SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA — CRIST 509 



panding population migrated into the growing towns and cities. But 

 in France as tlie population grew, roads were improved, canals were 

 built, and maritime trade increased; these developments were good 

 for the towns, but they also served to pull the peasantry along with 

 them, as it were, toward increased production. More up-to-date ex- 

 amples are not lacking : Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and 

 so on, are cases in point. Tropical Latin America shows in many 

 respects the reverse of the coin : The average small-scale subsistence 

 farmer is not surplus or market-minded, and, even if he should be, the 

 road or river tends to be a one-way street — i.e., the products that move 

 over them tend to lose most of their value en route, as they must pay 

 high transportation costs, or high taxes, or suffer outright confiscation 

 at the hands of one who claims to own the land on which the produce 

 was grown. Further, native peoples, ignorant of the official language, 

 who occasionally try to enter the market economy are frequently, and 

 sometimes even openly and flagrantly, robbed by the small village shop- 

 keepers, who consider themselves civilized. As long as these things 

 go on, it will be difficult to make the subsistence farmer market-ori- 

 ented. Eoads and rivers should be two-way streets, along which pro- 

 duce flows to market to be exchanged for cash or goods of sufficient 

 value to make the trip worthwhile and to motivate further rewarding 

 trips on the part of the producer of raw materials. 



NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL FORCES 



The subsistence agriculturalist lives in a world pervaded by fears. 

 His life is hemmed about by taboos, for evil spirits are at work every- 

 where. He may not be able to enter, much less to clear and grow 

 crops on certain pieces of forest because of the spirit or spirits that 

 live there. He may have to work on an infertile hillside instead of a 

 piece of fertile alluvial riverbottom land, over which hovers the ghost 

 of his old friend and compadre, Juan Lopez — for Juan, late one night 

 and full of aguardiente, fell face down in the little pond there and 

 breathed his last. In Haiti the peasant may have to spend much time 

 keeping the voodoo of his enemies off his own plantings and at the same 

 time harnessing those occult forces of black magic for his own ends 

 of bringing discomfiture and bad luck to those who wish him ill ; he 

 may have to bury the head of a white rooster in his neighbor's door- 

 yard, or hang the right wing of a guinea hen in the palm tree closest 

 his door, and so on. Thus, phantoms, demons, and horrible appari- 

 tions will be called forth to haunt his neighbor. Long and learned 

 papers have been written about sucli practices and their implications, 

 in many parts of the world ; social anthropologists are doing outstand- 

 ing work in this field. Suffice it to say that when a large part of one's 

 daily life is taken up with propitiating the gods, or trying to, or wish- 



