before. Hence, according to Braidwood, there must be more to the explanation of why people began to produce food than simply changes in climate.

For Flannery and Binford- “Why did incipient food production not come earlier? Our only answer at the moment is that culture was not ready to achieve it.”

2. Population growth 

a. Binford-Flannery model: 

• Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery suggested that some change in external circumstances, not necessarily environmental, must have induced or favored the changeover to food production. As Flannery pointed out, there is no evidence of a great economic incentive for hunter-gatherers to become food producers. In fact, as we have seen, some contemporary hunter-gatherers may actually obtain adequate nutrition with far less work than many agriculturalists.
• Because of population growth in the optimum areas, people might have moved to surrounding areas containing fewer wild resources. In those marginal areas, people would have turned to food production to reproduce what they used to have.

The Binford-Flannery model seems to fit the archaeological record in the Levant, the

southwestern part of the Fertile Crescent, where population increase did precede the first signs of domestication.

But as Flannery admitted, in some regions, such as southwestern Iran, the optimum hunting and gathering areas do not show population increase before the emergence of domestication.

b. Mark Cohen theorized that population pressure on a global scale explains why so many of the world’s peoples adopted agriculture within the span of a few thousand years.

1. 1. Thus, people could no longer relieve population pressure by moving to uninhabited areas. To support their increasing populations, they would have had to exploit a broader range of less desirable wild foods; that is, they would have had to switch to broad-spectrum collecting
   2. Cohen suggested that people might have tried a variety of these strategies to support themselves but would generally have ended up depending on cultivation because that would have been the most efficient way to allow more people to live in one place.

3. Competition for land: 

In the competition for land between the faster-expanding food producers and the foragers, the food producers may have had a significant advantage: They had more people in a given area. Thus, the foraging groups may have been more likely to lose out in the competition for land. Some groups may have adopted cultivation, abandoning the foraging way of life to survive. Other groups, continuing as foragers, may have been forced to retreat into areas not desired by the cultivators. Today, as we have seen, the small number of remaining foragers inhabit areas not particularly suitable for cultivation—dry lands, dense tropical forests, and polar regions.

4. Intensification of agriculture: 

Ester Boserup suggested that intensification of agriculture, with a consequent increase in yield per acre, is not likely to develop naturally out of horticulture because intensification requires much more work. She argued that people will be willing to intensify their labor only if they have to. Where emigration is not feasible, the prime mover behind intensification may be prior population growth. The need to pay taxes or tribute to a political authority may also have stimulated intensification.

Due to the absence of any written records, it is difficult to pin point any single reason for the beginning of agriculture. Therefore, a multifactorial theory, i.e., a combination of the above factors, becomes the most plausible solution to explain the beginnings of agriculture.

Consequences of Food Production:

Regardless of why food production originated, it seems to have had important consequences for human life.

1. Population Increase: Plant and animal domestication led to substantial increases in population.
2. Sedentarism: A greater reliance on agriculture led to an increase in sedentarism in many areas.
3. Deterioration in Health Conditions: Populations that relied heavily on agriculture were less healthy compared with earlier foraging populations.
4. Use of Goods: In more permanent villages, houses and furnishings became more elaborate, people began to make textiles and to paint pottery, long-distance trade seemed to increase, and political assemblies formed.

Question #2 . Anthropology is the outcome of European discovery, colonialism and natural sciences. Substantiate.

Anthropology is a holistic and integrated study of human beings at all spaces and times. Although it the interest in the cataloguing and comparing human beings and their cultures had started in the Greek civilization itself but the real thrust to the development of anthropology was given by the Europeans in the 18-19^th century.

European discovery

1. The age of expansion led to Prince Henry in Europe led to discovery of new sea routes to Asia and America. Thus, the contact between the Europeans and the local population of newly discovered increased

a. It also brought the western civilization in contact to the primitive cultures which produced an element of awe and surprise. Thus, curiosity became a prime factor to study about such obscure cultures.

2. Renaissance studies of Classical antiquity not only stimulated a general interest in differences among men, they also provided models for describing such differences.

a. The similarities between Sanskrit and Latin led to comparative linguistic studies laid the foundation of linguistic anthropology.

    3. Positivism- August Comte

Colonialism:

1. Orientalism was an ideology of colonialists which advocated the study of native’s customs, traditions and literature to better equip themselves for improved administration. This led to generation of ethnographs by colonialists.
   1. In India, such ethnographs were created by scholars like O’Malley, Thurston, Risley, etc.
2. Due to the philosophy of white man’s burden, the Christian missionaries also followed the colonial administrators in the newly acquired lands to help in social reformation and spread the gospel of Jesus.

Natural sciences:

1. Darwinism led to the development of social Darwinism. According to Spencer, the principles of evolution, including natural selection and survival of the fittest, apply to human societies, social classes, and individuals in the socio-economic realm.
   1. Thus, the idea of evolution of cultures came to vogue.
   2. According to R.R. Marret, anthropology is the child of Darwinism.
2. Comparative method that was used to compare plant and animal species started to be applied to compare cultures resulting in ethnological studies.

Following innovations can be cited:

Although the discipline began by the effort of Europeans, in recent times, it is sustaining due to the initiatives of local anthropologists who leaned the subject from Europeans and applied and invented newer concepts to study their own society. Famous Indian anthropologists like MN Srinivas, DN Majumdar, SC Dube etc. studied Indian culture itself and gave newer perspectives to enrich anthropology.

The beginning was set due to these factors but gradually, it expanded substantially through new methods, techniques and new areas of research.

Thus, anthropology today, is no longer a theoretical discipline rather it becomes a vocation to deal with whole range of human problems