Habitat, Economy and Society in the Central Africa Rain Forest by Jan Vansina

Author:Jan Vansina [Vansina, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780854967339
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1992-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Food Production as a System

Food production is usually the first link studied in the relationship of habitat and society, and when people farm as they do in the rain forests, the analyst turns first to agriculture. But all production forms a single system, if only because competing demands for time create a hierarchical order in such activities, and every activity supports all the others. Agriculture, then, is only a part of a distinct food-producing subsystem within the overall productive system. This interdependence is especially evident among the peoples of the rain forests, where before 1880 agricultural products accounted only for some 40 percent of the total food supply and did not cover nutritional needs. Villagers coordinated their farming with trapping around the fields. Different types of crops attracted warthogs, antelopes, monkeys, or even fruit bats. The men placed appropriate traps and thus ensured a supply of meat. Men, the trappers, worked in close proximity to their wives, the farmers. In addition, men built trapping systems miles long to block whole valleys. To further supplement their diet, the villagers abandoned their settlement for up to eight weeks each year to gather fruit, roots, and leaves. Four or five months later, they migrated from the village to camps further away, where they would hunt and fish. By integrating farming, gathering, trapping, and fishing, the villagers ensured a healthy nutritional balance and minimized risks caused by the bad performance of any food source.

The elegance of agriculture – with the digging stick and the machete – and its associations of plants, rotations, and dawn gardens for minor products and for experimentation in a rain-forest setting, has often been proclaimed. Praises of the other components of the food-producing system are less common, even though the techniques used there are equally impressive. In every case, equilibria were achieved between desired yields, the productive forces of the habitats, and the social goals of the community.

Because production processes as a whole (and food production in particular) form a dynamic system, one would expect crucial moments –bottleneck situations – on which the success of all later operations would depend, A set of conditions would have to obtain that involved natural factors as well as social factors. The choice made by any particular people to cope with such crucial moments, then, tended to have a pervasive ripple effect throughout every facet of human society and culture.

The crucial moment in the agricultural program in the rain forests was the time when it was dry enough for the cleared fields to burn. For this it had to be dry. But the drier season was short and irregular. In certain places only a few days were dry enough for the operation. Given that constraint, the size and yield of the fields depended on the number of collective laborers available to cut the forest before the critical days, and on the amount of time available to them to prepare the field for burning. Case studies show that different solutions to the problem were based

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