Subsistence Practices/Making a Living

Sign up for Subsistence Practices/Making a Living, which informs students about the many ways human beings adapt to their environments and learn to make a living as the Orma pastoralist in East Africa above illustrates. This course takes approximately four weeks. Each lesson should take about a week; but you can work at your own pace. Cultural Anthropology seeks to view each cultural concept in its broadest terms. This lesson brings understanding that all people everywhere must learn the skills appropriate for subsistence practices and making a living. Such skills and adaptations are essential for survival.

For this series of lessons there is a textbook required. The same textbook, Food, Globalization and Sustainability, by Peter Oosterveer and David A. Sonnenfeld, is used for the Food and Culture series of lessons as well.

Selected chapters from this textbook are required reading. The textbook may be acquired at Amazon.com or from other booksellers. At Amazon the textbook is available for renting at a reasonable cost.

After completing this series of lessons on Subsistence Practices/Making a Living, students will come to realize how production, acquisition, and consumption of food is very much about Subsistence Practices and Making a Living worldwide; and that it is interconnected and related to the topic of Food and Culture.

Both topics are involved in understanding how human culture and subsistence practices works and how cultural patterns are involved in sustainability and preservation, not only of human and all flora and fauna life forms, but the earth and its many complex ecosystems in which living things thrive.

Students will find these four lessons extremely valuable in understanding their own subistence patterns and how they relate to making a living. Knowledge gained here translates to understanding better one’s own day to day living patterns.