Search Results

Record-offices called grapheia are documented in villages in Egypt as early as the second century BC until well into the third century AD. This chapter investigates the role and nature of the grapheia documented in villages in the first three centuries of Roman rule (AD I-III), with a focus on Tebtunis, in order to establish what difference they made to the functioning of villages as independent communities and to what extent they provided village society with some form of self-administration.

This chapter lays out the methodological foundations for local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE). Understanding how the local economy works is the starting point for all of the methods in this book. A “meta-SAM” is introduced as the framework for understanding the workings of the project-area economy and providing a basis for constructing LEWIE models. It nests elemental SAMs for the key actors, including households, firms, or household-farms that may or may not be affected directly by the program, policy, or market shock under study. It highlights production and consumption activities as well as ways in which markets connect actors within the local economy. It also provides the basic data input for most, though not all, LEWIE models. To illustrate, a simple, stylized meta-SAM is constructed for an economy consisting of two household groups: poor households, which are eligible for a poverty program, and non-poor ones, which are not.

This chapter discusses the integration of Son-Duong village into Vietnam's market economy. The market economy had penetrated deeply into the daily lives of those remaining in Son-Duong through the commodification of residential land. In 1994 the village government sold 8.4 hectares of residential land at the price of 40,000 VND (US $3.65) a square meter along the main village road. Ten years later the price of property along this road had skyrocketed to an average of 850,000 VND (US $54). By 2006 most of the village streets had been paved in concrete, replacing the paths that used to be muddy in the rain. Income sources for village households have diversified, with agriculture accounting for only 42.5 percent of the net incomes in 2004, based on a survey of 283 households. Agricultural decollectivization and market economy participation significantly improved living standards. The relatively egalitarian class system during the command-economy era had also gradually restructured as a result.

This chapter describes the ethnographic setting and provides a historical contextualization of village life in Baoma in order to elucidate what is at stake for villagers in the contemporary period as compared to their past experiences and to those of their neighbors. It begins with a brief social and economic history of the locality since the advent of socialism, focusing on the impact of Mao and post-Mao policies on villagers. It then considers contending forms of morality in the present and their historical antecedents, along with village economy during the period 2004–2005. It also examines the nuclearization of families in Baoma and how nuclear families continue to depend on help from their siblings and their parents. Finally, it discusses the link between pollution and the phenomenon of cancer villages in China.

How have new caste and religious politics and fundamentalism impinged upon everyday life in a Tamil village community studied over twenty-five to thirty years? The chapter describes how Christian practice is increasingly disembedded from Tamil ritual and social forms while diversifying into various streams of global Christianity, including its charismatic and Pentecostal forms. It reveals caste as simultaneously erased from public life and asserted through new associationalism. State-level mediated discourses of religious and caste “communalism” do not, however, fuel local antagonisms. Indeed, the long history of moving between incompatible meaning, morals, and modes of signification provides these villagers with a specific capacity for adaptation in the context of disruptions from a new politics of caste and religious extremism.

This chapter looks at the changing economic strategies of Gounder households in villages in the hinterland of Coimbatore and Tiruppur in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s as these villages became more integrated into the wider regional economy dominated by textiles and engineering. The chapter shows how the Gounder populations in the villages were transformed as the role of agriculture declined and non-agricultural employment rose, much of it involving commuting and outmigration. Agriculture remained a strong component of the village economy, however, throughout the period under review. Fertility decline, increased participation in education including higher education, and the changing position of women played important parts in the transformation. Changing family, kin, and caste relationships were at the heart of the transformation too.

The Conclusions provide a summary of the main findings of the study on village life in early Roman Tebtunis as they have emerged in the previous chapters and discuss the significance of its formal and informal village institutions within the wider context of Roman Egypt. In the light of the evidence from other periods in Egypt (Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and post-Roman) and from other parts of the eastern Roman Empire (e.g. Asia Minor and Syria), a discussion follows as to what extent this village study can be used as a model of village economy and society in the Roman world more generally, and for wider comparison with villages in the medieval and later periods.