Why Cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-farming Transitions in Southeast Asia (McDonald Institute Monographs) (Hardback)
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Short Description for Why Cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-farming Transitions in Southeast Asia Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: "farming" and "foraging"? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume. Inherent within the question "Why Cultivate?" are people's relationships with the physical world: are th...
Full description- Publisher: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
- Published: 31 December 2011
- Format: Hardback 142 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Social & Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | Ancient History: To C 500 CE | Archaeology | Prehistoric Archaeology
- ISBN 13: 9781902937588 ISBN 10: 1902937589
- Sales rank: 898,727
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Full description for Why Cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging-farming Transitions in Southeast Asia
Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: "farming" and "foraging"? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume. Inherent within the question "Why Cultivate?" are people's relationships with the physical world: are they primarily to do with subsistence and economics or with social and/or cultural forces? The answers given by the contributors are complex. On a practical level they argue that there is a continuum rather than a sharp break between different levels of management of the environment, but rice-growing usually represents a profound break in people's relations to their cultural and symbolic landscapes. An associated point made by the archaeologists is that the "deep histories" of foraging-farming lifeways that are emerging in this region sit uncomfortably with the theory that foraging was replaced by farming in the mid Holocene as a result of a migration of Austronesian-speaking Neolithic farmers from southern China and Taiwan.

