Subsistence cultivation in the Caribbean

Abstract

Subsistence cultivation on small plots is a marked characteristic of rural life in the Caribbean islands, as it is in most areas in the American tropics. It closely resembles the subsistence cultivation systems of neighboring areas and has been classified as a subcategory of American tropical forest agriculture (Denevan 1980; Katz, Hediger & Valleroy 1974: 769). Yet its practitioners are not natives of the American tropics, but the descendants of Africans who often grew their own food and a small market surplus on the unused lands near the plantations on which they worked as slaves. These provision grounds were important in their adaptations to slavery and to the changes later brought by emancipation (Mintz & Hall 1960). That they are still an essential part of rural land use, economy, and household survival has been recog nized in an abundant literature.2 Most of the studies in this literature are local and particular. Few attempt any intra-regional comparison or generalization (Hills & Iton 1982, 1983; Momsen 1972; Paquette 1968, 1982; Rashford 1982), and none attempt extra-regional comparison or systematic synthesis. This is surprising when we consider the synthesizing and explanatory efforts applied to some other important Afro-American cultural features with multi-cultural origins, such as religion or Creole languages (e.g., Al leyne 1980; Bickerton 1975; Carrington et al. 1983; Simpson 1978; Taylor 1977). This paper uses both intra-regional and extra-regional comparison to test a working hypothesis developed in the field. It asks whether a