Introduction

Thirty-five years ago, Charles Erasmus focused attention on the changes occurring in household labour organisation in South America, where wage labour was rapidly supplanting two traditional forms of inter-household labour organisation, namely festive and exchange labour. He saw that rural households relied upon festive labour groups to complete ‘unpredictable urgent tasks’ (‘the result of a delay in farm work caused by some unexpected circumstance, such as illness in the family, irregular rains, occupancy of a farm late in the season, and enforced absence from the farm’ Erasmus, 1965, p. 182). They also relied upon reciprocal labour exchanges where ‘predictable urgent tasks conform to seasonal peak labor loads’ (for example, ‘clearing before the rains come or before the weeds can grow back, weeding before the crop is choked, and harvesting or processing before crop spoilage can occur’; Erasmus, op. cit.). The operative words, which define both the nature of agricultural activities and seasonal constraints, are ‘urgent’ and ‘predictable’.

Extensive literature on the organisation of household labour now exists, but the purpose here is restricted to demonstrating how labour organisation interacts with seasonality. One must go further than describing a calendar of agricultural activities and ‘recapitulate the myriad of germane papers that establish seasonality in work requirements exists in all agricultural systems’ (Alderman & Sahn, 1989, p. 82). Instead, it will be useful to review the relative merits and drawbacks of different types of labour organisation, in order to evaluate household strategies as responses to a range of socio-economic and geographic environments.