Listen to part of a lecture in an anthropology class.

P: Okay, welcome to Anthropology 101. Now, anthropologists have traditionally classified human societies into groups, according to certain shared features or characteristics. So before we even open our textbooks, what might be some ways of classifying societies?

S: Well, maybe their form of government, whether it's a democracy or something else like a society where all members have equal standing, an egalitarian society.

P: Good, anybody else? S: Maybe whether it's nomadic or not, whether the group moves around or just stays put all year? P: Sure, those are good suggestions and anthropologists do categorize societies along those lines.

P: But there's another system of categorization I want to mention that's traditionally been very popular. That's looking at a society's mode of subsistence. How does it survive? Particularly how does it acquire food?

S: Oh, like hunter-gatherers, right?

P: Precisely! There are actually four separate categories, hunting and gathering pastoralism, horticulture, and intensive agriculture.

S: Okay, I understand hunting and gathering, but what's the difference between the others?

P: Good question. Pastoralism generally refers to domesticating animals, say, raising chickens or goats, horticulturalists, plant seeds, and harvest the resulting crops. And the last classification, intensive agriculture, that's like pastoralism or horticulture on a large scale. But I said that's a good question for a reason, because on closer examination, the difference between, say, hunting and pastoralism, it really isn't that clear.

But then if we added new categories, we'd need too many for it to be practical. Um, what I is this, according to the definition, hunters and gatherers subsist by hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants. But how exactly do we define wild? If people capture and raise the young of an animal they've hunted, you couldn't call them domesticated, but are they still wild? And merely by gathering certain plants on a regular basis, you affect their growth, which eventually leads to domestication.

P: So the question you're left with is, when does gathering become horticulture? Okay, so another question is, do we pay attention to how people get their food or to what food they actually eat?

S: But wouldn't people eat the food they get?

P: Not necessarily! Imagine a group that hunts, but then trades the meat for domesticated crops. Do we classify them as hunter-gatherers, because they hunt wild animals? Or as horticulturalists, because they eat intentionally cultivated food? And It's not just what people eat. It's a matter of how much.

P: Let me explain, what if a group gets its food, partly through hunting and gathering, and partly through raising animals and growing crops? Does a society have to depend exclusively on one mode of subsistence in order to be classified that way? S: Um, well, I don't know.

P: And neither do I. I'm not really asking the question. I'm suggesting that the traditional system doesn't have an answer to that question. I mean, the classification system isn't completely useless. It's just a bit too broad to give us much useful information about a society.

There's another concern, though, on a different level, which involves certain assumptions that anthropologists have traditionally made about societies based on how their mode of subsistence is classified. Basically, it's been taken for granted that these categories correlate with societal complexity. That is hunter-gatherer societies tend to be organized along the simplest lines, small settlements, nomadic lifestyles, a relatively egalitarian political structure. And as you move from hunting and gathering to intensive agriculture, societies get more complex in their organization.

But a recent study in New Guinea suggests that this doesn't really hold true. That is not so much whether a group source of food is wild or cultivated, but rather what kind of stability they're able to achieve. So maybe a hunter-gatherer society that's nomadic will tend to be more simply organized.

But then let's consider one that relies on, say, fish chain, or any use of aquatic resources which are available year round. They can stay in one place, expand in size, spend less time searching for food. So even though they're also hunter-gatherers, because they hunt for wild fish, they're able to develop organizational structures that are just as complex, socially, and culturally, as many horticultural or intensive agricultural societies.