Primitive agriculture is called horticulture by anthropologists rather than farming because it is carried on like simple gardening, supplementary to hunting and gathering. It differs from farming also in its relatively more primitive technology. It is typically practiced in forests, where the loose soil is easily broken up with a simple stick, rather than on grassy plains with heavy sod. Nor do horticulturalists use fertilizer intensively or crop rotation, terracing, or irrigation. Horticulture is therefore much less productive than agriculture. The villages are small—some no larger than many hunting-gathering settlements—and the overall population density is low compared with farming regions.
Forest horticulturists use fallowing techniques variously called “slash-and-burn,” “shifting cultivation,” and “swidden cultivation” (a northern English term now widely used by anthropologists). After about two years of cropping a plot is left fallow for some years and allowed to revert to secondary forest or bush. Before resuming cultivation the bush may be cut, left to dry, and then burned. The ashes bestow some fertilization, but the foremost benefit of this procedure is that the plot will be relatively weed free at first.
Since the fallowing periods of the plots are much longer than the planted periods, the swidden horticulturalists must gradually encroach on more distant land. Sometimes this results in semisedentary villages when the newly arable plots finally are so distant that a few horticulturalists must start to build huts near the newer fields, to be joined later by others. Such a land-hungry system, in a region of competing populations, greatly increases the chances of conflict. Population dispersal thus becomes a grave threat in horticultural regions. Land for expansion inevitably must be found at the expense of neighbours or by shortening the fallowing periods—which eventually results in lower production.
Many forest tribes—typical are the horticulturalists of the South American tropical forest—constantly maintain a military posture. Large-scale warfare is not usual (because of the lack of political leadership) but raids, cannibalism, torturing of captives, and other forms of belligerence are.
Horticulturalists have more material goods than most hunter-gatherers, though not more than such societies as the Indians of the Northwest Coast. This suggests that the accumulation of domestic goods is related not so much to the higher productivity of the horticulturalists as to their greater stability of settlement.
The most highly developed of aboriginal slash-and-burn horticulturalists were undoubtedly the Maya of Guatemala and Yucatán, who had a chiefdom or primitive state. But this was most exceptional, for almost all other primitive horticulturalists did not go beyond simple tribes with egalitarian and nearly autonomous communities. Any regional confederation was likely to be only on the basis of intermarriage and clanship. Sometimes an ephemeral sort of near-chiefdom arises, founded on the capabilities of a charismatic leader. In Melanesia, where a well-established form of personal politics thrives, the leader is called Big Man or Centre Man.
The Big Man in Melanesia is big because he has a following. He begins with his own family and near relatives and friends, who provide goods that he, on behalf of his group, gives away to other groups at a feast on some ceremonial occasion. He and his faction are feasted reciprocally by others at other times. His ability to redistribute on an increasingly lavish scale to larger groups expands his following. He thus amasses what the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in reporting on the Trobriand Islanders, called a “fund of power.” With the public esteem gained in this economic contest, the Big Man is sought out for giving advice, adjudicating quarrels, planning ceremonies, and admonishing and conciliating. But this is influence, not the true authority that inheres in a status or office in an established hierarchy. A really big Big Man may succeed in integrating a region of several villages, but when he loses to a rival or dies, the unity of the region dissolves until some other unusually influential man unites it again.
In many respects the religion of horticultural peoples resembles that of hunting-gathering peoples. Shamans, life-crisis ceremonies—especially puberty rites—totemism (ceremonies for plant or animal species believed to be ancestral to particular human groups like clans or lineages), and the worship of animistic spirits are common in the religion of many kinds of primitive societies. The egalitarian society does not usually practice ancestor worship as does the hierarchical society. Among horticultural peoples with chiefdoms, the chief’s ancestors, in time, become gods. The most remote ancestors, the founders of the chiefly lineage, are the most important gods; more recent ancestors and those of related but collateral lines have a lesser status. The result is a hierarchy of gods resembling the political hierarchy on Earth. Furthermore, the chiefdoms tend to be theocracies, with the hierarchy of priests closely and functionally related to the political hierarchy.