The People [ii]

Tangu economic life, gardening, hunting, gathering, and the manufacture of such articles as string bags and clay pots, is largely—but not wholly—a matter of their own internal adaptations and traditional arrangements. So also is the distributive system, the organization of households into co-operative groups, and exchanging and trading across the brother and sister link. At the same time white men and their goods do, and have impinged on economic life in important ways. For the present three may be picked out. First, steel tools have replaced the old stone edged tools. But though these new tools are more efficient than the old ones their use has not involved any new kinds of work, purposes, or forms of organization. Time is saved, and the day is longer. Second, contract labour has drawn young men to the coast where they work on plantations for cash to buy the tools they need as well as other goods such as beads, pigment, cloth, wooden chests, and a variety of knick-knacks. Third, the introduction by the administration of rice to be grown as a cash crop has involved a quite different and separate arrangement for production and distribution without altering the indigenous system for dealing with traditional crops.