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

Gregg, Matthew T. (2009): Cultural persistence as behavior towards risk: evidence from the North Carolina Cherokees, 1850-1880. Published in: Journal of Income Distribution , Vol. 18, No. 2 (June 2009): pp. 3-15.

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.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Risk-Sharing; Cooperatives; Cherokee Indians
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D81 - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty; N - Economic History > N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics ; Industrial Structure ; Growth ; Fluctuations > N11 - U.S. ; Canada: Pre-1913; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J5 - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining > J54 - Producer Cooperatives ; Labor Managed Firms ; Employee Ownership

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