ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the case material to show the complexity of household forms, how these shape the response to agricultural changes, and how the household itself has been transformed by growth of market relations. It takes as its focus the aspiration to obtain a predictable annual income out of farming, and examines the resulting changes in work, and in the time scales embedded in economic action. The chapter uses the categories of an accounting system as descriptive framework, since these embody the dominant conception of rational action. Farming is different, it will continue only if some farmers’ children stay on, but this possibility is seen as increasingly tenuous. The economic loss to the local farming community occurs only if women continue to emigrate out of the area, taking their capital with them. The household as a unit involving co-resident married brothers has become much rarer since land-reform, and in its place the readers find great mixture of forms.
