Subsistence means living in a permanently fragile equilibrium between alimentary needs and the means for satisfying them.

The following is a list of subsistence techniques: Media:Example. ...

• Hunting and Gathering techniques, also known as Foraging:
  • freeganism — involves gathering of discarded food in the context of an urban environment
  • gleaning — involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields
• Cultivation:
  • Horticulture — plant cultivation, based on the use of simple tools.
  • subsistence agriculture — agricultural cultivation involving continuous use of arable (crop) land, and is more labor-intensive than horticulture.
• Pastoralism, the raising of grazing animals:
  • Pastoral nomadism — all members of the pastoral society follow the herd throughout the year.
  • Transhumance or agro-pastoralism — part of the society follows the herd, while the other part maintains a home village.
  • Ranch agriculture — non-nomadic pastoralism with a defined territory

• Alternative ends : people devote their time, resources, and energy to five broad categories of ends — subsistence, replacement, social, ceremonial, and rent.
  • Subsistence fund — work is done to replace calories lost through life activities.
  • Replacement fund — work is expended maintaining the technology necessary for life.
  • Social fund — work is expended to establish and maintain social ties.
  • Ceremonial fund — work is expended to fulfill ritual obligations.
  • Rent fund — work is expended to satisfy the obligations owed political or economic superiors.

• Distribution and Exchange:
  • Redistribution
  • Reciprocity — exchange between social equals.
  • Potlatching — a widely studied ritual in which sponsors (helped by their entourages) gave away resources and manufactured wealth while generating prestige for themselves.
  • LETS — Local Exchange Trading Systems.

In anthropology, the hunter-gatherer way of life is that led by certain societies of the Neolithic Era based on the exploitation of wild plants and animals. ... Foraging just means looking for food (or, metaphorically, anything else). ... Freeganism is the practice of minimising ones adverse impact on the environment, animals, and human lives by limiting participation in the capitalist economy. ... Gleaning is the collection of leftover crops from farmers fields after they have been mechanically harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. ... Tillage (American English), or cultivation (UK) is the agricultural preparation of the soil to receive seeds. ... Look up horticulture in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Subsistence agriculture is agriculture carried out for survival — with few or no crops available for sale. ... In geography, arable land (from Latin arare, to plough ) is a form of agricultural land use, meaning land that can be (and is) used for growing crops. ... In a draw in a mountainous region, a shepherd guides a flock of about 20 sheep amidst scrub and olive trees. ... Communities of nomadic people move from place to place, rather than settling down in one location. ... Transhumance is the seasonal movement of livestock between mountainous and lowland pastures. ... Ranching is the raising of cattle or sheep on rangeland, although one might also speak of ranching with regard to less common livestock such as elk, bison or emu. ... A calorie (cal) is a unit of thermal energy, equivalent to about 4. ... A ritual is a formalised, predetermined set of symbolic actions generally performed in a particular environment at a regular, recurring interval. ... This page deals with mathematical distributions. ... For redistribution in the policital sense, please see redistricting. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... A potlatch is a ceremony among certain Native American/First Nations peoples on the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia such as the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakiutl (Kwakwakawakw). ... Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are local, non-profit exchange networks in which all kinds of goods and services can be traded without the need for money. ...

See also

• List of alternative lifestyles
• List of things which are neither production nor consumption
• Staple food
• Society