The Ecology of Wealth‐in‐People: Agriculture, Settlement, and Society on the Perpetual Frontier

For the Susu of northwestern Sierra Leone, rural settlement dynamics reflect a frontier culture history and the perpetuation of frontier sociopolitical arrangements in village life. Under frontier conditions people are wealth. The competition among male elders for wealth‐in‐people is a major determinant of village movements and the organization and deployment of agricultural labor. In this article, I explore the implications of frontier social arrangements, as illustrated in the careers and lives of individual elder men, for the ecology of swidden agriculture. One significant result is a competitive scramble for labor, which both hinders crop production and leads to problems of intensification and resource degradation. I conclude that local problems of resource management are the result of individual efforts to achieve and maintain social position in the context of established systems of hierarchy.