Description
Netting, Robert McC (1981). Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community. CUP Archive. 320 Seiten. ISBN 978-0521281973
This innovative anthropological study of the Swiss alpine peasant community of Törbel considers ecological change and stability over the last 300 years. A problem-oriented ethnography, it is the first to use the quantitative methods of historical demography to understand the social and economic life of a peasant community. Professor Netting portrays a resilient and enduring system of human subsistence through descriptions of the local environment, farming, and herding; through analyses of population patterns of birth, marriage, and death; and through examinations of the social organization of inheritance, land tenure, political competition, and household formation. The material for this book comes not only from such usual anthropological sources as interviews and participant observation but also from parish records processed by computer techniques, from government agricultural statistics, and from original parchment documents in the village archives. Drawing on the disciplines of geography, ethnography, demography, and history, the study depicts the evolution of a local ecosystem, highlighting the sources of change and stability in the lives of the inhabitants. The book emphasizes the way in which both material and cultural factors have maintained village equilibrium and the genealogical continuity of family lines. It also focuses on the forces that unbalance and permanently alter the system: nutritional change, fertility and mortality rates, and external economic forces.
Robert McC Netting is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His previous books include Hill Farmers of Nigeria: Cultural Ecology of the Kofyar of the los Plateau (1968) and Cultural Ecology (1977).
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