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Chapter One. The Material Background |
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wealth in land rather than in livestock such as pigs, buffaloes and mithan |
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The production of an ample food supply facilitated the growth of villages of a size and stability elsewhere associated only with permanent tillage. Land was the principal source of wealth, and a Konyak had no other effective way of accumulating capital except to increase his holding of land. Pigs, buffaloes, mithan, and ordinary Indian cattle were kept for slaughter, but there was little trade in animals, and none of the systematic investment in livestock which characterizes the economy of more mobile slash-and-burn cultivators such as the Daflas of the Himalayan foothills. |
