How family structure is related to the subsistence system?

Question

How family structure is related to the subsistence system?

Answer 1

because family is the basest political unit.. and economy and government politics goes hand in hand..

take for example the philippines..

when the Spanish colonized it, they made the conquest much faster through the concentration of the population surround the plaza (or park).. but this was also so that the encomienda system [the economic strategy] could be implemented.. each family was given a parcel of land to till and grow crops in.. its expected that the kids would help in the production so the quota expected of them is quite very very high..

in terms of economic output,the realtionship of family structure and the subsistence is really only quite correlational..

but since the term subsistence is more fitting to mean the countryside, the number in a family and the traditional role-playing they have plays a major role in keeping the state of their particular wage-generating ways..

in one area in the philippines [in ifugao..],

the traditional roles in a family no longer applies that much (because of western influences), therefore no matter how the kids are required to cultivate their particular plots in the the Ifugao Rice Terraces, most would just choose to leave for the nearby cities.. (though rice farming is not the everything in their life, its part of their income-generation as well as the traditional subsistence of their people..)

Answer 2

There are some functionalist style explanations that tie particular kinship structures to particular agricultural or environmental contexts.  For example, some people have asserted that polygyny is particularly associated with hoe agriculture because in these agricultural systems women were primarily responsible for working the land and so it was beneficial for a man to have multiple wives to work his land.

That said, many contemporary anthropologists are fairly reluctant to accept these ideas in such blatantly functionalist terms.  Generally, people these days thing that there is a mix of factors that lead to particular kinship systems and subsistence systems don't play the only or deciding factor.

I don't know if this answered your question or not...