Cultural persistence as behavior towards risk: evidence from the North Carolina Cherokees, 1850-1880

Matthew Gregg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Can economic theory help explain the persistence of a cultural enclave among the Cherokee Indians living in North Carolina during the nineteenth century? To date, Fogelson and Kutsche (1961) and Finger (1984) identify the continuation of a communal, labor-sharing agricultural institution called the gadugi as simply an example of Cherokee agency during a period of substantial upheaval. I contribute to the historiography on ancestral labor traditions by adopting Kimball's (1988) framework on the function of farming cooperatives to test whether this arrangement sprung up as a form of insurance against the idiosyncratic risk inherent in southern agriculture. Data collected from the 1850-1880 manuscript census returns on North Carolina Cherokee farms are used to compute the variance of household self-sufficiency, which appears substantial enough to warrant a non-market mechanism to pool risk.

Keywords: Risk-Sharing; Cooperatives; Cherokee Indians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 J54 N11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Income Distribution 2.18(2009): pp. 3-15

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Journal Article: Cultural Persistence as Behavior Towards Risk: Evidence from the North Carolina Cherokees, 1850-1880 (2009)
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