Compare and Contrast Horticultural Societies With Agricultural Societies

Hunting-and-Gathering Societies

Starting time about 250,000 years ago,
hunting-and-gathering societiesSocieties of a few dozen members whose food is obtained from hunting animals and gathering plants and vegetation.

are the oldest ones we know of; few of them remain today, partly because modern societies have encroached on their being. As the name
hunting-and-gathering
implies, people in these societies both hunt for food and gather plants and other vegetation. They have few possessions other than some elementary hunting-and-gathering equipment. To ensure their common survival, everyone is expected to assistance notice food and likewise to share the food they find. To seek their nutrient, hunting-and-gathering peoples often move from identify to place. Because they are nomadic, their societies tend to be quite small, often consisting of only a few dozen people.

Beyond this elementary summary of the type of life these societies atomic number 82, anthropologists take also charted the nature of social relationships in them. One of their nigh important findings is that hunting-and-gathering societies are fairly egalitarian. Although men exercise nearly of the hunting and women most of the gathering, perhaps reflecting the biological differences between the sexes discussed earlier, women and men in these societies are roughly equal. Because hunting-and-gathering societies have few possessions, their members are too fairly equal in terms of wealth and power, equally virtually no wealth exists.

Horticultural and Pastoral Societies

Horticultural and pastoral societies both adult nigh ten,000–12,000 years ago. In
horticultural societiesSocieties that utilise hoes and other simple tools to raise small amounts of crops.
, people use hoes and other simple hand tools to raise crops. In
pastoral societiesSocieties that raise livestock as their primary source of food.
, people heighten and herd sheep, goats, camels, and other domesticated animals and use them as their major source of nutrient and as well, depending on the animal, as a ways of transportation. Some societies are either primarily horticultural or pastoral, while other societies combine both forms. Pastoral societies tend to be at least somewhat nomadic, as they ofttimes have to motility to find better grazing land for their animals. Horticultural societies, on the other hand, tend to be less nomadic, as they are able to keep growing their crops in the same location for some time. Both types of societies often manage to produce a surplus of food from vegetable or beast sources, respectively, and this surplus allows them to merchandise their extra food with other societies. It as well allows them to have a larger population size than hunting-and-gathering societies that often reaches several hundred members.

Accompanying the greater complexity and wealth of horticultural and pastoral societies is greater inequality in terms of gender and wealth than is found in hunting-and-gathering societies. In pastoral societies, wealth stems from the number of animals a family owns, and families with more animals are wealthier and more than powerful than families with fewer animals. In horticultural societies, wealth stems from the amount of state a family owns, and families with more country are wealthier and more powerful.

Ane other side effect of the greater wealth of horticultural and pastoral societies is greater conflict. Equally merely mentioned, sharing of food is a key norm in hunting-and-gathering societies. In horticultural and pastoral societies, still, wealth (and more specifically, the differences in wealth) leads to disputes and even fighting over country and animals. Whereas hunting-and-gathering peoples tend to exist very peaceful, horticultural and pastoral peoples tend to be more than ambitious.

Agricultural Societies

Agricultural societiesSocieties that cultivate big amounts of crops with plows and other relatively advanced tools and equipment.

adult some v,000 years ago in the Center East, cheers to the invention of the turn. When pulled past oxen and other large animals, the plough allowed for much more than cultivation of crops than the unproblematic tools of horticultural societies permitted. The bicycle was also invented nigh the same time, and written language and numbers began to be used. The development of agricultural societies thus marked a watershed in the development of human order. Ancient Arab republic of egypt, China, Greece, and Rome were all agricultural societies, and India and many other large nations today remain primarily agricultural.

We have already seen that the greater food production of horticultural and pastoral societies led them to go larger than hunting-and-gathering societies and to have more trade and greater inequality and disharmonize. Agricultural societies continue all these trends. First, because they produce then much more than nutrient than horticultural and pastoral societies, they often become quite large, with their numbers sometimes reaching into the millions. 2d, their huge food surpluses lead to extensive trade, both within the society itself and with other societies. Third, the surpluses and trade both atomic number 82 to degrees of wealth unknown in the earlier types of societies and thus to unprecedented inequality, exemplified in the appearance for the first time of peasants, people who work on the land of rich landowners. Finally, agricultural societies’ greater size and inequality also produce more conflict. Some of this conflict is internal, every bit rich landowners struggle with each other for even greater wealth and power, and peasants sometimes appoint in revolts. Other disharmonize is external, every bit the governments of these societies seek other markets for merchandise and greater wealth.

If gender inequality becomes somewhat greater in horticultural and pastoral societies than in hunting-and-gathering ones, it becomes very pronounced in agricultural societies. An of import reason for this is the hard, physically taxing piece of work in the fields, much of it using big plow animals, that characterizes these societies. And so, also, women are often pregnant in these societies, because big families provide more bodies to work in the fields and thus more income. Considering men do more than of the concrete labor in agronomical societies—labor on which these societies depend—they take caused greater power over women (Brettell & Sargent, 2009).Brettell, C. B., & Sargent, C. F. (Eds.). (2009).
Gender in cross-cultural perspective
(fifth ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
In the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, agricultural societies are much more likely than hunting-and-gathering ones to believe men should dominate women (run across Figure 5.2 “Type of Society and Presence of Cultural Conventionalities That Men Should Dominate Women”).

Industrial Societies

Industrial societiesLarge societies that rely on machines and factories as their primary modes of economic product.

emerged in the 1700s equally the development of machines and then factories replaced the turn and other farm machinery as the principal mode of production. The first machines were steam- and water-powered, but somewhen, of course, electricity became the main source of ability. The growth of industrial societies marked such a dandy transformation in many of the earth’s societies that we at present telephone call the menstruum from about 1750 to the tardily 1800s the Industrial Revolution. This revolution has had enormous consequences in nearly every aspect of society, some for the better and some for the worse.

On the positive side, industrialization brought about technological advances that improved people’s health and expanded their life spans. As noted earlier, there is also a greater emphasis in industrial societies on individualism, and people in these societies typically enjoy greater political liberty than those in older societies. Compared to agricultural societies, industrial societies also accept lowered economic and gender inequality. In industrial societies, people do have a greater chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than was truthful in earlier societies, and rags-to-riches stories keep to illustrate the opportunity available under industrialization. That said, we volition encounter in later capacity that economical and gender inequality remains substantial in many industrial societies.

On the negative side, industrialization meant the rising and growth of big cities and concentrated poverty and degrading weather in these cities, as the novels of Charles Dickens poignantly remind us. This urbanization changed the character of social life by creating a more than impersonal and less traditional
Gesellschaft
society. It also led to riots and other urban violence that, amongst other things, helped fuel the rise of the mod law force and forced manufacturing plant owners to improve workplace conditions. Today industrial societies consume most of the world’s resources, pollute its environment to an unprecedented degree, and take compiled nuclear arsenals that could undo thousands of years of human society in an instant.

Postindustrial Societies

We are increasingly living in what has been called the
it historic period
(or only
data age), as wireless technology vies with machines and factories as the basis for our economy. Compared to industrial economies, we at present accept many more service jobs, ranging from housecleaning to secretarial work to repairing computers. Societies in which this transition is happening are moving from an industrial to a postindustrial phase of evolution. In
postindustrial societiesSocieties in which information technology and service jobs have replaced machines and manufacturing jobs as the principal dimension of the economy.
, and then, information technology and service jobs have replaced machines and manufacturing jobs as the primary dimension of the economy (Bell, 1999).Bong, D. (Ed.). (1999).
The coming of mail-industrial lodge: A venture in social forecasting. New York, NY: Basic Books.
If the car was the sign of the economical and social times dorsum in the 1920s, then the smartphone or netbook/laptop is the sign of the economic and social future in the early years of the 21st century. If the manufacturing plant was the dominant workplace at the beginning of the 20th century, with workers standing at their positions by conveyor belts, then cell phone, computer, and software companies are dominant industries at the beginning of the 21st century, with workers, virtually all of them much better educated than their earlier factory counterparts, huddled over their wireless technology at home, at work, or on the road. In short, the Industrial Revolution has been replaced by the Information Revolution, and we now have what has been called an
information guild
(Hassan, 2008).Hassan, R. (2008).
The information society: Cyber dreams and digital nightmares. Malden, MA: Polity.

As part of postindustrialization in the The states, many manufacturing companies take moved their operations from U.S. cities to overseas sites. Since the 1980s, this process has raised unemployment in cities, many of whose residents lack the college pedagogy and other training needed in the information sector. Partly for this reason, some scholars fear that the information historic period volition aggravate the disparities nosotros already have betwixt the “haves” and “accept-nots” of society, as people defective a college education will accept even more problem finding gainful employment than they do now (W. J. Wilson, 2009).Wilson, W. J. (2009). The economic plight of inner-city black males. In Due east. Anderson (Ed.),
Confronting the wall: Poor, immature, black, and male
(pp. 55–70). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
In the international arena, postindustrial societies may as well have a leg upwardly over industrial or, especially, agricultural societies as the globe moves ever more into the information age.