Showing papers on "Subsistence agriculture published in 1976"

The crisis of slave subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution.

Abstract: tT HE sharp reduction of trade between the United States and the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution had far-reaching consequences. Before the Revolution the resources of the sugar colonies had been concentrated on producing and exporting tropical staples to the extent that the islands were highly dependent upon the continental colonies for plantation equipment and supplies. Curtailment of trade set in motion a series of crises, resulting in efforts to expand alternative overseas sources of supply and markets, and to diversify the island economies. Most critical was the problem of providing subsistence for the slaves, who had been largely supplied with North American foodstuffs in the preRevolutionary period. Compounding this problem was an unprecedented series of hurricanes and tropical storms that denuded the islands of vegetation and left the inhabitants without reserves of locally grown foodstuffs. The calamities did not end with the Treaty of Paris in I783, for both hurricanes and trade restrictions continued to plague planters and slaves for some years. The responses varied from island to island, but in no case were adequate measures taken to provide insurance against scarcity and famine. Together with war and natural disasters, American secession from the British Empire and British mercantile policies resulted in a subsistence crisis that bore heavily upon the slaves in the West Indies.

Subsistence Strategy in the Fish and Hare Period, Northern Ontario: The Weagamow Ojibwa, 1880-1920

Abstract: An original model is proposed to describe the subsistence strategy during a period when fish and hare had become the primary survival resource for certain Subarctic Algonquians--a period hitherto neglected in the literature. The model consists of a "home base" and its zones of exploitation that can expand and contract with changes in resource availability. Different patterns are described that suggest environmental diversity within the region. Three underlying principles are outlined that embody the knowledge required for carrying out these adaptive strategies. Detailed field data collected over the past seventeen years at Weagamow Lake, Ontario, were supplemented with archival records to reconstruct settlement and demographic patterns, environmental conditions, and specific food-getting techniques. Only brief attention could be given to relevant sociopolitical aspects that demonstrate the highly adaptive and flexible nature of Ojibwa society, in this report on some of the accumulated Weagamow Lake data.

A note on crop mixtures under indigenous conditions in Northern Nigeria

Abstract: This note contends that crop mixtures are employed by farmers primarily as risk precautions and that the immediate objective of farmers is not only one of profit maximisation but also of stability of income. The results of an income stability model employed to verify this hypothesis seem to agree relatively well with existing information in parts of Northern Nigeria.

Unrewarding Wealth: The Commercialization and Collapse of Agriculture in a Spanish Basque Town

Abstract: This work contains a history of farming in a Spanish Basque town where the farmers changed their subsistence farms into highly profitable commercial enterprises in response to demand created by tourism and industrialisation. In the period of highest profits however, the young Basques began to abandon their farms and turned to factory work at a much lower standard of living. The institutional problems within both the farm families and the local municipality are described along with the Basque ideas about the dignity of work to help explain why such successful maximisers of economic gain should ultimately reject economic rewards in favour of other values. Davyyd Greenwood carefully examines the relationships between workers of economic gain and the institutional and cultural aspects of human behaviour. In particular he argues that human behaviour is a complex mix of motivations and that our methods must reflect this complexity.

Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use As Factors for Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England

Abstract: During the seventeenth century, European colonists employed many arguments to rationalize the dispossession of the Indians in New England. One such contention maintained that the native populations failed to "improve" their land [in a European manner] and, therefore, the settlers should have fair claim to this "unused" territory. Was this actually the case? What were the exploitation strategies employed by both cultures? Were they complementary or competitive? Was there room for accommodation? It is the view of this writer that there is a close interrelationship between environment, subsistence and society, and that this interrelationship is systemic. From this theoretical perspective, a closer look at the juxtaposition between colonial and Indian subsistence patterns and environmental limitations may help to answer the questions noted above, as well as contribute to a more objective evaluation of the Indian-European contact situation in New England. Since ethnohistorical analyses have traditionally been focused on coastal patterns, the following discussion draws from such data, but its thrust is specifically oriented towards "interior" patterns in the Connecticut River Valley. Early English Agricultural Strategies in New England On May 14, 1636, eight settlers, led by William Pynchon, drew up an agreement to form a town. Although Pynchon wished to establish Springfield, Massachusetts as the location for a trading post to expand his own economic ventures into the Connecticut River Valley, the "plantation at and over against Agawam" was, nevertheless, a corporate enterprise whose purpose was to settle a community with a sufficient population of independent farmers to support a local government and a church. The original document of intent stated that the town should consist of not less than forty, nor more than fifty ETHNOHISTORY 23/1 (Winter 1976) 1 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.147 on Wed, 21 Sep 2016 06:02:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Gathering in the argolid: a subsistence subsystem in a greek agricultural community

Abstract: Gathering as an activity, as a mode of foodgetting, is the concern of this paper, not the gatherer as a type, or category, or subsistence level. In the literature discussing the subsistence pattern of cultivators, too little concern has been given to the role that gathering activities play in the overall subsistence pattern. Though it is essential for the sake of order to define and delimit units or boundaries of a given study, we must not allow these definitions to dictate the nature and the outcome of the studies. Thus, in the case of subsistence, we must look at gathering not only as it occurs among peoples that subsist purely by hunting and gathering activities, but also at the contribution of gathering within food producing economies. It is the aim of this paper to focus on the role that gathering activities play in the overall subsistence pattern in a particular rural community and to draw generalizations from that material about the role of gathering in agricultural subsistence economies in general. Gathering is here defined as: “the exploitation of noncultivated plant and stationary marine resources”. This follows the logic that stationary marine resources require neither the strategy nor the technology involved in the pursuit of moving prey as for true hunting. A cultural-ecological theoretical orientation underlies this analysis, in that gathering is discussed with regard to the use of and relation t o the effective environment. The “effective environment” includes those aspects of the environment that influence man directly, both positively and negatively. as defined by the knowledge and technology at his disposal.’,’ Thus, we shall first briefly consider the environmental context of the Methana cultivator in his subsistence pursuits. The data presented here were collected in the course of field studies conducted between August 1972 and August 1974 on the peninsula of Methana in the Saronic Gulf of Greece.

Marital strategy in Lesotho: the redistribution of migrant earnings

Abstract: Thus Casalis writing in 1861 (1965: 183), and the point of this paper is to illustrate the contemporary relevance of his remark, though I eschew his ethnological preoccupation. Today Basotho migrants go to work in South Africa, in the towns and on the farms and down the mines. Their families, who remain in Lesotho, depend on their wages for subsistence. Because customary bridewealth demands are high, a man must also rely primarily on his earnings in order to marry. As an item of expenditure marriage payments are a heavy strain on subsistence resources; as an item of income they are a substantial supplement to those resources. In the field I developed a strong interest in the intricacies of such payments because of the irony that the migrant labour system, which is the means by which Basotho find the cash to establish legitimate marital relationships, is itself the largest threat to marital stability by enforcing the separation of man and wife for repetitive periods of indefinite duration. The principle of marriage in Lesotho conforms with a prevailing paradigm of marriage with cattle in eastern and southern Africa. The elements of this paradigm, in a simple and generalized form, are the following: (1) The filiation of children depends on the transfer of bridewealth payments from the husband's kin to the wife's kin. (2) Cattle have a special role in the social structure — they form the substance of a marriage sphere of exchange, by contrast with a subsistence sphere of exchange which may be dominated by agricultural produce and earnings in the cash sector. (3) Transactions in cattle are therefore a prime determinant of relationships of affinity between two families, relationships which are often represented in the ethnographic record in diagrammatic form, such that cattle are seen to pass in one direction and wives in the opposite direction. If combined with, for example, preferential cross-cousin marriage, this sort of model produces a circular system

The process of the year among aborigines of the central and south coast of new south wales

Abstract: central and south coast of New South Wales has been the subject of considerable attention from prehistorians and has yielded rich evidence of Aboriginal occupation. There are also many casual observations of economic activities. Some reports of the Aborigines of this area conclude that the population was semi-sedentary, others see it as having been highly mobile (Megaw & Wright 1966:44). Bowdler (1970) regards the sites in the Sydneysouth coast region as representative of a single economy, archaeological variations reflecting the dietary changes of a group of people constituting a single sub-culture who are nomadic in their quest for food. This is also the approach adopted by Lampert who gives primacy in the generalized economy to specialized fishing activities. He sees no reason for coastal people to forsake a seashore existence (1970a: 130). Yet a review of recent literature is inconclusive as an aid in formulating propositions on the influence of economic activities on Aboriginal settlement and the direction any movement might take. It seems worthwhile to generate an independent hypothesis based on observations of variables affecting the activities of coastal hunter gatherers generally and the environmental conditions of the central and south coast of N.S.W. particularly. This proposition when evaluated against both archaeological and ethnographic data appears to stand. I find it useful to express the proposed model in systematic form for it symbolizes processes and activities which can be seen to be a system in themselves as well as forming a part of a complex of systems both social and environmental. As a system the components are related in a casual network of interaction. Although quite different patterns of settlement may be observed for various coastal hunter gatherer societies in different parts of the world, all exhibit regularity in their economic system. A review of ethnographic and/or archaeological sources for a sample of hunter gatherer societies exploiting principally coastal and/or estuarine resources in their subsistence activities1

Indigenous involvement in the cash economy of Lau, Fiji, 1840–1946

Abstract: THE INTEGRATION OF RURAL FIJIANS INTO THE 'MODERN' MARKET ECONOMY is a major policy aim of the government of independent Fiji. Working on the assumptions that subsistence economies are incapable of sustaining significant economic growth and that such growth is necessary and desirable, the government continues to commit itself to one major British-introduced organization through which people in the rural villages are expected to be come involved in the transition to the cash economy: the co-operative society.1 Co-operatives in the eastern Lau group of islands, popularly assumed to be the most 'tradition-bound' in Fiji,2 have been operating as relatively successful business enterprises for upwards of two decades. They have been a major vehicle for a marked increase in villagers' involvement in the cash economy during the post-World War II period.3 But co-operatives in Lau accelerated an already well established market participation. Lauan society had not, at the most basic level of earning a livelihood, remained frozen in some kind of pre-contact primitive state, as if the Tongan conquest of Lau in the 1850s and 60s, European trading from the 1840s and settlement in the 1870s, and cession to Britain in 1874 were separable parts of Lauan history. Even before European contact, Lauans were not simply subsistence farmers producing in passive isolation from all contacts external to the village. They were motivated to produce goods and services not only for their own use but also to trade within the Fiji group and with Tongans.4 An examination of Lauan participation in the market economy from about 1840 to 1946 reveals the indigenous response to new opportunities for economic transactions outside the village and serves to emphasize that the contemporary market participation of rural Fijians in the Province of Lau is the result of a long, dynamic process in which govern ment has played a positive and consciously formative role only recently.

Agricultural growth against a land resource constraint: the philippine experience

Abstract: In this paper, we seek a possible route for accelerating the agricultural growth in tropical monsoon Asia in the face of increasing population pressure on limited land resources. According to a postulate of classical economists like Ricardo [18], population pressure on limited land resources will result eventually in agricultural and economic stagnation characterized by high food prices and low real wage rates that are barely sufficient for subsistence. The classical view has been challenged by Boserup [3] and Clark and Haswell [4], who argue that the population pressure will induce changes in both agricultural technology and agrarian structure so as to increase the intensity of land utilization. Hayami and Ruttan have provided another perspective, showing how countries like Japan, unfavorably endowed with land resources, could achieve rates of growth in agricultural output as high as those favorably endowed, like the United States, by developing technology appropriate to their resources [8]. The question here is whether the mechanism for inducing institutional and technological changes in response to population pressure for increased land utilization is, in fact, operating in countries in tropical monsoon Asia today. If so, what policies would be appropriate to facilitate those changes, given the specific environmental and economic conditions in those countries? We attempt to answer such questions by studying agricultural development in the Philippines during the past two decades. A major change in the agricultural growth pattern in the Philippines is identified: a shift from area expansion, continually opening new land for cultivation, to expansion through intensified land utilization. We try also to show that the factors underlying this basic shift are changes in the relative costs of those alternatives for increasing agricultural output. It has to be emphasized that this paper is designed to suggest a broad hypothesis rather than to provide conclusive evidence. Our analysis is bound to be highly conjectural because of the stringent limitations of data available in the Philippines.

Backward‐bending supply curves and behaviour of subsistence farmers

Abstract: This paper formulates a model of the peasant economy to test the hypothesis that subsistence farmers are not responsive to economic opportunities and behave according to the notion of a backward‐bending supply curve. The productivity of farmers is analysed with respect to farm size, tenancy, off‐farm income, and other variables. The hypothesis is then tested using data from three paddy areas in Malaysia, each differing in the level of social and economic development. The results indicate that farmers in the more subsistence‐oriented area behave according to the backward‐bending supply curve hypothesis, while the more commercialised farmers do not.

The Development of Pinyon Exploitation in Central Eastern California

Abstract: Recent archaeological research in Owens Valley, eastern California, has revealed four archaeological phases spanning the period between 3500 B.C. and the historic period. Reconstruction of the prehistoric settlement-subsistence patterns during this interval showed that nuts of the pinyon pine, an important component of the historic diet in the region, were relatively ignored as a subsistence resource until sometime between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1000, when a distinctive procurement system developed around their exploitation (Table 4). Several factors which might account for this shift were explored. At present, there are two viable explanations, both of which view the inception of pinyon exploitation as an attempt to maintain a balance between population and resources. One is that there was a reduction in the pre-existing subsistence base; the other is that there was an increase in local population through natural growth or immigration. Climatic evidence appears to support the former view, while linguistic evidence supports the notion of population increases through immigration. It is also possible that these two factors are functionally related and that the increase in local population was due to immigration from localities more severely affected by an areawide warm-dry interval. These data fail to support Jennings' (1957, 1964, 1968) contention that Great Basin subsistence patterns incorporated all available resources and that this adaptation showed no fundamental changes through time, but tend to support the view that the human ecology of the region was quite variable through time and space.

The situation of agricultural workers in Kenya

Abstract: The most numerous and most degraded workers in Kenya are the agricultural workers. Their wages are below subsistence. The position of women workers is especially bad. An examination of the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers’ Union reveals its failure to improve its members’ conditions in any way. In the absence of support for workers in the higher echelons of government, the only hope is for strengthened organisation among the workers themselves.

The collapse of frontier farming in alaska

Abstract: Literature of the 1898–1950 period predicted that Alaska would be occupied by pioneer farmers, in a manner similar to the rest of the United States. Physical conditions allow subsistence farming in large areas of Alaska, and many governemnt inducement were offered to pioneers. These included liberal land laws, a subsidized government railroad, and a demonstration group settlement scheme. The almost complete failure to attract settlers seems attributable mainly to a decline in the traditional advantages of frontier agriculture in the twentieth century and a simultaneous rise in the opportunities and amenities of urban life. These trends were generally not acknowledged by government planners until about 1950, and their increasingly elaborate plans to force the recalcitrant yeoman farmer onto the “last frontier'’were thus exercises in frustration.

The Development of Pinyon Exploitation in Central Eastern California - eScholarship

Abstract: Recent archaeological research in Owens Valley, eastern California, has revealed four archaeological phases spanning the period between 3500 B.C. and the historic period. Reconstruction of the prehistoric settlement-subsistence patterns during this interval showed that nuts of the pinyon pine, an important component of the historic diet in the region, were relatively ignored as a subsistence resource until sometime between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1000, when a distinctive procurement system developed around their exploitation (Table 4). Several factors which might account for this shift were explored. At present, there are two viable explanations, both of which view the inception of pinyon exploitation as an attempt to maintain a balance between population and resources. One is that there was a reduction in the pre-existing subsistence base; the other is that there was an increase in local population through natural growth or immigration. Climatic evidence appears to support the former view, while linguistic evidence supports the notion of population increases through immigration. It is also possible that these two factors are functionally related and that the increase in local population was due to immigration from localities more severely affected by an areawide warm-dry interval. These data fail to support Jennings' (1957, 1964, 1968) contention that Great Basin subsistence patterns incorporated all available resources and that this adaptation showed no fundamental changes through time, but tend to support the view that the human ecology of the region was quite variable through time and space.

Broadpoint: Culture, Phase, Horizon, Tradition, or Knife?

Abstract: Turnbaugh's thesis about the dispersal of the Broadpoint Culture along the East Coast of the United States is critically examined. The test of Turnbaugh's thesis presented here examines the proposed Broadpoint Culture from seven dimensions: characteristic style of artifacts, technology, subsistence base, trade networks, mortuary practices, human biology, and sociocultural factors. Assemblages reported from 15 Broadpoint components are compared. It is concluded that: (1) the Broadpoint Culture was at best a reflection of a widespread maritime economy, rather than a complete culture; (2) the dispersal of broadpoint artifacts along the East Coast reflects a minor technological innovation rather than the physical migration of Broadpoint Culture peoples; and (3) the Broadpoint Horizon (ca. 2250 to 1550 B.C.) represents an excellent archaeological situation to study the dynamics of band-level societies practicing a maritime economy.

The Marketed Surplus of a Subsistence Crop: Paddy Rice in Taiwan

Abstract: The price response of the marketed surplus of subsistence crops is a topic of major concern to agricultural planners in developing countries. Recent attempts to measure the relevant elasticities by Bardhan, Haessel, and Toquero et al. have significantly added to understanding the magnitudes involved but seem to possess potentially serious methodological limitations. First, they do not explicitly consider the "barter component" of marketed surplus. Haessel recognizes the existence of in-kind disposals but assumes them to be fixed by contractual arrangements and hence insensitive to changes in price. If the barter component is large, even a small response to a change in price may be important for policy purposes. A second limitation is the assumption that sales and on-farm consumption are strict complements, so that it is necessary to consider the price response of either marketing or consumption but not both. While this results in considerable simplification, it ignores the farmer's additional option of simply adding to (or subtracting from) existing stocks. The present paper considers the marketed surplus of paddy rice in Taiwan, a case in which the barter component is important. For a sample of farm households in the middle rice region of Taiwan, paddy rice used to pay in-kind household and farm expenses amounted to over 60% of cash rice sales for the period 1962-72. The simple approach adopted disaggregates total marketed surplus into cash sales and barter components and also allows for separate estimation of the price and output elasticities of on-farm consumption. A further departure from previous studies is that the estimation is based on time-series data. The approach generates what appear to be quite reasonable estimates of the price and output elasticities and suggests that the numerical results of studies that ignore the barter components of marketed surplus may require qualification. Following a brief discussion of the nature and limitations of the available data, the estimated s ructural equations are described, the elasticity estimates derived, and the conclusions summarized and qualified.