Editors: digitally scanned photos available
32-YEAR STUDY SHEDS LIGHT ON MODERNIZATION OF RURAL COMMUNITIES Findings help explain, forecast development trends in South Asia, India
In 1963, when anthropologist Paul Hockings took his first census of a tribe-like community in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India, he had little idea what direction his research would take. He went to the relatively cool tropical mountains armed with a graduate student's curiosity, a firm grounding in cultural anthropology and linguistics, and an interest in the culture and household structure of a local indigenous group, the Badagas.
Hockings' view of his research as exploratory probably kept him from feeling overwhelmed; he was embarking on what would become a 32-year study of the Badagas, including 26 years of gathering data. His research would encompass their culture, social history, language, economy, kinship structure, oral literature and adaptation to modern conditions. He would publish an award-winning dictionary, record Badaga proverbs in writing for the first time and documented traditional medical practices before they died out. His final results, published in 1999 as Kindreds of the Earth: Badaga Household Structure and Demography (Sage Publications), constitute a longitudinal study that his peers say gets to the heart of development issues in South Asia, and explains why the Indian population explosion has been capped.
"Paul Hockings, almost uniquely in the field of anthropological demography, is reporting a longitudinal study covering 26 years of measurement and cultural change," said noted demographer John Caldwell, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. "The central importance for many of us is his evidence of how fertility transmission actually gets underway. The study is almost certainly a reliable guide to an explanation of what will eventually happen over much of the sub-continent."
After conducting his initial census, Hockings returned to the Nilgiris periodically, most recently in 1994. He estimates that one thousand Badagas took part in the study -- "many of them several times over, and always with good grace," he adds.
The Badaga community evolved in several ways during the study period. Farmers switched from a subsistence mode to developing small cash-providing tea plantations, which raised their standard of living. The introduction of the dowry system, where previously a groom had paid a "bridewealth" to the bride's family, dramatically changed the dynamics of marriage, and increased the number of unmarried adult women living with their parents. Educated younger Badagas took up work in neighboring cities. Most significant for Hockings, Badaga women perceived an increase in the expense of caring for children and brought their fertility rates down to levels comparable with those of Japan and other industrialized nations.
"It was remarkable that the younger Badaga women, even if uneducated, took an active part in controlling their fertility and health by seeking the services of scientific medical doctors and modern clinics," Hockings said. "Men, though somewhat better educated, tended to be more conservative in this regard, even though in other matters they were well informed through the newspapers and village discussions. Modern attitudes are very much part of women's thinking."
The Badaga people are somewhat unusual in that they adopted a tribal social model several hundred years ago, although they formerly belonged to a caste group on the Mysore Plain. The change came when their medieval ancestors, who had been settled farmers, migrated south from the plains in the decades following the Muslim invasion and the end of the Vijayanagar empire in 1565. In settling the sparsely populated Nilgiri Hills, Hockings said, they became "a tribe among tribes."
In a section of his book, Hockings reflects on the challenges of a long-term study. Few people knew their exact age, for example, because they did not keep records of births. Furthermore, "the problem of just how old a person was begins to pall when compared with the problem of who he or she was," Hockings said; people often changed their names between one census and the next, or used very common names. In one case, he found two brothers living in the same household who were both named Ra:man.
"The younger of the two was a twin and it is customary to name twins Ra:man and Laksmanan, from the Ramayana legend, even though they already had an elder brother, Ra:man," said Hockings. "For me, detailed record-keeping was essential."
As the Badaga study winds down, Hockings is devoting more time to his other research projects, which include agricultural peoples' adaptation to mountainous environments in China and elsewhere. He edited a 1997 volume on the Badaga and their neighbors, Blue Mountains Revisited: Cultural Studies on the Nilgiri Hills (Oxford University Press). He is currently editing the Encyclopedia of Asia (Scribner's), and is also the editor of the journal Visual Anthropology. Recent special issues of the publication covered the topics of images and human rights; the changing meaning of "culture" at the close of this century; visual culture in the Middle East; and cinema and society in India.
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