Dry Grain Farming Families
Hausalund (Nigeria) and Karnataka (India) Compared

This book represents a radical assault on prevailing orthodoxy of the study of economic features of rural tropical economies:

Polly Hill (Author)

9780521271028, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 October 1982

340 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

Anthropologists and economists have made persistent efforts to identify economic features of rural tropical economies in the simplest possible terms, in order to enhance their universality. This has resulted in the creation of doctrine on such matters as the causes of rural economic inequality and abysmal poverty. The doctrine is far too generalised to have any practical utility; it is ahistorical; and it usually involves the false belief that all cultivators in a community have similar economic responses. So firm is this orthodoxy that under-development studies have become deadlocked - to the point that our ignorance is constantly on the increase. The book represents a radical assault on prevailing orthodoxy, breaking the deadlock by insisting that we properly categorise the main types of agrarian system in the tropical world. Moreover, it practically demonstrates how to identify these important categories, and draw useful generalised conclusions about it, on the basis of detailed fieldwork in parts of northern Nigeria and south India.

List of tables
List of figures
List of plates
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations and conventions
Introductory chapter
1. Background material: the two regions and the eight localities
2. A dry grain Agrarian mode
3. The village farmland
4. The farming household: (1) joint households
5. The farming household: (2) miscellaneous aspects
6. The essence of inequality: land ownership
7. The diversity of economic activity
8. Intensification
9. Upward and downward mobility
10. Migration
11. Rural/urban relationships
12. The withdrawal from the countryside
13. Agrestic servitude
14. The inevitable dissolution of the large estates
15. How did the weakest elements formerly survive in the anekal villages?
16. The lack of an Agrarian hierarchy in pre-colonial west Africa
17. A dry grain mode: some conclusions
List of references
Index.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM]