Subsistence Change in Northeastern Zaire

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9402034 Morelli This research involves two ethnographers studying why some foragers in the Ituri forest of northeastern Zaire adopt farming as a subsistence strategy, while others maintain relations with local farmers in order to obtain the carbohydrate portion of their diets. The researchers will study economic decisions and environmental constraints of a community of foragers every summer (the annual "hunger season") for five years, measuring field sizes and food availability as well as work input and labor availability. The hypothesis is that adoption of farming rather than trading for farm foods will occur when shortfalls of cultivated trade foods are frequent, severe, predictable and regional in extent. This research is important because understanding economic behavior in the widest range of societies is necessary to distinguish what is fundamental to human decision making under scarcity and uncertainty from what is constrained by capitalist market relations. This sort of study of production and exchange in primitive forest conditions will provide data that will help social scientists advance our understanding of human economic decision making.