"An important and significant contribution to anthropology."--Barry S. Hewlett, Washington State University
The Agta Negrito people have been hunters and gatherers in the tropical rain forests of the Philippines for centuries. This book investigates a small group of the Agta living on Luzon Island during their transition from a foraging society to a landless group of agricultural workers.
The core of the book is a demographic study of fertility, mortality, and migration over a 44-year period. It is one of only two studies that have completely reconstructed the population dynamics of a foraging group without relying on mathematical models. Ethnographic and narrative historical sections of the book establish the contexts for the demographic data and enhance the study's readability. As a case history of social and population dynamics in a remote frontier region, the work describes the impact of international commercial interests on both the rain forest and the landless peasantry seeking to survive.
The work is of exceptional value because of the difficulties of obtaining reliable demographic data from a foraging group, and for the long-term coverage of the quantitative database.
John D. Early, retired professor of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, is the author of several books, most recently (with John F. Peters) The Population Dynamics of the Mucajai Yanomama.
Thomas N. Headland, adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and anthropology consultant for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is the coeditor of Tropical Deforestation: The Human Dimension and of Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate.
