Hello,
Could you please read my short Anthropology essay and give me some feedback?
The prompt is:
What is the most accurate description of the relative importance of hunting versus gathering in foraging societies in terms of nutrition? In terms of place in society?
Thank you in advance.
Frederic
Anthropology considers the food acquisition techniques as factors of great importance to categorize the impressive array of human cultures. First in terms of emergence and importance, the subsistence pattern of early or contemporaneous uncivilized societies, taken in the literal sense of "non-urbanized societies," has been the foraging model, which encompasses the hunt and the food gathering. The preponderance of hunting over the gathering, or vice versa, is not as conspicuous as one could imagine. Those two food acquisition techniques have profound consequences in terms of nutrition and place in society because they influence the health, the labour specialization, and the social stratification.
In the first place, the comparison of hunt with gathering permits to evaluate the nutritional consequences for the people that belong to foraging societies. Foragers have necessitated meeting their caloric needs through stable supplies of food, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to avoid malnutrition or starvation. Hunting and gathering have provided them with about the same amount of proteins, although they have needed to collect large quantities of edible plants to equal the outcome of proteins supplied by the relatively small pieces of meat. However, gathering has been less energy consuming than hunt because foragers could more simply locate vegetables in the forest or in the open ground than animals. Besides, even the scavenged animals have required humans covered longer distances to amass available carcasses than to cover distances to accumulate vegetable food. The major implication of the concurrent use of hunting and gathering has been the development of a generalized alimentation through a mixed diet. Such a varied nutritional regime offers the foragers flexible eating habits that permit them to conserve a high income of proteins, even in times of paucity of either animal flesh or eatable vegetation, and thus escape starvation.
In the second place, the contrast between hunt and gathering allows to appraise the structural repercussions in foraging societies. In the light of the foraging techniques, including hunting and gathering, one is not amazed to discover that the foragers emphasize a division of labour based on gender. Indeed, each individual is catalogued in a gender that is associated with specific tasks. For example, generally, men hunt and women gather. Nonetheless, the labour specialization is not the rule, because individuals, independently of their gender, may perform duties that are usually assigned to other genders. Subsequently, egalitarianism is the normality for there are no formalized, and even sometimes recognized, differences between individuals in a group. Such parity conducts to generate societies without any class, and therefore, without social stratification.
Furthermore, hunting and gathering deeply influence the foraging societies far beyond their immediate need of food, because the produce of hunting and gathering diverges only in terms of methods of food acquisition. Indeed, although at first sight those techniques seem to have relatively opposite effects on foraging societies, they are at the origin of a generalized dentition and diet that enhance the health and the chances of survival of individuals in a group. In the end, that maximizes the chances of reproductive success and minimizes the risks to see many individuals selected against by selective agents during the process of natural selection. Consequently, from an evolutionary point of view, hunting and gathering in foraging societies prevent the human species from extinction through adaptive modus operandi to collect food supplies.
Finally, because of the proximity of the individuals with the nature in their daily life, and particularly when they search for their alimentation through both hunting and gathering, foragers develop a profound sense of respect tinged with admiration for the natural phenomena. Furthermore, due to their lack of scientific knowledge, they tend to acquire deferential behaviours towards nature that are often translated into a wide panel of diverse religious practices. To adhere to the diversity of their requirements, such as protective or prophetic requests, and of what appears as supernatural, foragers construct a miscellaneous ensemble of supreme beings. Thus, polytheism becomes the transcription of the worldview of foragers, formed through their conception of the social order in addition to their fear of lacking food supplies to forage, into religious matters. Consequently, the description of the relative importance of hunting versus gathering in foraging societies in terms of nutrition and place in society is not limited to practical observations but it provides anthropologists with an in depth understanding of the culture of those societies.
Greetings!
An excellent essay! I have just a few editing suggestions:
in the first place, the comparison of hunting with gathering permits us to evaluate the nutritional consequences for the people that belong to foraging societies.
gathering has been less energy consuming than hunting because foragers could more simply locate vegetables in the forest or in the open ground than animals.
Besides, even scavenging for animals has required humans to cover longer distances to amass available carcasses than to cover distances to accumulate vegetable food
Good work!
Thanks,
Sarah, EssayForum.com
