Aram A. Yengoyan

Demographic and Economic Aspects of Poverty in the Rural Philippines

Poverty in Southeast Asia has been analyzed in numerous ways (squatters, high population densities, dietary deficiencies, war, disease, etc.) though there has been no single systematic work which attempts to delineate all socio-economic and political forces which create the evolution of rural poverty. Although rural poverty in Southeast Asia is widespread and in most ways represents poverty in its most acute form, I am purposely not dealing with poverty per se. My aim is to discuss how regional, economic and population factors such as types of cultivation and labor requirements influence the variety and intensity of rural poverty in the rural Philippines. In particular the hypothesis under investigation is that where a landscape is economically committed to a single cropping activity (such as an export crop) which is highly labor intensive, the worse aspects of rural poverty commonly emerge. Furthermore, where a regional landscape is characterized by a diversity of agricultural patterns-some labor intensive crops, some capital intensive crops-the scale and character of rural poverty is of a different order or at least of a different magnitude. A few concepts employed in this paper will first be briefly discussed. In the analysis of rural poverty, the concept of labor is a critical measure in determining the degree of poverty. Labor as utilized in this essay refers to the total aggregation of individuals who compose the required work force in any economic system. All economies require different inputs of labor; consequently in the long run population processes such as birth rates and indices of fertility are viewed as responses to differential levels of labor inputs and agricultural requirements. Thus where certain agricultural Financial assistance for the research for this paper was from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations Program in Support of Social Science and Legal Research on Population Policy. The field work in Capiz in 1970 was supported through a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Fellowship. I wish to thank Mr. R. Estacio for his generous assistance and for his lknowledge of fishpond ecology which made this study possible. The paper was written during the time I was a senior Fellow at the Population Institute, East-West Center, Honolulu (January-August 1972). Special thanks to Robert Harrison and Alan Howard for their critical arguments on some of the ideas presented in this article.

Copulation, conception and deception in aboriginal Australia

Ashley Montagu. Coming Into Being among the Australian Aborigines: A Study of the Procreative Beliefs of the Native Tribes of Australia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Revised and Expanded Second Edition, xi + 426 pp., figures, notes, bibliography, and index.