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Chapter 4 The ego-cultural nature of societies dependent on perishable staple foods
The majority of the societies that depend substantially on the perishable, non-grain, staple foods have developed, often in extremely ancient times, largely or entirely independently of the domestication of grain crops and the larger herbivorous animals in South-Western Asia that constituted the so-called "Neolithic Revolution". They belong within the tropical/equatorial world, rather than within the sub-tropics or temperate regions. Modern agricultural science has developed very largely within the culture-historical matrix of Western Europe and like most other areas of scientific thought and endeavour, its philosophy has been much interpenetrated by what should really be regarded as the folk ethnocentricism of the Western European peoples (Uchendu, 1970). Even when scientific thinking is applied in the field of tropical agriculture, its application has been deeply influenced by conventional "European" modes of thought, many of which are of nonscientific or pre-scientific origin. This situation has been exacerbated by the political and cultural hegemony which Western Europe has exerted over most of the world community from The Renaissance until very recent times, which has led to the false but widely held view that the cultural values of Europe (with its extensions in North America, Australasia, etc.) are inherently superior to those of other cultures. Modern Europe with its "Scientific Revolution" descended culturally through Renaissance and Medieval Europe from the Mediterranean cultures of ancient Rome and Greece, as indeed is evident in everyday social matters. Those Mediterranean cultures descended in turn through the Judaeo-Hellenic tradition and other cultural contacts from the still older cultures of the Nile Valley and the Mesopotamian region of South-West Asia. A continuous cultural-historical tradition thus exists, direct, even if of great time-depth, between modern Europe and the so-called "Neolithic Revolution" which took place in Mesopotamia or on the fringes of that region, some 10 000 years ago, when the initial domestication of the grasses that gave rise to the grain crops and of the animals that are still the basis of modern animal husbandry, took place (Coursey, 1976; 1978a).
Throughout the entire cultural history of modern Europe and its antecedents, grains, together with some leguminous plants and animal products, have been the major foods. The vegetable foods, the grains and pulses were all propagated from seed. As a result, the concept of "seed time and harvest" has entered deeply into the thinking of peoples in all of the civilizations that have developed within this culture-historical continuum. In these cultures, food is often instinctively and indeed symbolically and ritually identified with grain or its products, such as bread. Many of the pre-Christian religions of the Mediterranean cultures and of early Europe were based on a reverence for corn, while in more recent times, corn and bread have retained a cultural significance far beyond their nutritional role, within the framework of Christian symbolism (Jacob, 1944). To the present day, the originally Biblical term "daily bread" remains virtually a synonym for food within European-derived cultures. Vegetatively propagated crops were of little importance in these cultures prior to the introduction of the potato which when first introduced into Europe was a subject of much approbium and was adopted mainly by the most economically depressed social groups (Salaman, 1949). Although root crops were known, the radish being extensively grown in ancient Egypt and the carrot domesticated in Europe during Roman times, they were all seed propagated and were accommodated within the conceptual framework of grain crop agriculture. The vegetatively propagated staple food crops such as the tropical root crops and other sources of perishable staple foods that form the subject of this document were unknown.
The perishable staple foods are derived essentially from the vegetatively propagated food plants discussed in the previous Chapter 2, of which the tropical root crops are the most important. These are all essentially plants of the humid or sub-humid lowland tropical or equatorial regions, except for the potato and some minor root crops, derived from the highland tropics of the Andes; in recent years, some of those crops have spread into the more humid parts of the tropical savannas, or even to the temperate regions. The patterns of food production based on these crops have been appreciably influenced in comparatively recent history and especially during the last century, by contacts with peoples predominantly those of European origins. Nevertheless, the initial origins of these crop plants and the processes of domestication which first brought them into symbiosis with man as crops were independent of the Neolithic Revolution and its associated cultural concepts. The cultural patterns that have developed in the tropical/equatorial regions based on perishable staples are perhaps most clearly seen today in the yam-orientated cultures of West Africa (Coursey and Coursey, 1971) and Melanesia (Barrau, 1970; Coursey, 1972; Tuzin, 1972; Yen, 1973a) but there is evidence for the existence, at a very early stage of human history, of "a continuous ring of gardening cultures", based on the use of vegetatively propagated crops, extending right across the tropical/equatorial zone of the Old World (Lomax and Berkowitz, 1972). This cultural continuum has been largely destroyed by incursions of grain-based cultures into Northern and Eastern Africa, the Middle Eastern area, India, the Indo-Chinese peninsula and Indonesia, several thousand years ago, but nevertheless more recent than the original domestication of either grain or root crops. In these intervening areas, except amongst a few relict peoples, cultural patterns associated with yams and aroids have declined very greatly under the influence of cultures descended from the Neolithic Revolution, but at the two extremities of this former continuum, the earlier root crop orientated cultures have survived. In West Africa, the ancient yam cultures have retained their traditional structure until recent years while assimilating the introduction of cassava. In Oceania, root crops, notably yam and taro, have remained predominant in Melanesia and also accompanied the Polynesian migrations which started from the South-East Asian mainland to the furthest islands of the South Pacific (Barrau, 1965a; 1965b).
Similar evolution of cultures with root crops as their nutritional base, took place independently in early pre-Colombian times in tropical/equatorial latitudes in the New World where Xanthosoma, sweet potato and, most importantly cassava were domesticated, paralleling in many ways the yam and Colocasia cultures of the Old World. Likewise, also paralleling Old World history, destructive culture contact took place in northern South America, firstly with indigenous Amerindian maize cultures and secondly, and even more disruptively, subsequent to European contact, following Colombus' "discovery" of the Americas in 1492. This latter contact, however, has facilitated the dissemination of New World crops to the Old, and vice versa. Cassava, in particular, has expanded rapidly across the Old World tropics mainly in the present century, very largely through its spontaneous adoption by subsistence agriculturalists, already accustomed to other vegetatively propagated crops who have recognized the production potential of the crop; its adaptability to marginal climatic and soil conditions; its immunity to many pests; and above all its high return of food per unit labour input. Similarly, Asian and African yams, Colocasia and the plantains and other cooking bananas were transferred from the Old to the New World and breadfruit was taken in domestication from the South Pacific to tropical America and Africa.
The philosophies of peoples whose cultures are built nutritionally on vegetatively propagated crops as their staple resource, are essentially different from those of peoples who depend on the grain crop/animal husbandry complex. These differences derive from cultural origins, specifically from the methods by which the different types of crop were originally brought into domestication by Man. In these processes, Man not only modified plants to make them more suitable for food production, but by initiating artificial food production systems became himself the product of an artificial nutritional complex. Human culture is thus, at least in part, an artefact of Man's relationships with his crop plants. Plant domestication can thus be regaded as a reciprocal process, in which Man is himself domesticated by the crops with which he has become associated just as he has domesticated them. The consequences for Man of the evolution of these contrasting food production systems have not been explored except in very general terms, but major cognitive and conceptual differences certainly exist. These have penetrated deeply into human culture and ways of thought, eventually becoming formalized and ritualized in order to maintain cultural and social continuity, for in pre-literate (or even in literate) societies, "Ritual is ……. the DNA of society, the encoded informational basis of culture …… the memory core of human achievement" (Campbell, 1966).
An important difference in cultural behaviour between grain-based agricultural societies with systems derived from the Neolithic Revolution and those with vegecultural systems was first pointed out by Haudricourt (1964). The former, dealing with crop plants which require a direct, active and selective approach by Man have led to an "interventionist" mentality and ultimately to the type of cultural system that has now become dominant over most of the world and which automatically perceives Man as dominant. Conversely, the more indirect and less positively active relationships developed between Man and the vegetatively propagated crop plants of the tropical/equatorial regions have led to a "non-interventionist" attitude of mind resulting in an altogether different view of Man as an integral part of the overall ecosystem rather than as something above, separate and dominating it (Coursey, 1978a; 1981b).
The Neolithic Revolution was essentially a traumatic process, initiating rapid cultural changes which came about originally as a response to stress (Wright, 1971). The culturehistorical process that led from there to the development of modern technology passed through two further traumatic discontinuities that served to reinforce and emphasize the interventionist type of attitude that already had been inculcated by the initial stressreaction of the grain crop domestication situation. Firstly, there was the emergence of bronze-using cultures, whose metallurgical base depended on scarce, highly localized, mineral deposits. Possession of the metal conferred great military and economic advantages on those who controlled it, so favouring the development of more closely organized, hierarchic social structures among those who had access to copper and tin, and these groups because of the advantages conferred by the metals and the organizations their possession inculcated became dominant in the South-West Asian and Mediterranean worlds and later and separately in much of Southern and South-Eastern Asia. Secondly, the adoption of medieval Christianity, itself deriving from South-West Asian and Mediterranean sources, by the vigorous but barbarian cultures existing in Northern Europe around 1500 to 1000 BC, provided these peoples for the first time with a theoretical basis for regarding themselves as a separate and inherently superior creation from the rest of the biological world. This, as their descendants achieved world domination in the paleo-Colonial era, laid the foundations for the rapidly approaching ecological crisis now facing the entire world (White, 1967).
No such sudden break with the past or with adjacent or interpenetrating cultures was involved in the processes which brought the perishable staples into symbiosis with Man in the tropical/equatorial regions. The domestication of these crops can be viewed merely as a phase in the slow evolution of a symbiotic inter-relationship between plant and Man, emerging from the concepts of "protection" which non-agricultural peoples have concerning their wild food plants (Burkill, 1953; Barrau, 1970; Coursey and Coursey, 1971; Coursey 1972). The beginnings of this evolutionary process may indeed be as old as humanity. The relationship between pre-human hominids and their plant foods may have contributed as much to physical evolution as the more recent domestication process has to Man's cultural evolution (Coursey, 1973b).
After the domestication of the vegetatively-propagated crops and the establishment of food production systems based on them had occurred, no further traumatic changes took place in the cultural evolution of the tropical "gardening" societies comparable with those that have just been discussed until very recent times. Some cultures remained using only stone tools until the ethnographic present or made the transition directly from stone to the use of the more democratic iron without any significant intermediate use of the elitist copper-based metals. Highly socially stratified societies with technologically sophisticated artefactual complexes did not, therefore, emerge. The pagan religious systems that remained dominant throughout their history until very recent times laid much emphasis on maintaining a proper balance between Man and the ecosystem of which he formed a part and indeed those elements within traditional pagan religion that are concerned with plant life and food production are often very largely systems of ritual sanction designed to regularize and control the interaction of Man and his crop plants to mutual advantage (Barrau, 1965a; 1965b; Coursey and Coursey, 1971; Tuzin, 1972; Coursey, 1978a, 1981b).
The agricultural systems based on grains could also be compared to the reproductive strategy adopted by those species which produce large numbers of offspring but take little care of them, so that only a small proportion survive (K selection), whereas vegecultural food production systems, essentially horticultural, may be compared to those species which have few offspring, but take efficient care of them to ensure a high rate of survival (r selection).
Taking all these factors into consideration, the tropical cultures based on perishable staple foods may be regarded as being essentially ecocentric, i.e. orientated toward the maintenance of an overall ecological balance, in contrast to the technocentric approach, which pertains in most "Western" cultures, where the introduction of a new technology is normally regarded as the first essential towards the solution of any problem that may arise (Dawson, 1981). Because of the ecocentric rather than technocentric approach; the relatively simple technologies that have therefore emerged; and also because of the identification of the civilizations ancestral to those of Europe with a graincrop basis, it is often assumed that any culture based on the use of non-grain or perishable staples must be at an inherently low level and that it is only the grain-orientated cultures that can be based on a symbiotic relationship between Man and plant; and that these must be contrasted sharply with all other cultures where Man is viewed as being purely parasitic on his environment. In many parts of the tropics, however, the reverse is true and peoples who depend on perishable food crops or who use grains only to a very secondary degree have often achieved very substantial cultural levels where relationships to the total environment are often far more profound than those which occur in the more highly socially organized grain-based agricultural civilizations.
As has already been discussed in Chapter 3, the post-harvest technology of the perishable staples is often based on the avoidance of long term storage, rather than on the evolution of sophisticated storage or processing techniques. Thus, storage and processing have often been developed primarily as extensions of normal household food preparation activities, and are thus seen, in many societies, as essentially a woman's function, as opposed to food production which in many societies is often a traditionally male role. It must be emphasized, however, that there are extremely wide degrees of cultural and philosophical diversity between cultures which are nutritionally based on perishable staple foods some of which diversity fundamentally affects woman's roles in the crop storage/processing situations. Overall, however, it appears that the role of woman in the storage and even more in the processing of foodstuffs, is a very substantial one and the more complex the nature of the processing techniques employed, the greater the woman's role is likely to be. It must be emphasized, however, that no general rules can be drawn in this matter, across the whole varied spectrum of cultures oriented towards perishable staple foods.