ABSTRACT
A large literature has grown up concerning the nature of change among the Hausa in rural northern Nigeria focusing on the organization of work, a central empirical and methodological commitment of the Murphys' research. The use of capital to mobilize labor in northern Nigeria must be discussed in the context of several facts concerning labor in relation to land and technology. As for the latter, while the odd tractor is seen in the countryside, the hand plow and hoe are ubiquitous. The realities of the organization of work on the ground create interests on the part of both employee and employer that lead to different contractual arrangements and preferences. A dialectical approach to agricultural wage contracts in Hausaland reveals forms that emerge from forms that differ as much in their noncontents as their positive attributes. Each form contains both the persistence of attributes of its predecessor and the contradiction, or negation, of other attributes.
