The mixed economy of the South Indian Kurumbas

Abstract

This article reports on the Kurumbas, forager-horticulturists of Attappady, India. The concern here is with the relationship between the subsistence economy and social organization in an attempt to explain the persistence of both immediate- and delayed-return systems. The explanation I propose lies in the nature of adaptation to the physical environment and Kurumba relations with tribal and peasant neighbors that affect their subsistence pattern and put them in a state of partial transformation; i.e., suspended between, while participating in, different economic and social arenas. (Social organization, hunter-gatherers, Kurumbas, Attappady) That present-day foragers are hardly representative of a paleolithic way of life is well known. For several hundreds of years they have been heavily dependent upon both part-time cultivation or herding and trade with food-producing populations (Lee and De Vore 1968; Myers 1988; Lee 1992; Bird-David 1988, 1992; Headland and Reid 1989; Headland 1991; Guddemi 1992). In brief, hunter-gatherers cannot be understood as independent from and unaffected by other sectors of a wider network (Denbow 1984). Although the Kurumbas of Attappady, India, are described as engaged in hunting and gathering, these modern foragers(1) combine and flexibly shift between hunting and gathering, swidden cultivation, small-scale herding, trade, and occasional wage labor. There are different mixes of these components in any hunting-gathering society, depending on historical factors and such conditions as available resources, ecological parameters, technology, relations with neighbors, type of trade networks, etc. Important features that characterize relations of production among foragers include collective ownership of the means of production, an emphasis on the importance of co-operation, egalitarian patterns of sharing, flexibility in the local group membership, and little emphasis on accumulation. Some of these features are shared by horticultural people who are at the egalitarian end of the spectrum, but what differentiates egalitarian farmers from foragers is the latter's loose structure and the greater informality of their arrangements. Similarly, certain formal and structured aspects of horticultural societies are present in some hunter-gatherer societies. Although a certain mode of subsistence procurement is characteristic of foragers, other aspects of their culture vary. Failure to recognize this masks the flexible nature of these societies. Woodburn (1982) suggests that there are two kinds of food-gathering societies based on their economy and social organization: an immediate-return system and a delayed-return system, the first based on the immediate use of food resources and the second based on the yield of labor over time. An immediate-return economy is flexible and relies on multiple alternative strategies. A delayed- return system is found among more sedentary foragers whose economic cycle includes massive harvests and storage of a seasonal resource, such as occurs with economies based on crop cultivation. There are contradictions between the organization and ideology of immediate-return societies and the organization and ideology of delayed-return societies. The most important of these is the contradiction between sharing (or generalized reciprocity) which is central to a hunting and gathering way of life, and the husbanding of resources, which is central to a farming and herding way of life (Lee 1979:412-13). Societies with immediate-return economic systems have immediate-return social organization, and societies with delayed-return economic systems have delayed-return social organization. Among the different approaches to understanding the social systems of foraging societies, some prefer a neat correlation between the subsistence mode and social organization, and assume that the subsistence mode is a primary factor in determining social organization (e.g., Lee and De Vote 1968). …