Living Standards

By the 1960s, the lot of the average person in Buguias had improved markedly from prewar standards. People recall this melioration primarily in terms of diet. With the rise of market gardening, lowland rice became a staple food, while sweet potatoes were demoted to a supplementary position. Now the common farmer could also purchase dried fish, an occasional tin of meat or seafood, distilled liquor, and kerosene for cooking and lighting. Clothing and housing standards also improved; most couples replaced their thatch roofs with galvanized iron sheets, which, although unappealing to the (Western) eye, are locally regarded as far superior to thatch.

But the populace did not share equally in this new bounty. Some had inadequate lands to support their often sizable families in the new style. The poorest fifth of the population could not afford boiled rice as their mainstay; instead they subsisted on a watery rice gruel supplemented with sweet potatoes. But as before, the poor received community subsidies; they ate high-quality food at communal feasts, they could gather fruit on the waysides, and now they could glean the remains of harvested vegetable fields.

Many of the wealthier couples continued to live in much the same style as their poorer contemporaries. As before the war, they devoted the bulk of their riches to religious ceremonies. But the very rich—those who traded vegetables on a large scale—rose to a new level of consumption. Several couples built large, modern houses in both Buguias and Trinidad, filling them with a variety of consumer goods.

Despite the common academic notion of "subsistence affluence" (Sahlins 1972) giving way to "commercial deprivation" in the global periphery, the rise in living standards that accompanied agricultural commercialization in Buguias is paralleled in many other peripheral societies. While many scholars still hold to a view that

William Clarke (1988) has felicitously labeled "edenism" (a recurrent myth, once popularized by Rousseau and later spread with the countercultural impulse of the 1960s), it is now clear that many subsistence economies were anything but prosperous. As Dennett and Connell (1988: 281) say of one group of New Guinea highlanders, "They have no wish to retreat to the 'subsistence affluence' and nobility that have sometimes been thrust upon their ancestors." Whatever the costs of commercialization have been, the Buguias people unanimously voice the same sentiments.