Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. (context now chiefly North America English) One's path through life; a manner, a lifestyle or behaviour, now especially when seen as traditional.
Wikipedia
The expression lifeway is a fairly new technical term that is not yet in most general dictionaries and for which most textbooks instead still use "way of life". The American Heritage Dictionary defines a lifeway as: "1. A customary manner of living; a way of life. 2. A custom, practice, or art: the traditional lifeways of a tribal society."
In several disciplines, lifeway is used in the sense of the ecological position of human beings within a larger ecosystem - such as a food web. It is studied by cultural ecology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. The most basic distinction usually made between lifeways is that between the hunter-gatherer (including fishers) and that of the farmer (including the shepherd, goatherd or rancher) who domesticates wildlife to raise for food and clothing.
Urban lifeways (trading on relationships or information, manufacturing which requires infrastructural capital at hand, etc.) are studied by urban economics but are also technically lifeways in the same sense as that of the hunter-gatherer and farmer.
Usage examples of "lifeway".
He had also hoped to discover information about the lives his people had led before their move north which could help guide him in building a new lifeway in High Hallack, one acceptable to all their number, male and female alike, but he had not been able to unearth anything of significance despite all his efforts and the untiring assistance of his hosts, not then and not since.
They may not see it as any advantage to have their daughters and granddaughters move into the lifeway followed by their counterparts in most other races.
Xorock, Gurrin, and Langhold will violently oppose any such agreement, any easing of our treatment of our females, any altering of our lifeway whatsoever.
Our lifeway offers an alternative, and a few might find it attractive enough to adopt or partly adopt it.
The entrance to the plasma center was from the side street, up four cement steps, through a set of glass doors stenciled in blue with the name Bloodlines as well as a parent corporation, Lifeways Inc.
If I am a bit cross today, it's because I recall how the things I loved, moors, woods, old towns full of kindness, old lifeways, I've seen them crumbling and by now they may be gone.
He was a novice, but like most Kithfolk he had passed considerable time in virtualities, which included forests, lifeways of the past, and the like.
And there are other malcontents, misfits in religion, politics, lifeways — and some who look at the stars with a purekind of longing.