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25 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
scarcity
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The assumption that resources (for example, money) will never be plentiful enough for people to
obtain all the goods they desire. |
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institutions
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Stable and enduring cultural practices that organize social life.
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economy
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The material-means provisioning process in cultural systems.
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subsistence strategies
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The patterns of production, distribution, and consumption that members of a
society employ to ensure the satisfaction of the basic material survival needs of humans. |
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food collectors
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Those who gather, fish, or hunt for food.
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food producers
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Those who depend on domesticated plants or animals for food.
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extensive agriculture
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A form of cultivation based on the technique of clearing uncultivated land, burning
the brush, and planting the crops in the ash-enriched soil, which requires moving farm plots every few years as the soil becomes exhausted. |
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intensive agriculture
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A form of cultivation that employs plows, draft animals, irrigation, fertilizer, and
such to bring much land under cultivation at one time, to use it year after year, and to produce significant crop surpluses. |
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mechanized industrial agriculture
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Large-scale farming and animal husbandry that is highly dependent
on industrial methods of technology and production. |
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production
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The transformation of nature’s raw materials into a form suitable for human use.
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distribution
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The allocation of goods and services.
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consumption
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The using up of material goods necessary for human survival.
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neoclassical economic theory
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A formal attempt to explain the workings of capitalist enterprise, with
particular attention to distribution. |
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modes of exchange
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Patterns according to which distribution takes place: reciprocity, redistribution, and
market exchange. |
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reciprocity
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The exchange of goods and services of equal value. Anthropologists distinguish three forms
of reciprocity: generalized, in which neither the time nor the value of the return are specified; balanced, in which a return of equal value is expected within a specified time limit; and negative, in which parties to the exchange hope to get something for nothing. |
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redistribution
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A mode of exchange that requires some form of centralized social organization to receive
economic contributions from all members of the group and to redistribute them in such a way that every group member is provided for. |
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market exchange
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The exchange of goods (trade) calculated in terms of a multipurpose medium of
exchange and standard of value (money) and carried on by means of a supply-demand-price mechanism (the market). |
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labor
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The activity linking human social groups to the material world around them; from the point of view
of Karl Marx, labor is therefore always social labor. |
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mode of production
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A specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labor is
deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge. |
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means of production
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The tools, skills, organization, and knowledge used to extract energy from nature.
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relations of production
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The social relations linking the people who use a given means of production
within a particular mode of production. |
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ideology
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Those products of consciousness—such as morality, religion, and metaphysics—that purport to
explain to people who they are and to justify to them the kind of lives they lead. |
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ecology
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The study of the ways in which living species relate to one another and to their natural
environment. |
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ecozone
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The particular mix of plant and animal species occupying any particular region of the earth.
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affluence
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The condition of having more than enough of whatever is required to satisfy consumption
needs. |