Subsistence is the action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level.
The following is a list of subsistence techniques:
- Hunting and Gathering techniques, also known as Foraging:
- Artisan fishing — a term which particularly applies to coastal or island ethnic groups using traditional techniques for subsistence fishing.
- Cultivation:
- Horticulture — plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools.
- Subsistence agriculture — agricultural cultivation involving continuous use of arable (crop) land, and is more labor-intensive than horticulture.
- Pastoralism, the raising of grazing animals:
- Pastoral nomadism — all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year.
- Transhumance or agro-pastoralism — part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village.
- Ranch agriculture — non-nomadic pastoralism with a defined territory.
- Distribution and Exchange:
- Redistribution
- Reciprocity — exchange between social equals.
- Potlatching — a widely studied ritual in which sponsors (helped by their entourages) gave away resources and manufactured wealth while generating prestige for themselves.
- LETS — Local Exchange Trading Systems.
- a parasitical society, subsisting on the produce of a separate host society
- raiding
- conquest and taxation
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, subsistence and/or techniques:
“The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935)
“I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper—just running down the edges of different countries and continents, “looking for something” ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)