Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

there is a good deal of interhousehold exchange, barter and, less commonly, sale of
goods and services, broadening the spectrum of local resources and techniques of
appropriation effectively available to any individual or household.
4.2 Agriculture
4.2.1 Spatial and social relations of agriculture
Maruranau's agricultural zone spans the breadth of the reservation along the western
edge of the forest. Every household has at least one farm, and often several, except
on rare occasions when adverse circumstances prevent this. These may include a
shortage of cassava sticks and other planting materials owing to estrangement from
the agricultural cycle following a period of emigration or damage of the farm by
predation, drought or flood, ill-health or injury at a crucial time in the agricultural
cycle, or - especially in the highly disrupted climate of the late 1990's - disruption of
the agricultural cycle by unusual patterns of rainfall. Local networks of mutual aid,
especially - but not exclusively - among kin and affines, generally seem to operate in
such circumstances. Other families may supply planting materials or labour, or provide
someone without a farm an opportunity to work co-operatively on theirs. Two
households participating in the survey reported that they had no farm, but each is
exceptional in its own way: one an unmarried female teacher, the other an aged
widow. Both remain highly dependent on local agricultural produce obtained through
trade, barter, or the assistance of relatives.
The farms are located along a number of 'farm roads', trails into the forest along
each of which several families typically have their farms and fallow fields, which form
the basis of the socio-spatial organisation of agriculture. Each road is nominally
owned by a particular individual, whose permission must, strictly, be sought by any
other individual seeking to cut a farm along it. This status is initially conferred upon
the person who first cut the trail; in practice most of the active roads were first cut
by previous generations, and their custody inherited by its current bearers via a
variety of cognatic patterns. A young man 3 may thus have a choice between the
roads used by his father, father-in-law, and perhaps uncles if they farmed in different
places. Immigrants without close sanguinal or affinal connections in their village must
either approach the 'boss man' for the road along which they wish to farm, or (much
less commonly) cut their own road in a new location.