Introduction
There are many ways of making a living in today’s world, so numerous in fact, that we can only begin to discuss even a few in this introductory series of lessons on Subsistencea method whereby humans are able to continue their existence; condition of being able to stay alive; practices that maintain survival Practices/Making a Living.
These series of lessons are meant to give students the larger picture of how humanity first began figuring out ways to make a living, and how cultural adaptationculture is the primary way that humans adapt to their environmental surroundings More is the main way in which groups begin to incorporate new innovations and inventions into the cultural patterns of their everyday lives.
One of the definitions in this lesson has to do with nomadic societiessocieties that make a living by herding or moving from place to place; nomads have no fixed home and move according to the seasons in search of food, water and grazing land, which we have discussed only briefly. Nomadic societies are those that move around often, either seasonally, or for reasons of better pastures and/or fresh water. The following film demonstrates the nomadic lifestyle of people who inhabit the Mongolia. The people who make a living in nomadic societies usually live in tents, and eat very basic foods for obvious reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLanCgALwlo
See their cultural adaptations of clothing, shelters, foodany nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink, or that plants absorb, in order to maintain life and growth, and transportation methods. You can see some modernity integrated with their traditional ways of herding.
Also, look for the alternative way of education. Children are taught basic skills for living a nomadic lifestyle. You also see children questioning the “old” ways of life, as well as segregated gendergender is culturally constructed; the word may have various meanings in various cultures; generally it is the state of being male or female (biologically), but is more often used with reference to social and cultural differences, which may or may not be biological gender is used in various languages such as Spanish, where nouns are preceded with an article such as la (feminine) or lo (masculine) - many languages have "gendered" speech, including Latin, Greek, Russian, and German, but grammatical gender is very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex labor divisions (discussed previously). Religionan organized system of beliefs expressed through rituals and symbols and concerned with the supernatural in some way; the way a society holds itself together and "sells" its ethics and standards to the next generation - no culture has ever survived without religion More is also usually important to nomads.
We cannot learn about ways of making a living without talking about the peasantry, their lifestyles, and how they have contributed to the overall health and well-being of entire societies. The peasantthe word peasant was formally defined by Eric Wolf, cultural anthropologist, who insisted that peasants were no more than "rural cultivators" whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers who uses the surpluses to underwrite their own standard of living and in turn distributes the remainder to other groups in the society who do not farm, but need to be fed because they produce goods and services useful to the society as a whole societies are hard to get a visual history of their lives, as they leave behind little literature describing their plight. As the definition points out, peasants were mostly “rural cultivators,” who gave up their surplus to lords or government entities that owned the land that they farmed.
In all the ways of making a living, which we have discussed, sustainabilitythe basic definition of sustainability is maintaining ecological balance; but for our purposes in studying human culture, we add two more dimensions of sustainability: social and economical, so sustainability is about maintaining social, economic, and ecological balance (as much as possible) is a common denominator. As peasant societies became the norm in medieval times (1100-1500), sustainability was often only the main goal for the elites who made their wealth off of the peasants’ labors, and not the sustainability of the peasants’ lives who produced the agricultural products. In the 1300’s, the peasants organized a revolt, to the surprise of their landholders. Many peasants lost their lives, and in fact were slaughtered ruthlessly by their governments until the monarchs and lords realized that killing the peasants was cutting off vital sources of food supplies for their lavish tables.
The “rural cultivators” in medieval times may have been peasants, but in the agrarian societies in the 18th and 19th centuries of the United States, in the Anglo-American Global Villagethe Anglo-American culture region is all of North America plus Alaska and Iceland and the included islands in the region, such as the Baffin Island of Canada - and excludes Mesoamerica below the Mexican-American border, such workers were known as “sharecroppers.” My own great-grandparents lived and worked on lands that were not their own. They were expected to turn over surplus agricultural products to the landowners, and during times of warWar: A state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state. – to the government. They were also expected to pay taxes on the commodities they produced. These people were extremely poor, and fit the definition of peasant perfectly. They indeed lived in peasant societies on the fringes of industrialization, which is the next topic to be discussed.
There is an advertisement in the middle of the following film about peasantry, which you may click to end the ad; then the film continues uninterrupted.
In this entertaining film you see peasantry lifestyles portrayed in the stereotyped way we most often think of them. Their lifestyles are examined in depth and a different lifestyle, other than the stereotypical, emerges so that we have a more accurate portrayal of the peasants of yesterday, as well as those who may be labeled peasants of today. Ancient peasants are examined both biologically and culturally, in order that we may get a better view of their cultureculture is not genetically inherited, it is shared, learned, and dynamic- never static and cultural patterns. This film by the BBC, of course, is just about those peasants who live(d) and work(ed) in the European Global Villagethe European culture region includes Europe, excluding those parts where the Slavic language is dominant, but also includes Greenland along with islands associated with the region before industrialization processes began.
Now we must examine the onset of industrialization and how it has affected the ways of making a living in all cultures in the world. Cultural researchers agree that there are probably no populations now on earth that have not been introduced to some form of modernity and industrialization.
The following film is about the onset of industrialization in the United States, the Anglo-American Global Villagea place in the world where your ancestor may have lived,  the world is divided into cultural areas, each area designated as a global village, see the Global Villages Map., but the same processes were happening across the ocean in the European Global Village as well. Both of these Global Villageson this site Global Villages are representatives of the 11 dominant culture regions, as designated by cultural geography maps have made contributions to other global villages, which has become part of the whole globalizationall nations and peoples are interconnected in today's world due to massive flow of goods and services, importation of labor, immigration, technology, finance capital, outsourcing of businesses, and infectious diseases; globalization promotes rapid culture change and adaptations, which blur the lines of cultural components More process.
The film is an example of what industrialization has meant to the human familya family is group of people consisting of parents and children living together in a household; family members can also live away from parents or in a different household across the globe. And as the film points out, industrialization comes with a high price tag of environmental destruction and exploitation of natural resources, as well as destroying wildlife and human habitats.
In the following decades, with billions more people, humanity must learn to lessen the enormous appetites of consumption. How this willa document stating how a person wants real and personal property divided after death More be accomplished lies at the feet of future generationsthose people that are born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively; usually a generation within families is considered about 20 years all over the world, not only in the United States. Finding a way to work together cross-culturally in peaceful endeavors of preservation efforts is the only way such problems can be resolved.
Learning about and understanding others’ cultural patterns and practices, beliefs, and worldviews will hasten cross-culturalof or relating to different cultures or comparisons between them connections between peoples of all walks of life. This website, in some small way, hopes to contribute to this worthy goal.