agrarian ecology

Reported by:

Andrew John B. Fernandez

Social Scientists were and often are convinced that “basic food production is dull, routine, grubby, and very much background activity”.

The view of culture as a basic coping device for the survival of a human population in an environment directed attention to subsistence techniques and strategies as adaptively interacting with social organization and a whole range of other institutions.

Descriptions and TypologiesMorgan: cultivation was one of the key

elements in transition from savagery to barbarism, and its development was speculatively associated with concepts of property and with technology.

“Horticultural preceded field culture, as the garden (hortos) preceded the field (ager)” and although the latter implies boundaries, the former signifies directly an “inclosed space”.

However, tillage must have been older than the inclosed garden.

Agricultural succeeded pastoralism according to the early evolutionists, and Ratzel regarded it as an improvement because it “forces on a man the wholesome habit of labour” and is followed by the accumulation of capital, the development of trade, and a fuller organization of the social ranks.

Hahn repudiated such simplistic and ethnocentric economic stages, pointing out that animal husbandry was not antecedent of tillage.

The most intensive type of tillage was horticulture characterized by irrigation and the use of fertilizers.

Curwen and Hatt made a further distinction between semiagriculture, which women were cultivators while men hunted or herded, and two types of full agriculture, with and without the plow directed by men and each occuring in a number of regional variants.

Though questions of the origin and processes of domestication of crops and animals may be left in the capable hands of archeologists, geographers, botanists, and zoologists, the more recent spread of cultigens is a valuable addition to culture history.

Murdock’s summaries of crop complexes grouped by origin give an added dimension to linguistic, archeological, and culture trait distributions in plotting prehistoric contacts and population movements. Questions have been raised on the dating of

Malaysian diffusion and the influence of both new tropical forest crops and iron technology on the relatively Bantu migrations.

Claims that introduction of the sweet potato into Highland New Guinnea within 300 years ago.

The earlier geographers have taken the deterministic position that the national environment could directly cause particular type of culture. However, anthropologist, have noted the limitations that climate, precipitation, topography, soils, and other features could impose on the diffusion and adoption of agricultural complexes.

Meggers continues the “possibilist” approach, providing environments into four types on the basis of their subsistence potential for agriculture, and stating the “law” that “the level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies”.

Perdon refines the environmental factors into more precise ratings of temperature, precipitation, soils, and land forms and emphasizes the cultural factors technological, economic, and political which may outweigh the natural surroundings in determining agricultural potential.

Careful attention must be given to environmental parameters, the relevant question concerns the conditions under which agricultural intensification takes place and the necessary techniques and costs for realizing various levels of potential returns.

An exclusive focus on technology as a cross-culturally valid determinant of agriculture has similarly resulted in oversimplifying ecological relationships and obscuring the processes of change between broadly defined evolutionary stages.

White recognizes declining subsistence returns as a major reason for altering agricultural techniques and harnessing new energy sources, he does not associate such changes with declining productivity per man hour as an economic condition of rising population pressure on resources.

Historian of technology discusses the introduction of the heavy, moldboard plow, opening up clay bottomlands for cultivations, increasing crop production and supporting denser population, these factors are systematically related is fascinatingly clear, but the processes of agricultural change cannot be referred solely to technological innovation.

Agriculture in the Ecosystem• A farmer’s activities and choices could not be

understood without a much more detailed knowledge of his local environment.

• Conklin set high standards in his collection of rainfall and soil analysis data, his exhaustive step-by-step enumeration of stages in site selection, cutting, burning, cropping, and fallowing that make up swidden cycle and his attention to native categories of land usage, climate, soils, vegetation, and labor.

Shifting cultivation as a general type of food production with worldwide distribution has become increasingly well defined. Pelzer cited as its main characteristics its lack of tillage, the rotation of fields rather than crops, clearing by means of fire, absence of draft animals and manuring, use of human labor only, employment of the dibble stick or hoe, and hoe short periods of soil occupancy.

Geertz adopts an ecological model in emphasizing the way n which shifting cultivation is integrated into and maintains the natural ecosystem into which it is projected, using diversity of crops, rapid recycling of nutrients, and duplication of the protective plant canopy and to transform a natural forest into a harvestable.

Patterns of shifting cultivation well outside of the tropics continued to be practiced on infertile European lands till the 18th century.

Under the conditions of land scarcity, people plant trees in their swiddens in an attempt to reproduce at least partially the missing spontaneous woodland.

Nye and Greenland: cropping by shifting methods results:Multiplication of pests and diseasesIncrease weedsDeterioration in the physical condition of the

soilErosion of top soilDeterioration in the nutrient status of the soilChanges in the numbers and composition of

the soil fauna and flora.

Allan has defined “the maximum population density the system is capable of supporting permanently in the environment without damage to the land”.

Street points out, deterioration of land is cumulative process, and its current changes may be too slight to be noticed.

A truly ecological understanding of any agricultural system requires not only the study of dynamic interrelations with the effective physical environments (soils, water, temperature, topography) but also quantitative consideration of energy transfer with the human organism.

• Various root and grain crops provide significantly unequal caloric output and percentages of protein from the same land area, and they may make correspondingly different demand on soil fertility.

• The relative scarcity of certain nutritional elements in available foods may cause stress leading to physiological changes, and such cultural responses as supplementary collecting of wild food during the times of drought.

Agrarian Social Organization• The most interesting aspect for cultural

anthropologists of the ecosystemic approach to agriculture was the possibility of treating social institutions as adaptive variables.

• Julian Steward proposed to examine the basic adjustment by which man utilizes a given environment and the way in which a “cultural core” of features was adaptively related to these subsistence activities and economic arrangements.

Brookfield calls agrarian geography, “the study of agriculture not only in relation to its use and manipulation of natural resources but also to land tenure, holding, and allocation, and to the social, economic, and political systems within which farming is carried on”,

Though the sexual division of labor traditionally has been linked to agricultural type, and cross cultural studies have shown that intensity and complexity of agriculture do correlate with increasing assignment of tasks to males, there now appears to be considerable flexibility in performance of necessary labor.

There is growing evidence that household composition among farmers varies with the type and amount of labor required for effective crop production. Extended from nuclear family

A considerably more problematical linkage is that between type for descent group and agricultural system.

Forde has suggested that were the scale and stability of separate settlements are limited by the habitat or productive techniques, descent groups are unlikely.

The hypthesis that unilineal descent groups become important:The need for mobilizing large, coordinated

groups for certain tasks of the agricultural cycle

The need for laying claim to, defending, and selectively transmitting rights in important resources.

Demography density is not an absolute but depends on local population distribution and the productivity of resources.

Land is therefore sought individually, utilizing kinship and affinity bonds, and weakening the clan as a political unit.

Waddell contends that the clan fills this function by defining the territory itself in agnatic terms, and the in general the dimensions and size of the effective autonomous social unit can be accounted for the terms of ecology, agricultural requirements, and defense.

A segmentary lineage structure of greater range and geneological depth may be effective for mobilizing considerable military pressure against neighboring groups, thereby making possible predatory expansion necessary for the extension of agriculture by shifting techniques.

Wittfogel’s hypothesis that large scale irrigation reqiured the centralization of political power to construct and maintain the system. Chiefly authorityState governmentCouncil of leaders