Articles by Amrita Rangasami

Famine: The Anthropological Account An Evaluation of the Work of Raymond Firth Amrita Rangasami Analyses of famines have generally (ended to rely on macro data on food production and demographic changes affecting large populations spread over vast geographical or agri-meteorological region. Macro famines, such as those confined to a district or a village or affecting populations practising a single craft or occupation, etc, have received far less attention. Raymond Firth's work on famine in Tikopia, a Polynesian island with a small population is important because apart from brief examinations of 'hunger periods' by Malinowski and Richards, there have been hardly any investigations of such situations by anthropologists. This paper evaluates Firth's study on famine, its nature and causes and also tests his explanation for famine against his own postulates on the economic basis of society.

'Failure of Exchange Entitlements' Theory of Famine A Response Amrita Rangasami The sudden collapse into starvation that has been identified with the famine condition, the author argues, ts only the final phase of famine when the stigmata of starvation become visual and the victims have collapsed. Famine is not,; however, an event marked by the death of the victim. The basic failure in the understanding of famine is the inability to recognise the political, social and economic determinants that mark the onset of the process. We need, therefore, to redefine famine and identify the various factors, political, social, psychological and economic, that operate to keep large classes in the population under continuous pressure.

Report on a Famine Amrita Rangasami This report on famine conditions in a flood-affected village in Goalpara district of Assam investigates whether there had been deaths in the village as a result of famine and examines how far the famine had been caused by the ceasing altogether of the economic activity upon which the village had been dependent for its subsistence