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Rice Production in a Lisu Village

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

E. Paul Durrenberger
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Extract

On hillside slash and burn fields, Lisu of Northern Thailand produce rice, opium poppies, and corn. In this paper I shall develop models to show the relationships among various factors that determine how much rice each household produces, and the relative importance of opium and rice.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 139 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1979

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References

1 Rice has to be transported from the fields to the village for storage. When it is loaded on pack animals, or in transport baskets for people to carry, it is measured out in standard kerosene, tins (a basket, one phit). People therefore have a fairly accurate idea of how many baskets of rice they harvest. To check, I measured several harvests load by load and compared the results with reported figures. Since these figures were accurate, I accepted the other estimates as fairly accurate. When Mr. Keen measured the fields, he obtained harvest measures which also matched these figures. The average weight of one basket of unhusked rice is 12.04 kg. The field size figures are from Keen's survey. The figures for number of workers and consumers are from census data I collected. The number of workers is the number of individuals in the household who regularly do agricultural work. The number of consumers is based on age and sex. Children from 0 to 2 years old count as 0.2 man-units; from 2 to 4, 0.3; from 4 to 6, 0.4; from 6 to 8, 0.5; from 8 to 10, 0.6; from 10 to 12, 0.7; from 12 to 14, 0.8; males from 14 to 60, 1.0; females from 14 to 60, 0.8; individuals over 60, 0.8. Estimates for the number of days devoted to various agricultural tasks were obtained by interviewing individuals of each household once each week and asking them what work they had done for the past week day by day.

2 It will be noted that three households have been omitted from Table 1. I have incomplete data on opium production for house number 11, and members of the other households produced neither opium nor rice. Since I am interested in the relationship between rice and opium production, these households are not pertinent to this study.

3 Hadden, K. and DeWalt, Billie, “Path Analysis: Some Anthropological Examples”, Ethnology 8 (1974): 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 106.

5 Ibid., p. 108.

6 Land, K.C., “Principles of Path Analysis”, in Sociological Methodology, ed. Borgatta, E.F. (San Francisco, 1969), p. 108Google Scholar.

7 For a discussion of path analysis in anthropology, see Hadden and DeWalt, op. cit.

8 Land, op. cit. p. 6.

9 Durrenberger, E. Paul, “The Regional Context of the Economy of a Lisu Village in Northern Thailand”, Southeast Asia 3 (1974): 569–75.Google Scholar

10 A. Y. Dessaint, “The Poppies are Beautiful This Year”, Natural History 81: 30.

11 Ibid., p. 30.