ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to consider the problem of maintaining adequate numbers and varieties of human beings within the community. Beyond the agricultural and population ecologies of the single village, there is a community ecology represented by the relationships between the individual village and the villages surrounding it. The problem of maintaining an equilibrium between manpower requirements and population size is accentuated by periodic catastrophes. There has been an upward trend in Namhalli’s population, which can be attributed to modernization and increased agricultural production, the general pattern of population fluctuation in South India suggests an alternation between population shortage and surplus. An increasingly dense and malnourished population combined with the increasing use of marginal lands would set the stage for emigration or for territorial aggrandizement leading to warfare. A variety of techniques are consistently applied that have the effect of replacing absent family members and “transferring” surplus population.
