JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. rnT HE similarities of the islands in the Caribbean stem from their shared tropical environments and from their history of colonization, plantations, and slavery. The differences arise from the details of their individual histories and natural features. That two islands as different in soils and topography as Antigua and St. Kitts could both have been dominated by sugar cultivation exemplifies the area's common economic and historical imperatives. But when the resource and subsistence possibilities of individual island societies are considered, individual ecological relationships become significant and substantial differences in history and colonial exploitation emerge.Barbuda is one West Indian island where present-day land use, land tenure, and subsistence economy are clearly the products of a unique history and natural history. Here community and economy differ in important respects from those on islands that had been devoted, as Barbuda had not, to plantation agriculture.One of the remarkable features of the Barbudan adjustment to history and environment is cattle keeping, which is central to Barbudan economy and society. It permits men to earn their livings by traditional productive activities without emigrating, and it preserves an unusual form of land tenure especially suited to environment and land use. Cattle keeping fits economic requirements, ecological conditions, and values while providing cash, prestige, and companionship in cooperative work teams for Barbudan men. The personal relationships that it activates among residents of different households are essential to village solidarity. But even though cattle keeping perpetuates all these Barbudan ways of life, at the same time it establishes a foundation for economic change.Three related processes of the past twenty or so years have reinforced the social and economic functions of Barbudan cattle keeping: diminishing rainfall, declining cultivation, and increasing numbers of feral cattle. Too many animals and too little rain make cultivation unrewarding; the Barbudan need for cash makes it unattractive. Because few paying jobs exist in Barbuda and because the Barbudan system of land tenure debars the sale of land for development, Barbudan men can accumulate cash and prestige without emigrating only by cattle keeping or by lobster diving.1
The decline of fieldwork in human geography in the United States is reflected in place name studies of the last 30 years, which have been founded on maps alone. Research in Barbuda, Lesser Antilles, demonstrates the importance of human informants and observations in the field for gathering toponymic information, and shows the axiom that place names alone are evidence of past landscapes and land uses to be unreliable. The study tests some accepted principles of naming against field observations and proposes the significance of creole language and diglossia in the place names of creole speech communities.
The idea that a division of labor is fundamental in the organization of society is an old and respectable one associated with such names as Comte (1 875243-244), Durkheim (1933), and Murdock (1949:7-9,213-214). The phrase "sexual division of labor" perhaps sounds old-fashioned now when we are more accustomed to speak of sex roles and more attuned to the perception that rigid labor divisions between the sexes may be in the analytic categories of the observer as well as in the realities of the observed (Nelson 1974). This paper deals with the sexual division of labor on the West Indian island of Barbuda, or in contemporary usage, the sexual differentiation of social and economic roles.' It deals equally with the organization of production in this peasant economy. I shall try to uncover the relationship between the two, to look beneath cultural prescriptions and observable behavior to the productive capabilities of the landscape and the organizational means of exploiting those capabilities, for it is here we shall find some understanding of the separate social and economic responsibilities of men and women.Descriptions of the sexual division of labor are commonplace in ethnographic writing. The list of possible illustrative examples is almost endless, but let me select two from well-known works dealing with peasant communities, since a peasant community i s my own subject. These two show a difference In conviction about the behavioral reality of the sexual division of labor. Arensberg's description of the division in rural Ireland (1937:5563) expresses strong conviction of its behavioral reality, of the complementarity of men's and women's roles and the cohesion that depends on it, and of i t s economic necessity. Pitt-Rivers, on the other hand, conveys uncertainty about any strict division of labor in behavior (1961 :85-87). In rural Andalusia, economic necessity does not enforce the complementarity of men's and women's labor, but encourages behavior that contradicts cultural ideals about what is appropriate to the sexes; rules do not govern behavior although they govern preference and ideals (Pitt-Rivers 1961 :86-87). But what Subsistence and cash production on the West Indian island of Barbuda fall into two organizational categories: that for which household personnel is sufficient and that for which personnel from different households must organize into a cooperative team. This difference in productive organization is associated with exclusive areas of social and economic responsibility divided between men and women, although physical labor sometimes overlaps. Underlying the organization of production and hence the sexual distinction of roles, are the productive capabilities of the landscape and the customary system of land tenure that permits its most efficient use.production and division of labor 253
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