This dissertation research award will allow a cultural anthropologist from the University of Kentucky to study how new economic opportunities to sell cash crops affect the patterns of authority in the households of Venezuelan peasants. The methods to be used include structured sample interviews and participant observation, to test hypotheses concerning the decrease in rural- urban migration, increase in male control over economic resources, and increase in economic incentives offered to younger household members to keep them on the farm. This research is important because peasant households throughout the world are shifting from a subsistence to a cash-crop livelihood, with attendant changes in household structure and function. Increased understanding of how households react to specific incentives can help us design programs to ameliorate problems of deteriorating social control in rural families and excessive rural-urban migration.
