Robert McC. Netting

What Alpine Peasants Have in Common: Observations on Communal Tenure in a Swiss Village

An ecological approach to the persistence of communal tenure in a Swiss village suggests that such rights are neither historical anachronisms nor aspects of the closed corporate community. The adaptive value of group holdings in alpine pasture, forest, water, and access routes is compared to that of individual rights in arable land, meadows, and buildings within the same community. The nature and exploitation of resources are related to communal acquisition, conservation, and distribution.

Kofyar Cash-Cropping: Choice and Change in Indigenous Agricultural Development

Amid discussions of an agricultural crisis and the failure of largescale, mechanized, capitalintensive development schemes in Nigeria, the Kofyar of Plateau State provide a case study of farmers spontaneously expanding food crop production for the market, using indigenous lowenergy technology. Temporary, followed by permanent, migration from the Jos Plateau homeland to frontier settlements on the fertile Benue plains has been accompanied by a change from initial shifting cultivation in forest clearings to permanent, intensively tilled and fertilized homestead fields. Labor is organized primarily in households that have grown in size and complexity. Cooperative and exchange work groups are also important for meeting seasonal bottlenecks and providing the careful, disciplined cultivation that intensive agriculture requires. Kofyar now devote up to 50% of their labor to cash crops, and they purchase considerable quantities of manufactured goods and medical services. Their uncoerced adaptation to an environment of new land resources and market incentives suggests both the advantages of indigenous development with a minimum of state control or interference and the limitations of a conventional dependency theory perspective.

The genetic and demographic impact of in-migrants in a largely endogamous community

Historical demographic data extending back approximately 300 years were analysed to determine the demographic and genetic impact of in-migrants to an endogamous Swiss Alpine village. In-migrants were involved in only 14% of the marriages recorded in the village. In addition, only slightly more than 50% of the in-migrants were represented in the 1970 gene pool of the village. However, in-migrants accounted for nearly 38% of this gene pool. This seemingly anomalous situation can be explained by the fact that while the fertility of in-migrants and the marriage rate among their children are reduced (accounting for the near 50% drop-our rate of in-migrants from the gene pool), the fertility of the children of in-migrants and the marriage rate among the grandchildren of in-migrants are increased relative to village natives (accounting for the high proportion of genes in the gene pool ultimately attributable to in-migrants). Our results clearly demonstrate that although this community forms an endogamous population, it is definitely not a genetic isolate. Other investigators are cautioned against automatic invocation of the simplifying (and, thus, extremely tempting) assumption that endogamy is equivalent to genetic isolation.

An anthropology of history: The seventeenth century crisis in Europe and “peasant” social class

Frank McArdle. Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society 1587–1784. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. 226 pp. Victor Skipp. Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden 1570–1674. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. xii + 132 pp.