Program 10: Lesson 8 - Patterns of Subsistence: The Food Producers

Faces of Culture - "Patterns of Subsistence: The Food Producers"

Narr: From the dawn of human life until fairly recent times, we roamed the earth foraging for food.

Because the plants and animals on which we depended were not restricted to a single place, neither were we restricted by territorial boundaries. We followed game animals in their wanderings, and camped where food plants were most plentiful.

But around 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world, we began to domesticate plants and animals.

The act of domesticating plants drastically altered our way of life. Plants take time to grow, and, in many cases, they must be carefully tended. When the plants are ready for harvest, this, too, takes work.

When we invest so much time and energy in tending our plants, we must stay around to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Just as foragers stay close to their food supply by moving around, food producers try to insure their food supply by staying close to their plants. They settle down.

From the field grew the village. From the village grew the town. From the town grew the city. As the cities grew so did the states. The birth of modern civilization stems from the simple act of placing seeds and plants into the ground.

But houses and fields are especially subject to natural disasters. They cannot flee as wild animals and foragers can.

Since we cannot escape nature, we attempt to placate it. Like the Maya of Mexico, desiring a plentiful harvest, we appeal to our gods through prayer.

These Maya still practice one of earliest forms of food production, horticulture. The cultivation of crops without the aid of irrigation, draft animals or fertilizers.

In the tropics, torrential rains leach the shallow soil of nutrients. To replace them, the Maya use a technique known as "slash and burn horticulture."

First they cut down an area of the forest and leave it to dry for some eight months. Then they burn the dried vegetation. Carefully calculating the wind, they start backfires. Then they set the main fire. Fire burns everything. Nutrients which have been stored in the vegetation remain in the ashes, enrich the soil and thus make cultivation possible.

After the rainy season when the ashes have been absorbed into the soil, the Maya plant. With a simple digging stick, they bore holes in the soil and plant their seeds.

This form of cultivation represents an ingenious accommodation between the needs of the Maya and their delicate environment.

Corn, beans and squash are all planted in the same hole. The three plants break ground at the same time. The squash vines spread over the ground, cutting down on the growth of weeds and conserving water. The bean stalks use the corn for support and put back into the soil the nitrogen used by the corn.

The soil, however, remains usable for two years at most. Then the land must once more be consumed by the forest. It will be ten years before it will be productive for human use again.

Like other horticulturalists the Maya live in villages, grouping their houses, storage bins and animal pens together in order to remain close to their crops.

Though horticulturalists may supplement their diet by hunting and fishing, they no longer follow the animals from place to place. Instead, the daily lives of horticulturalists center on the need to tend their fields.

A settled life and a need for labor leads to increases in population and a change in the way society is organized. The need for continued access to the fields gives rise to the idea of property.

Among horticulturalists, property is typically controlled by the extended family or by lineages, groups of kin who trace descent to a common ancestor.

Ownership of land, crops and homes is accompanied by other changes in social organization.

Social distinctions replace the egalitarianism of foraging societies. And cultures exhibit the beginnings of social stratification, differential access to wealth and prestige.

On Pentecost Island in Malaynesia live other horticulturalists. They rely on root and tree crops. Their principal crop is the yam.

Their way of life also reflects the greater social complexity that marks the transition from foraging to cultivation.

The calendar of these people is based on the yam cycle. And the months of the year are named for the work being done at that time in the yam gardens.

Families provide food for rituals in which thousands of yams are displayed and distributed to visiting clans.

High status is conferred on men who give away the most and best yams. The result is an elaborate system of ranking.

(Drums.)

Narr: As the men reach higher grades, they're treated with more respect and can exert greater influence. Although a "Big Man" may not have much coersive power, he can use his position to persuade others to follow his lead.

(Drums and chanting.)

Narr: In order to assure a good harvest, these Melanesians practice an extremely dangerous ritual. Fertility is its major symbolic theme.

For two or three weeks of every year, the men construct a gigantic tower. When completed, each man will dive from the top, a height of 80 feet.

The tower is divided into several levels. Each corresponding to a different part of the body. The lowest level is the ankle, the highest, the top of the head. Each man builds his own diving platform. In the forest the divers select vines which will be tied to their ankles to break their fall.

To "dive well," the top of the diver's head must just graze the ground. It is, therefore, critical that each diver carefully measure the length of his vines. The slightest miscalculation could mean the difference between life and death.

(People singing.)

Narr: The ritual has lost much of its religious significance for the Pentecost Islanders, most of whom have been converted to Christianity. However, "earth diving" is still performed every year for tourists, a new economic adaptation for Malaynesian yam growers.

Horticulture, as practiced by the Melanesians and the Maya is still successfully carried out in many parts of the world. It's a form of food production, especially well adapted to tropical forest soils which need the cycle of regrowth to remain arable. And to mountainous regions where tractors and other heavy machines are impractical.

Horticulturalists typically do not produce a large food surplus, remaining essentially subsistence farmers.

This is Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a temple in the ancient city of Angkor. The heart of a rich and highly stratified kingdom. It was established by the Khmer, ancestors to the present day inhabitants of Cambodia.

Like other cities in ancient Greece, Egypt and Central America, Angkor was built on another form of cultivation, intensive agriculture.

Complex Khmer society developed between the 9th and 13th centuries A.D., would not have been possible without the huge surpluses created by intensive agriculture.

Intensive agriculture made possible the magnificence of Khmer society and its corresponding level of social complexity with rulers, courts, soldiers and priests, artisans, and slaves.

Sophisticated water storage and irrigation systems overcame the vagaries of monsoon rains and drought, making it possible to grow great quantities of rice. Enough eventually to feed one million people.

Like a number of other once great cities, Angkor is now in ruins. Some anthropologists believe that societies based on intensive agriculture are inherently unstable.

The Khmer kingdom is no exception. The riches of settled hieratical societies must be protected by standing armies. The wealth of Angkor attracted warriors from Thailand who invaded the Khmer kingdom and took its men away as slaves.

But the excessive demands on the people caused by temple building and public works also contributed to its downfall.

When Buddhism was introduced into the Khmer society, the people no longer supported the Hindu priests with their rice and labor. The elaborate irrigation systems fell into disrepair. The Khmer kingdom collapsed and Angkor was abandoned.

In other cases, the large populations of settled societies and their consumer needs eventually overburdened the environment.

The United States began as a nation of immigrant farmers seeking new lands to plant, drawn ever westward.

(Music of "America the Beautiful!")

"Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.
For purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plains."

(Music of "America the Beautiful!")

Tearing through the tough matted grass of the Great Plains, farmers turned the rich fertile soil and created a cornucopia of wheat. But this uncontrolled intensive planting resulted in an alarming drop in the water table and increased the loss of top soil through erosion.

When drought and heavy winds came, the result was the creation of an unanticipated nightmare, the "Dust Bowl." It was one of the chief contributors to the misery of the "Great Depression" of the 1930's.

Dispossessed farmers from the plains of Oklahoma and Nebraska trekked west in vast caravans in search of a new promised land.

Novelist John Steinbeck described this migration in his classic work, The Grapes of Wrath.

"They swarmed across the land like locusts, hungry for food, for work, for a place to rest. A people on the move, fearful, desperate."

But as the hard times eased, the fear and the desperation subsided. The farmers of the Midwest resettled. Much of the Great Plains became fertile again. The combines rolled once more to harvest the amber waves of grain.

Modern machinery and more intensive farming techniques have transformed the American farm. At the turn of the century nearly half the U.S. population worked on the land. Now less than 3% are farmers.

Although the United States was built on, and is still sustained by agriculture, in many ways Americans have ceased to be an agrarian people.

All over the world, people are being forced to redefine their relationship to the land that feeds us all.

People in all societies based on intensive agriculture must struggle to balance the needs of their large populations against the productive capacity of their land.

More than half the world's population subsists on rice.

These fields on the island of Taiwan are among the most productive in the world. Many of these plots are cultivated two, or even three times, a year. One cultivated acre can feed seven people.

As in Angkor this high yield is largely attributable to expert water management, the design and controlled use of irrigation to assure continuous fertility.

Draft animals like the water buffalo dramatically increase the amount of energy available for input into the land. They assist in plowing, harrowing and tilling; that is, turning over the earth, leveling it, and clearing it of weeds.

Some fine harrowing is human powered, however, to guarantee even spacing and straight rows.

Fertilizer is applied two or three times a season, the first, during land preparation. Heavy applications are required for high yields. Herbicides are applied to control weeds and combat insect pests and plant diseases.

Wet rice culture is labor-intensive. The greater number of farmers working, the greater the yield, and consequently, the greater the number of people that can be fed.

This is linked to the growth of large families and the emergence of government which regulates all aspects of food production and distribution, and provides the social controls necessary to keep order in large and diverse societies.

The Taiwanese have developed hybrids of the rice plant which are shorter in the stem, stiffer in the stock and which produce many tillers from each root. This creates stocks that are more resistant to wind, disease and pests, and gives the maximum number of heads per plant.

A power tiller can do five times the work of a water buffalo, thus increasing productivity. But this isn't the only reason that machines are used.

In a land where the children of farming families flee to the city in search of less arduous and more lucrative jobs, labor shortage has made them a necessity.

But many rice farmers of Taiwan continue to perform their traditional tasks methodically, and precisely by hand.

While rice is the staple of East Asia, another grain, wheat, sustains much of the rest of the world.

In Afghanistan, farmers produce wheat much as they have for some 8,000 years. Yet this, too, is intensive agriculture.

Like the farmers of Taiwan, the Afghanis also rely on an elaborate irrigation system. But here it provides an additional function. It provides the power to turn the millstone to make flour from the grain.

In Afghanistan as elsewhere, intensive agriculture has brought about many profound social consequences.

In town farmers could find customers among non-farmers for their surpluses and with their earnings they could buy what they could not produce for themselves.

A new and powerful institution developed, "the market," and with it, commerce and trade.

A monetary value was ascribed to goods and services, producing profound transformation in human relations. The merchant appeared on the scene, the banker, trades people.

Along came powerful distinctions in wealth and access to power and prestige. The pace of specialization quickened, producing a host of professionals and artisans.

(Music of sitar and drums.)

Narr: Along with specialization the territorial state appeared with its panoply of leaders, bureaucrats and officials,
sanctioned by religious hierarchy, and protected by professional armies.

Yet this stratified social life would not be possible without the farmers who produced the wheat that feeds the soldiers, artisans and public officials.

On the island of Bali in Indonesia, farmers, officials and religious leaders are organized into a complex social order aimed at regulating the agricultural cycle in one of the most intensely farmed areas of the world.

Bali has supported itself by growing rice for more than a thousand years.

Across the island, farmers have traditionally shared the available water from rainfall, from the rivers and lakes, and from an intricate web of irrigation canals and tunnels. This cooperation has enabled them to grow several crops of rice each year without pesticides or outside fertilizer.

This sharing of a scarce resource was made possible by a religious system organized around a belief that water is sacred to the Goddess Dui Danwu.

The temple to Dui Danwu is located at Lake Batur, the crater of an extinct volcano and the most elevated water source on the island.

(Music of gamelan orchestra.)

Narr: At every stage of rice growing there are rituals. And for each ritual the participation of the priests of the water temples is essential.

Holy water is distributed through a network of water temples culminating in the home of the water goddess at Lake Batur. The flow of holy water from upstream to downstream mirrors the flow of irrigation water.

At each source of water along an irrigation system, each lake, spring, main canal, and even, the tiny canals leading into each farmer's field, there is a temple or shrine.

The planting cycle is carefully regulated by a system of priests under the ultimate supervision of the Juradei, the high priest at the temple at Lake Batur. This traditional cycle insures that every farmer has enough water to produce rice and also plays an important role in pest control.

If all the fields in a large area harvest at the same time, there's nothing for the rice pests to eat, and pest populations decline. Ducks are released into the fields to eat whatever pests remain. But since the ducks would also eat the young seedlings, they must leave the fields before the next planting.

The result is a carefully balanced ecosystem under the guidance of the temple priests producing enough rice to support Bali's dense population.

Like the Balinese, most people in the world today live in complex societies based on intensive agriculture. And like the Afghanis, we have become an urban culture.

But as our occupations become more specialized and as we become increasingly industrialized, we no longer relate directly to the land. The food in our supermarkets seems remote from the soil. It is easy to forget that it is, in fact, a product of nature.

And that each of our cultures is initimately related to the ways we chose to use our world's natural resources. Modern society would not have been possible without that first act of placing seeds and plants into the ground.

(Afghan singing and music of flute.)