ABSTRACT
Household members engaged in a variety of village-based economic activities, the most important being rice cultivation, rubber tapping, fruit collection and selling, and what might be broadly termed as domestic labor. Few new family farms were being created as children married and took a more active economic role, since many younger working people sought employment outside the village. The resulting exodus from rural areas like Negeri Sembilan has contributed to a genuine decline in village-based economic activities. Minangkabau farmers in Negeri Sembilan in the mid-1970s, therefore, appear to have employed a strategy of technological modernization t.o offset the effects of labor migration and ecological degradation in order to ensure their economic survival, rather than to develop commercialized or capitalist farming enterprises. All peasant farmers in Negeri Sembilan were market-oriented. Nor does peasantism necessarily imply aversion to risks, technological conservatism or even a “traditional” – if this means stubborn – clinging to old ways.
