THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

woman from Terhathum district who had married a Yakha and lived in
Tamaphok told us that such arrangments persisted in her natal community,
but that it did not suit the Yakha (man mildaina). It was easy to say,
as did Bhim Bahadur, that people had become phamaNDi ('proud, arrogant')
and did not want to be involved in the obligations of horleqpata,
Education was frequently invoked, both as a reason why people had become
ghamaNDi and as a pract ice1 reason for the decline of horler)pata, since
with many children and young people attending school it was difficult to
be committed to providing the circulating labour such groups required on
a daily basis. To run effectively, a horleopata needed a modicum of
equality in terms of land holdings or at least, labour to land ratios,
in order that everyone benefited to much the same extent from the
rotating labour. With greater inequalities of wealth and land
developing in the community, there was a feeling of 'why bother'?
Poorer people benefited relatively less from horleopata, while for rich
people it was easier to pay for labour than to become involved in the
complications of labour exchange.
Thus in Tamaphok it was far more common for group work to be called
parma or boni (also pakhura, literally 'upper arm'), This, however, was
not the neatly bounded, reciprocating whole such as might have been
represented by horleopata or jarlaogi in the past, or the Gurung nogar
described in the ethnographic present by Messerschmidt (1981). In
Tamaphok, work groups tended to be organized on the basis of
neighbourhood rather than kin links (although of course the two were not
necessarily exclusive), This was reflected in the Nepali name given
such a group, a Toli (since Tol also means 'settlement', and was used in
place names in Tamaphok). A Toli was made up of kheTB!a ('field