Adaptive Strategies

Define adaptive strategy. Identify the five adaptive strategies in Cohen’s typology of societies. Discuss how Cohen links economy and social features.

Cohen defined adaptive strategies as societies’ systems of economic production. Moreover, linking different societies’ economies with their social activities creates similarities in adaptive strategies between various societies. These relations between economies and social features led Cohen to create typologies. There are five different types of adaptive strategies: foraging, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, and industrialism (Kottak, 2018).

The first adaptive strategy is foraging. Foraging involves hunting and gathering as a mode of living and economy. Foragers are not limited to one environment, as they can survive both in the tropics and in the ice lands. Therefore, foraging allowed most societies to survive through harsh conditions. Foraging economies depend highly on the immediate environment and nature because they do not practice food production. Additionally, they do not distinguish members of a band based on wealth, and when they acquire products from the environment, such as a hunt, they share as a band.

The second adaptive strategy is horticulture. Horticulture is a type of food production that involves using simple tools, such as hoes, to practice nonintensive plant cultivation. This type of cultivation involves slash and burn shifting cultivation over various plots on the same piece of land.

The third adaptive strategy is agriculture. Agriculture involves the intensive continuous cultivation that involves irrigation that allows for cultivation-independent seasons, animal domestication to reduce labor and provide manure, and the development of terraces to ease cultivation on steep land. Long-term production from agriculture yields a balanced cost and benefit analysis. The economy is influenced by agriculture through the high yield of food production, which leads to population growth.

Pastoralism, another type of adaptive strategy, involves the herding of domestic animals. Pastoral economies can trade with agriculturists to obtain food crops. The final adaptive strategy is industrialism, which involves the use of land, labor, technology, and capital. Industrial economies involve the selling of labor to an employer. Additionally, the market principle is used to determine the prices of goods produced. To conclude, most societies’ economies are characterized by different types of reciprocity.

References

Kottak, C. (2018). Mirror For Humanity (11th ed.). McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

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