Robert C. Hunt

Canal Irrigation and Local Social Organization [and Comments and Reply]

Theory linking labor inputs of irrigation agriculture to social organization is briefly reviewed. Labor input is distinguished into five tasks: construction, maintenance, allocation, conflict resolution, and organization of ritual. A sample of world communities is canvassed in search of structural variation. A rationale for studying these phenomena in a local, rather than a society-wide, context is presented. Types of ties of the locality with the larger system are explored. Several propositions about pervasive external linkages with local phenomena are presented. Millons results, showing no relationship between size of irrigation system and centralization, are challenged. It is found that often irrigation management roles are embedded in other socially powerful roles rather than forming part of a specialized bureaucracy. Conditions for role embeddedness are explored.

Labor productivity and agricultural development: Boserup revisited.

Labor productivity is a major component of agricultural development. Boserup is the scholar most associated with the view that labor productivity declines with intensification of agriculture. This paper reviews the theoretical argument and empirical support for the decline thesis. An empirical test is conducted by means of a comparative study of traditional rice agriculture in Southeast Asia. The decline thesis is rejected. The implications for agricultural development are discussed.

Plausible ethnographic analogies for the social organization of Hohokam canal irrigation

This paper presents the results of a juxtaposition of archaeological findings on Hohokam irrigation and ethnographic research on the social organization of irrigation. There are no ethnographic or historic records pertaining to the Hohokam, so the comparative ethnographic approach is perhaps more productive than in other situations. Several forms of canal irrigation organization are considered, including politically centralized, acephalous, private, and several forms of communal. We find that politically centralized, acephalous, and private forms are implausible in the Hohokam context. Several of the communal forms are plausible. We find no ethnographic basis for positing a valley-wide management system.

Terracing and Irrigation in the Peruvian Highlands [and Comments and Reply]

Agricultural terraces in the Colca Valley of southem Peru facilitate the irrigation necessary for agriculture in this semiarid environment. Terrace expansion and contraction, in tum, are closely related to the availability of water. In the short term, households abandon terraces because of constraints in the system of water distribution. In the longer term, periodic droughts trigger water conservation practices which curtail expansion and lead to terrace abandonment. During periods of relative water abundance, constraints are relaxed, allowing new terraces to be constructed and abandoned ones rebuilt. Cyclical pattems of terrace contraction and expansion suggest that repeated observations of land use over time are necessary for an understanding of agricultural intensification and deintensification in the Central Andes.

Ecology, Culture, Social Organization, and State Formation in Southeast Asia [and Comments and Reply]

In this paper I call attention to the significance of Southeast Asia to discussions of the nature of state formation. While it is now apparent that certain phases of cultural evolution came early in Southeast Asia, the state was a late and, in some respects, incomplete development. Southeast Asian states do not appear to have developed into the fully centralized, highly stratified, totalitarian regimes held to typify other regions of Asia, such as China or India. I suggest that this is not easily accounted for in terms of recent comparative theories of state formation or in terms of the interpretations contained in the writings of Southeast Asianists. I suggest finally that features of Southeast Asian social organization provide the most useful focus of analysis for explaining what did and did not occur in Southeast Asia and then discuss the question of how these features may have come into being.

Labor Productivity and Agricultural Development: Testing Boserup

It seems fair to say that in the Neolithic age, every household was involved in food production, but during industrial times, only a very small proportion of households (<10%) were involved in farming and feeding everyone. Food producing went from being the activity of everyone to being a sector of the economy employing few people and at the same time producing a large agricultural surplus that is exported to the rest of the economy. This is often called agricultural development, and the process by which this development has been accomplished is often referred to as intensification. There are two positions on what has happened to the productivity of labor in this developmental process: the rise thesis and the decline thesis.