Habitus and Peasantisation in Nigeria: A Yoruba Case Study

Habitus and Peasantisation in Nigeria: A Yoruba Case Study
Author(s): Marc Schiltz

Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 728-746
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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HABITUS AND PEASANTISATION IN NIGERIA:
A YORUBA CASE STUDY
MARC SCHILTZ
University of Papua New Guinea
Research on changes in the system of agricultural production in the Iganna area of northwest-
ern Yorubaland indicates that in the course of this century rural cultivators have developed into a
peasantry. From concepts developed by Bourdieu, it is argued that the explanation of the
peasantisation phenomenon cannot be deduced from the structures of under-development as
propounded by dependency theorists. Instead, the changing strategies deployed by the Igannans
in order to reproduce the 'symbolic capital' of their lineage patrimonies are shown to generate
different modes of domination and dependence as the situations upon which they have acted
themselves change.
In this article I investigate the structures and practices underlying the processes
of peasantisation1 in Iganna, a rural community in northwestern Yorubaland,
using concepts developed by Bourdieu (I977).
Classical definitions have characterised peasants as self-supporting family-
based landworkers (Shanin I976), who live in some relationship to market
towns (Kroeber I948). In this sense the pre-colonial Igannans might already
have qualified for this broad category, though possibly Fallers's (I96I) defini-
tion of African cultivators as 'incipient' or 'proto' peasants would have been
nearer the mark. Radical writers, however, following Frank and Amin, define
peasants by the structural determinants that characterise their dependence-as
petty commodity producers-on capitalist spheres of exchange in order to
secure the reproduction of their own productive enterprises. In seventeeth-
nineteenth-century west Africa, dependence on the international market was
experienced to an important degree only by traditional rulers and war chiefs,
through mercantilist relations (Coquery-Vidrovitch I976). Control of the
Atlantic trade routes was then crucial for the expansion and maintenance of
empires (Law I977). So it was not until colonial rule in the first part of this
century had superseded the traditional ties of servility between commoners and
rulers, and individual cultivators had been enticed or forced to produce agri-
cultural commodities for the market, that African peasantries did emerge. It is in
this sense, then, of a world capitalist system, that one should read the assertion
made by Williams that 'colonialism created a peasantry in Nigeria' (I976: 2I).
If the dependency argument is to be understood literally, it would mean that
the transition of African cultivators to peasants was wholly the outcome of
external factors set in motion by colonial penetration. That such a view would
have come under attack by anthropologists (especially Marxists) is not surpris-
ing as it fails to recognise the diversity, specificity and resilience of the
pre-capitalist social formations subjected to colonial capitalism.
Man (N. S.) 17, 728-46
MARC SCHILTZ 729
Unlike the dual economy models (traditional v. modern) of gradualist

theories of development, Marxist approaches in anthropology (Meillassoux
I98I; Kahn I978; Roseberry I978) have supported the basic conception of a
world capitalist system as seen by dependency theorists, and stressed the
dominant structural role of this system in reproducing non-capitalist forms of
production among peasants. In this way they have argued that the formation
and reproduction of a peasantry cannot be accounted for solely by capitalist
penetration from without, but that this process of structural transformations has
also its internal dynamic, specific to the past and present conditions of the
society under study.2
But does an exercise in uncovering the objective structures of underdevelop-
ment enable the analyst to understand the specificity of the social processes
under study, as, in our project, the practices associated with 'peasantisation in
Iganna'? According to Bourdieu knowledge of the objective structures does not
by itself lead to knowledge of practice. The assumption that structures produce
practices and representations of practices (I977: 78sqq.) is the illusion of
objectivism-the fetishism of social laws into which structuralist readers of
Marx are caught (I977: 84). Although Bourdieu recognises that 'method-
ological objectivism' is 'a necessary moment in all research', this objectivism at
the same time ('by the break with primary experience and the construction of
objective relations which it accomplishes') demands its own supersession (I977:
72). Bourdieu attempts this supersession by positing the concept of habitus
which mediates between structure and practice. Habitus denotes
the culture of an epoch, class or any group as it is internalised by the individual in the form of
durable dispositions that are at the basis of his/her behaviour (Bidet I979: 203, my emphasis).
Structures as 'objective regularities/conditions' produce habitus. Habitus, then,

'the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces
practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective
conditions of the production of their generative principle' (Bourdieu I977: 78).
Bourdieu's 'theory of practice' summarised as structures produce habitus which
determine practices, which reproduce structures is thus equally a theory of reproduc-
tion (Bidet I979: 203). But the reproduction of structures is constantly subject to
changes. Because of habitus, individuals or groups may (consciously or
unconsciously) tend to reproduce the objective structures that produced habitus
in the first place. But the assumption that actual behaviour will achieve this is
teleological, as it ignores that agents always act upon historical situations which
are never identical. Practice, therefore, must be explained by habitus (its
generative principle) on the one hand, and by the irreducible novelty of
historical situations on the other. So whether we are dealing with phenomena
described as migration, revolution or peasantisation, the practices associated
with these phenomena are the product of the dialectical relationship between
situations and habitus (Bourdieu I977: 82-3) .
The discussion of peasantisation in Iganna, with reference to a world capitalist
system, must of necessity stress the economic referents which the term 'peasant'
denotes (see Firth I95i: 87-8). Drawing on Kahn's work on petty commodity
production, I try to identify on the one hand the structural determinants
730 MARC SCHILTZ
underlying the emergence and reproduction of peasant relations of production

in Iganna. On the other hand, drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of a 'theory of
practice'4 I explore also those practices that have created and are reproducing the
peasantry. These practices, by implication, are instrumental in generating new
processes of stratification in Nigeria.
Pre-colonial modes of domination
Although Iganna cultivators share some general characteristics with other Third
World peasants, the specificity of their peasant production is tied to their past.
Understanding how this past is internalised in the form of 'durable dispositions'
(that is: understanding 'habitus', the producer of practices and reproducer of
structures) will, therefore, constitute a first step.
The most constant feature in agricultural production in Iganna linking the
present with the past has been the combination ofhousehold-centred productive
units and lineage-centred landholding groups. Within a radius of 5-Io km
around the town individual farmers practise shifting cultivation on plots which
carry such staples as maize, melons, yams, okra, beans and cassava. While land
rights are in principle vested in lineages, rights accrue to individuals and their
descendants as a result of possession and usufruct. Consequently most Igannans
can claim exclusive rights over some tracts of land, mainly by virtue of agnatic
descent.5 Nevertheless, access to new land often operates through matrilateral or
other cognatic links. Here we see an ongoing process between individual
producers who by virtue of (agnatic or matrilateral) kinship possess the means of
production and initiate the productive process, and land-holding descent groups
which set up the conditions necessary for the reproduction of the productive
process. In this sense we may state that agnatic descent groups, known in
Yoruba as idile (idi, 'base', and ile, 'house'), fulfil an economic function, even
though as a kin-based group neither the idile nor its constituent household units
can be defined as an economic group in itself (as can the capitalist firm, for
example).
What the idile represents, then, in terms of production-reproduction, calls for
a broadening of the notion of economic calculation. This, as Bourdieu states,
must extend to 'all goods, material and symbolic, without distinction' (I977:
I78). In such a context the patrimony of a lineage represents a capital of
economic and symbolic assets which includes not only
their land and instruments of production but also their kin and clientele, . . . representing a
heritage of commitments and debts of honour, a capital of rights and duties built up in the course
of successive generations (I977: I78).
In this sense, idile in Iganna should be understood as the individual's patrimony,

representing for him/her a symbolic capital of renown and prestige as well as
material assets. Indeed each idile has its own history which starts with the
founding of the lineage in the town. Usually reference is made also to important
aspects of its 'pre-history', that is the lineage founders' original home and
migrations, their titles, specialisations and acts of bravery. Idile praise chants
(oriki-orile) sing about the orisa (deity) that made it prosperous; they tell of idile
MARC SCHILTZ 73I
forebears' wars for the Sabiganna (oba, or king of Iganna) and the honours he
bestowed on them in return.
In linking the concept of symbolic capital to the Yoruba concept of idile, it is
important in terms of economic calculation to analyse the mechanism of what
Bourdieu calls 'the perfect interconvertibility' of symbolic and economic capital
in the 'archaic economy' (I977: I78). This leads to the question ofidentifying the
conditions underlying the reproduction of idile relations. The aim of this
investigation will be to construct a working base for the diachronic assessment
of social costs, to present-day peasants, of reproducing the symbolic capital of
their idile patrimonies. On an ever-changing and refractory base, however,
assessment must be constantly adjusted, as the relations of production in the
colonial and neo-colonial Yoruba social formations will be undergoing subtle,
qualitative transformations.
The pre-colonial phase of Iganna's history is tied to the rise and fall of the Oyq
kingdom. Founded in c. i6oo by an exiled prince from the kingdom of Sabe, the
town grew in importance under the imperial expansion ofOyQ in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries on account of its strategic location along the western
frontier, at the cross-roads of the two major trade routes of Badagry (to the
south) and Sabe. and Ketu (to the west). Following the fall of Old-Qyq in the
I830's (Law I977: I95) and the sacking of many other towns in western
Yorubaland by Dahomey and Fulani-ruled Ilorin, Iganna became a haven for
thousands of refugees who settled permanently within its walls after pledging
loyalty to the Sabiganna. By the i88o's there were eight town quarters in
Iganna, totalling more than I 50 compounds (agbole) each of which was the home
of the various idile that made up the town.6
Although in Yoruba society there has always been an obsession with indi-
vidual ranking, this never led to ranked social categories or aristocracies. Within
the Iganna council of chiefs ranking order was subject to constant jostling,
especially with the arrival of refugees in the nineteenth century. Many settler
groups who had previously held chiefly or royal titles wanted to secure new
offices under the $abiganna. Other groups, though of non-chiefly descent, were
conferred chieftaincies upon settling because of their leaders' outstanding
achievements, especially in trade or warfare. At the same time, the ranking of
individuals by office, occupation or seniority did not in itself give rise to the
formation of concrete social strata into, say, aristocratic and commoner
lineages. Only slaves, as 'foreign' prisoners of war (either captured or pur-
chased), were differentiated from freeborn townspeople. But even they (or their
offspring) were gradually absorbed as lineage members.
This absence of lineage ranking meant that apart from the actual office holder
in a royal or chiefly lineage other lineage members did not rank differently from
commoners in terms of occupation, cult membership, corvee duties and such.
This is not to say that there was rank differentiation but no stratification in
Yoruba society. Quite the contrary. Stratification was an ongoing process, but
it did not create observable social boundaries as in feudal estates or apartheid
systems. In fact the jostling of the chiefly ranking order was a manifestation of
the underlying dynamics of stratification. The following account of the rela-
tionship between these observations and the system of production (together
732 MARC SCHILTZ
with the conditions of its reproduction) will perhaps elucidate this point.
The most constant feature of Iganna's pre-colonial history was probably
people's dependence on the land for making a living. During these three
centuries no substantial changes occurred in agricultural techniques and house-
hold-centred subsistence production. This the common people combined with
petty-trading and the marketing of locally produced artefacts and agricultural
goods. The most significant event in the nineteenth century was the escalation of
warfare throughout Yorubaland, which pitted war leaders against old-time
kings and chiefs in a bid to gain control over external resources. This coincided
with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and subsequent growing demand
for domestic slaves and European goods (Oroge 1971: I67, passim). But the
power struggles were fought mostly at the top of the political hierarchies and did
not last long enough radically to restructure local polities at the base. Those who
gained power and wealth, especially through involvement in external trade and
warfare, found that the consolidation of their achievements back home de-
pended on the structure and organisation of Yoruba society at that time in
history. Wealth and power, to become legitimised in the eyes of the people, had
to be shared and redistributed in the form of gifts, favours, benefits, loans,
patronage and displays of liberality, especially on the occasion of feasts. Only in
this way could the fragile bonds of loyalty and personal obligation on which
relations of power and wealth depended be built and reproduced.7
The appropriation of another individual's labour power required first of all
the creation of a social bond whereby this individual was personally obligated to
produce by virtue of being a wife, a son, an iwofa (debt-labourer), a client or a
slave.8 The initial setting up of a 'non-economic' bond meant that the actual
relationship between work and its product became 'socially repressed' (Bour-
dieu I977: I76). Those in a position of domination might have behaved in
authoritarian and peremptory ways, but at all times there were limitations to the
exercise ofpower. Dependants expected to be given the opportunity to work for
their own upkeep. Sons and slaves of the house were allocated farm plots of their
own, and female dependants were allowed some petty-trading or other lucrative
activity for their own maintenance. This plasticity was convenient for the
person in authority, who could then appropriate the dependant's labour power
when needed without having to shoulder the full cost of its reproduction.
In order to understand the processes of stratification one has to place these
multiple dyadic links of dependence and domination within the broader context
of group structure and ideology. Iganna are gregarious people who like to
combine individual pursuits with an intense social life which finds its audiences
in the various town-based groupings. Most binding among these were the idile
descent groups, each of which had its store of symbolic capital. This prestige and
renown of the idile was associated with the legitimation of the authority upon
which social solidarity within the households and the society at large depended.
Authority devolved from the ancestors and their orisa (deities) upon the king,
chiefs, elders and so on down to parents. Cases of misfortune (infertility,
sickness or premature death) were often interpreted as acts of the angered idile
orisa in response to disobedience or neglect. Power over life and death, power to
bless or punish-these were vested in the spirit world of the idile ancestors and
MARC SCHILTZ 733
their orisa. Ideologically, these spirits were the true sources of 'capital' (prosper-
ity and well-being) which they might extend as help ('credit') to those whom
they wished to bless, or withhold from those they wished to punish.
As within the various idile there was more or less assumed equality (at least to
the extent that they were not ranked-see Lloyd I974: 34), this symbolic capital
in which all its members shared corporately had to be upheld by each of them,
poor as well as rich. In their attempts to secure the reproduction of this symbolic
capital (through feasting the dead, becoming initiated into the orisa cults or
'honourably' concluding expensive litigations) the poor often had to borrow
from the wealthy or 'buy' their patronage. This involved entering into relations
of indebtedness with credit controllers who would then dominate the transac-
tions in which the labour of the poor was appropriated or their loyalty and
clientship secured.
For example, when an ordinary person was faced with the formidable expense
of burying his father, and honouring his idile, high cultural expectations would
invariably force him to borrow money from an affluent townsman. This
moneylender (olowo)9 could then increase his renown, consolidate his power and
legitimate his wealth by giving out a loan to the bereaved man in the manner of a
generous benefactor. Following the custom of the iwofa institution Johnson
I92I: I27; Fadip' I970: I89sqq), no date was fixed for repayment and no interest
was charged on the outstanding loan. However, the iwqfa, that is the debtor, or
his dependant (such as son or daughter) whom he could pawn in his own stead,
had to perform debt-labour for the moneylender until the initial loan was repaid.
The historical record of this widespread credit institution shows that olowo
often held on to the iw,ofa's debt labour for periods ranging between five to more
than ten years in return for each loan. While working for the olowo, iwqfa often
found it very hard to earn the money to redeem themselves. Children pawned in
this way were often not redeemed until maturity or even marriage. So while
being in debt was for many a very 'normal' and socially respectable way of life,
this situation created an extra labour pool, readily available to the well-to-do, at
the expense of the small householders who were the intermittent debtors in the
town community and forced to work with reduced labour power.
It is in the light of these examples that we should understand Bourdieu's
assertion that while the exhibition of symbolic capital (for example, feasting the
idile ancestors) is always expensive in economic terms, it 'is one of the mechan-
isms which make capital go to capital' (I977: I8I). But what the pre-colonial
Iganna data also reveal about the 'conversion of material capital into symbolic
capital itself reconvertible into material capital' (I977: I 80) is that such a process
applied to the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the large pool of debtors
and clients who lacked the material capital needed to uphold the symbolic capital
of renown attached to their idile.
In conclusion, I would stress that in pre-colonial Yoruba communities the
polarisation between those who controlled the circulation of material capital and
those who (intermittently) depended on it did not presuppose concrete social
strata or classes. On the contrary, it was the absence of such strata, predicated by
the absence of idile ranking, which enabled the well-to-do to offer their capital as
credit to those forced by the exigencies of idile obligations to enter into relations
734 MARC SCHILTZ
of indebtedness. The absence of lineage ranking also provided wide scope for
social mobility. Joining the credit pool of society and staying within it was
ultimately a feat of personal achievement. Even when an elevated position had
been consolidated in a chieftaincy title, successors to the title might be left unable
to tie to themselves the followers through whom power and wealth had to be
reproduced. The vagaries of individuals' fortunes and the jockeying for pos-
itions among title holders were symptomatic of a society which tried constantly
to consolidate and rationalise its procedures concerning competition and social
inequality. The dialectical relationship between situations and habitus mani-
fested in these practices will show up even more dramatically in the subsequent
colonial era when we follow the directions entrepreneurship began to take with
the channelling of food crops into the long distance trade with the expanding
urban markets.
The emergence of a commercial peasantry

The argument that Igannans have developed into a commercial peasantry
derives not so much from the simple observation that people produce agricul-
tural goods for a market (they already did this in pre-colonial times) as from the
changed relations that characterise petty commodity production. Kahn (I978;
I980) sums up the emergence of these relations ofproduction as the outcome of a
threefold process. First, the separation of producers from any class of non-
labourers with property rights in the means of production. Such a transition
often marks the breakdown of traditional links of servitude and chiefly auth-
ority. Secondly, the separation of the mass of producers from one another. This
process marks the dissolution of communal rights in property so that producers
become the individual owners of their means of production. Finally, increased
technical division of labour, the creation of markets and mobility of the factors
of production (Kahn I980: I 34-5). Such mobility is a 'crucial precondition for
the emergence of petty commodity production, as well as a basic condition of its
reproduction' (I980: I35). This dominant role of the economy in petty com-
modity production is, as in the case of capitalist production, possible only after
the servile and communal bonds of previous epochs have been dissolved.
The last point raises a problem. Although the dissolution of pre-capitalist
bonds can be observed in Iganna, in important respects they retain resilience.
This is so despite the separation of producers from one another which, as Kahn
states, is a necessary condition for the emergence of petty commodity produc-
tion. Such persistence of pre-capitalist bonds raises a problem which Kahn does
not incorporate explicitly in his analysis of the 'structure of petty commodity
production' (I980: I3osqq), where his concern is with the reproduction of petty
commodity relations of production already established. He does, however,
address this question elsewhere in his discussion of the concept ofa 'neo-colonial
social formation' (I980: 200sqq). Grappling with the question of whether or not
there is a dual economy in Third World countries, Kahn recognises 'the
specificity of localised, non-capitalist relations of production' (I980: 210)
dominated by capitalism within the same social formation. It seems to me that
the material base of this specificity, the base of habitus, is in the Iganna case
MARC SCHILTZ 735
situated precisely in the persistence of certain communal or even servile bonds,

as well as in the relative immobility of the most basic factor of peasant
production, idile land. I discuss this question again later, but first review the
changes that marked the first decades of this century. It is worth noting that it
took almost fifty years after the imposition of colonial rule for a commercial
peasantry in Iganna to emerge.
The stepping up of agricultural production and channelling of foodcrops into
long-distance trade at the beginning of the colonial era were the result of local
entrepreneurship rather than British colonial policy; the agricultural commer-
cial interests of the latter were concentrated in the production of export crops
such as rubber, cocoa and palm kernels in other parts of Yorubaland. In Iganna
in the first three decades of this century a number of big farmers (including both
chiefs and commoners) rose to prominence by channelling agricultural produce
into the long distance trade, first with Abeokuta and later mainly with Ibadan.
Because of the rising cost of living (people needing new British currency for
paying taxes and purchasing imported goods) these farmers (referred to as
olowo) functioned as bankers. While loans were outstanding the olowo enjoyed
the services of numerous iwqfa and household dependants who worked on their
farms, plied the caravan routes as headporters and retailed their produce in the
distant markets.
This period coincided with the beginnings of Indirect Rule in Nigeria, in
which chiefs continued to administer territories subject to the guidance and
overall authority of the British officials. Officially this sytem was introduced in
I9I4, but in essence had been in operation in Yorubaland since I879 (Atanda
I973: 8ssqq). In Oyo. the policy led to a reactionary local government regime
during the twenty-five years (1906-3 I) that Captain Ross was British Resident.
He propped up the Alaafin's power position as paramount chief over the whole
of the former Oyo Province in an unprecedented way. In traditionally rival
chiefdoms such as Ife and Ibadan, located in areas where British commercial
interests were centred and undergoing changes more rapidly, Qyo's power
politics gave rise to mounting conflict and resentment. In contrast, northwest-
ern Yorubaland-an economic backwater under British rule-remained a
stronghold of Oyo's Native Authority rule, directly controlled by the Alaafin.
As a result of this conservatism, authority relations in Iganna and within the idile
and households were constantly reinforced. This enabled those in positions of
domination as chiefs, moneylenders, household heads or parents to order their
dependants about and appropriate their labour in much the same way as in
pre-colonial times.
Indirect Rule took a more democratic and progressive turn in Yorubaland
after Ross's departure from Oyo. in 1931 (Atanda 1973: 249sqq). In Iganna the
weakening of chiefly power coincided with developments which eventually
eroded the big farmers' control over the long distance trade in farm produce. A
crucial development was motor transport, which reduced the need for head-
porterage. At around the same time intermediary markets for bulking farm
produce appeared near turnpikes where motor roads linked up with caravan
routes. Most affected by these developments were the many women marketing
farm produce on behalf of the big farmers. While the farmers stayed in Iganna,
736 MARC SCHILTZ
these women began to use their knowledge of the market mechanisms and trade
contacts in distant places to conduct business on their own account. This was the
beginning of a radical breakthrough in the relations of production. Previously
the dominant ethic had been that the producer controlled not only the produc-
tion process and the co-producers engaged in it but also the allocation of
produce, either for household consumption or for marketing.10 However, by
acting as independent brokers in farm produce, women began to appropriate
these goods from the direct producers and decide for themselves where and how
to allocate them. Elderly informants were careful to distinguish women's new
role as independent brokers or traders (onisowo) in farm produce from their
'traditional' role of simply selling these goods (taja) on behalf of the producer. "
The same informants insisted that in the beginning of this century long distance
trade in farm produce was solely the province of big farmers.
But these developments proceeded at a slow pace. In the I930's and I940's the
influence of the Alaafin still loomed large in town affairs within the Iganna area.
Throughout this period young people were still under the authority of their
parents. In their subordinate positions they continued to provide the bulk of the
dependent labour force in agricultural production. But in the I950S their bid for
self emancipation asserted itself in the form of a youth exodus to the cities.
The labour vacuum which their departure created was filled by two relatively
new categories of agricultural producers. First, from outside Yorubaland, farm
labourers popularly referred to as agatu began to move into the area. These men
tended to come in March when the first planting of maize and melons starts and
stay until October, when the second maize crop is harvested. Throughout the
farming season agatu received free board and lodging. The farmers who hired
their services usually paid them in arrears in October before they returned to
their home areas. Secondly, since the I940's there has been a great influx of
farmers from other Yoruba towns settling on land allocated to them by the
Igannans. This has resulted in a proliferation of farming hamlets into the exten-
sive tracts of bushland surrounding Iganna town. 12
Coincidental with these movements has been the proliferation of farm
markets. Of the two that existed in the Iganna district before the war one
remains, but in addition seven more have sprang up in various places. These
markets are held every four days and function primarily as sites for collecting
farm produce which is then taken off by lorry. The marketing and distribution
of farm produce to both intermediate and distant markets involves the special-
ised activities of many people. While transport services are run by men, the
middle trade in food crops is run almost entirely by women. Women who stay
with their husbands out in the farm hamlets often buy up produce from the
neighbouring farmers and sell it to the town-based traders who come with the
lorries on market days. Alternatively farmers sell directly to the itinerant
traders. At the time of fieldwork I estimated that thirty to fifty Iganna farm
produce traders operated regularly between their home town, Ibadan and
Lagos. In addition there are countless women who trade in farm produce on a
part-time basis and in many cases over shorter distances, covering only one link
in the long chain of middle trade. With the development of this complex middle
trade network, the old-time practice of wives marketing their husbands' cash-
MARC SCHILTZ 737
crops has gone out of fashion. Farmers still supply their wives with staples for
the purpose of household consumption; but as a rule they now sell their
cashcrops to women traders other than their wives, even when the latter are
produce traders in their own right.
Farmers are in theory free to sell their produce to the highest bidder. In
practice, established dyadic relations between farmers and traders cannot easily
be bypassed. They have advantages for both sides: for the traders, who may not
wish or be able to pay cash on purchase; for the farmers, who often request
nominally interest-free loans from their traders. These loans are viewed simply
as advance payments on crops still to be harvested. Clearly such transactions,
requiring mutual trust and cooperation, call for steady dyadic links (cf. Trager
1981). Following the demise of the iwgfa institution13 the double role of women
traders as brokers in farm produce and as providers of credit is probably the
main reason why farmers set up dyadic business relations with women who are
not their household members. Informants claimed repeatedly that there would
be no end of marital disputes if husband and wife entered into the relations that
characterise the farmer-trader dyad.
It may be possible to view these new arrangements as merely adaptive,
domestic strategies whereby husbands and wives make their 'traditional' roles
conform to the exigencies of the modern situation. My contention, however,
will be that in Iganna they are a reflection of radical changes in the relations of
production occasioned by the current conditions of peasant petty commodity
production. In order to grasp this new social reality we must analyse further the
content and implications of these current practices in Iganna in relation both to
habitus, as defined earlier with reference to the idile, and to the reproduction of
the structures of peasant production.
The consolidation ofpeasantproduction

Consolidation raises the question of how petty commodity relations of produc-
tion are reproduced once they have been established. Marxist writers agree that
the world market, to which individual petty commodity producers as well as
capitalist producers are linked, establishes the basic condition for the reproduc-
tion of the relations of production. Disagreement exists, however, as to what
prevents petty commodity production from developing into capitalist produc-
tion. Many of those who view the world economy in terms of a core-periphery
model argue that capitalism at the core needs the perpetuation of peasant
economies at the periphery for the supply of cheap labour, raw materials, and so
on. This in turn offsets the declining rate of profit at the centre as reflected in the
cyclical crises of the world capitalist system (Amin I974b; Frank i980). Others
view the entrenchment of peasant production as an expression of the pervasive-
ness of class struggle, as much within the periphery as between periphery and
core (Rey I973; Kahn i980).
In line with this second approach I am inclined to relate the process of Iganna
peasantisation to the wider processes of stratification in Nigeria, and more
specifically to the forces that oppose the capitalisation of agriculture in a country
so strongly committed to capitalist development. An explanation of these forces
738 MARC SCHILTZ
would, as Kahn argues with reference to Minangkabau petty commodity

producers, 'rest [as the concept of social formation implies] to a great extent on
features in a world-economy which are distinctly local' (I980: 2I0). In con-
nexion with this 'distinctly local' specificity of peasant practices in Iganna, I
discuss the growing dependence of farmers on hired labour on the one hand, and
on the women in the farm produce trade on the other. The ambiguities,
pragmatism, conservatism and innovations underlying these practices will, in
Bourdieu's sense, be viewed as the product of the dialectical relationship
between (changing) situations and habitus. As already indicated, the aim of this
analysis will be to assess the social cost for Igannans of reproducing the sym-
bolic capital of their idile patrimonies under current conditions of petty com-
modity production, and by implication to assess also how these practices are
instrumental in reproducing new modes of domination within the Nigerian
social formation.
Youth outmigration has meant that Iganna farmers must manage the farm
single-handedly for most of the year. They call on agatu labour mainly for
dependents' tasks: making new plots in the bush, weeding. But the actual
planting farmers always do themselves, although their wives may help them
with harvesting. Looking at production in general, the observer might argue
that the agatu provide labour formerly provided by farmers' sons, the major
difference being that the father-son relationship is replaced by the employer-
employee relationship. But the social situation of the agatu is more complex than
this simple status dyad suggests. Iganna farmers object strongly to the sugges-
tion that the agatu, whom in some ways they regard as latter-day iwQfa, are
replacing their sons. The comparison with the iwQfa is skewed and selective,
resting on such criteria as the fact that during the labour period the farmers direct
the tasks of the agatu and provide them with free board and lodging like other
household dependants. Moreover, since they are young men who often do not
speak Yoruba, and accept wages for doing agricultural work, farmers tend to
look down on them as people of low status.
This attitude is fraught with contradictions. The agatu sees his relationship
with the local farmers in economic terms. With the present structural domi-
nance of the economy, this puts him in a position from which he can extend or
withhold 'credit' in the form of labour. The terms of his contract are free board
and lodging while he works and a previously negotiated wage. This wage he
formerly calculated at a fixed piece rate, but increasingly now it is the result of
hard bargaining. As these wages are paid in bulk at the end of the rainy season in
October, farmers are often short of cash and have to enter into relations of
indebtedness with local creditors. That the agatu are economically in a strong
position is witnessed also by the fact that despite their low status they can afford
many luxuries-cassette recorders, motor cycles-beyond the means of ordi-
nary farmers.
Thus household-based agricultural production becomes increasingly depen-
dent on outside labour for its reproduction, while the producers' own children
and other former dependants withdraw their labour and migrate to the cities,
sending no substantial remittances back home. In this process farmers become
culturally alienated from their children, who as urbanites see their parents as ara
MARC SCHILTZ 739
oko-a derogatory term meaning 'people of the farm' but formerly applied to
gauche individuals ignorant of proper social behaviour. Yet this alienation does
not mean that emigration ipsofacto implies the severing of idile links. On the
contrary, research among migrants showed that most kept up active links with
their people in Iganna. Nevertheless, physical distance takes migrants out of the
orbit where idile obligations impinge most strongly on individuals' behaviour,
especially those socially and economically costly obligations which reproduce
the idile symbolic capital of renown and prestige. Also, as urban artisans, wage
earners and traders, Iganna migrants attempt to distance themselves structurally
from the home-based peasant producers by participating more directly in the
dominant capitalist spheres of circulation within the Nigerian economy Joseph
I978). It is through such participation that people can now aspire, if not for
themselves then for their children, at gaining access to the various national
power elites (Lloyd I972).
The middle-trade in farm produce offers women traders the chance of a
structurally more advantageous position for participating in the economy than
that enjoyed by the direct producers, who remain tied to the land. Of particular
significance in this respect is the produce trader's role as local creditor in
providing cash to farmers. The latter often have expenses which exceed their
available cash, given the seasonality of crops, the general high cost of living, low
investments in local credit institutions14 and the ongoing obligations to pay back
previous debts. The costliest items for which farmers most commonly sought to
obtain credit were the agatu's accumulated wages and (as in the past, cf. Johnson
I92I: I29; Fadipe I970: I89) idile related festivities. These include funeral
expenses and feasts to commemorate dead parents (isinku), marriage expenses,
initiation rituals and celebrations for new members of the onifa confraternity and
other orisa cult societies.
The new configuration, however, in which farmers as initiators of the
productive process lose effective control over their household dependants and
become directly dependent on outsiders (labourers and traders) for the repro-
duction of their idile-based enterprises, tends to exacerbate certain contradic-
tions within the present system of peasant production. Examination of the
ambiguities and tensions that characterise the interactions between farmers and
traders will perhaps elucidate this.
Ambiguity in these relationships which involve men (farmers) and women
(traders) has to do with gender relations in general. Here too the realities of the
changed relations are socially misrecognised by the formal persistence of
institutions underpinning men's authority over women, and by the fact that
Yoruba women have always engaged in occupations of their own, controlling
finances independently of their husbands. Men are well aware that women are a
political force to be reckoned with in domestic and town affairs. Ideologically
women's power is closely associated with their role as procreators, especially
with the belief that they control the life-giving blood. As one Aladura (faith-
healing Christian sect) prophet explained to me, 'Women are much more
powerful than men, because they own the blood' (nwon l'eVe). People give
expression to this belief in various ways. Although complicated by the fact that
orisa cults vested in idile are thought responsible for all blessings, including the
740 MARC SCHILTZ
birth of children, this belief in women's power is at the bottom of fears of

sabotage by witchcraft. All women are viewed as potential witches (aje).
Witches are said to kill their victims (especially infants, husbands and co-wives)
by draining their blood. No power is more lethal, anti-social and difficult to
control than witchcraft, as it is ubiquitous and cuts across the idile boundaries,
just as women themselves do through virilocal marriage. 'The mothers did it'
(awon Iya ni nwon se e) is the respectful expression Igannans use to euphemise
witches' activities.
For men, such fears are constantly exacerbated by the fact that women have
always been able to achieve relative economic autonomy. Thus in the capricious
context of markets, presided over by Esu, the most unpredictable of Yoruba
orisa (the 'Trickster' divinity), women can compete with men and even outdo
them in acquiring wealth and in tying others to them as debtors and clients.
Significantly, in the early I950's, when the former big farmers were declining
and women asserting their control over the farm produce trade, the Atinga
witchfinding cult which swept through western Yorubaland reached Iganna (cf.
Morton-Williams I956).
Men's ascendancy over women traditionally asserted itself mainly in the ritual
domain of the idile-based cults and in the juridico-political domain of town
affairs. Divination was always performed by men. The ritual functions of
offering prayers and pouring the blood of slain animals over ancestral graves and
orisa shrines were performed by men, even in cults dominated by women (such
as Yemoja, Qsun or Orisa-oko). The control of witchcraft was the specific task
of certain male-dominated cults such as Oro and Egungun (Morton-Williams
I964; Schiltz I978). Decision-making in town affairs and adjudication were
functions of the king and other ranked office holders whose titles were vested in
the various patrilineages within the town. The functions of lyalode and Iyalqja,
the two chiefly titles belonging to women, were restricted to women's affairs,
and the titles were not vested in any particular lineage. Thus men's cultural
ascendancy was part of a total mode of domination with the idile descent group
as a lynch-pin.
Since the breakdown of chiefly authority and the demise of the big farmer
system of production there has been a general scramble for access to external
resources. Everybody, down to the smallest farmer, can participate in the wider
economy nowadays, without first having to 'tie' himself to a chief or olowo.
Instead farmers tie themselves to women traders. But in this process the ethos of
production, namely that producers control the co-producers and the allocation
of the produce, no longer applies. Neither agatu nor women traders are
dependants whom the farmer controls. Moreover, farmers are alienated from
their produce long before it reaches the market, since traders appropriate and
allocate it as they like. Also, the organisation of the middle trade is such that the
trader can establish herself in an economically powerful position and gain
considerable control over the cash returns of the farmers she deals with.
This last point is important. The prices of foodstuffs in the urban markets are
subject to seasonal inflation. In the second half of the year, when food staples are
plentiful, prices are relatively low. By November, when scarcity sets in, prices
begin to rise and continue to do so sharply until July. My recordings of farm
MARC SCHILTZ 74I
produce prices in the Ibadan markets in Orita-merin may serve to illustrate the
extent of seasonal price fluctuations most clearly in the case of yam flour which
trebled in price in the nine months between October I974 and June I975.
Consequently, by a delay on sales cash returns can be increased considerably.
Iganna farmers have little scope to do this due to their constant social obli-
gations, pressures to pay previous debts, or the urgency to pay off the agatu in
October, when prices are low. Traders, on the other hand, especially those
working with enough capital to pay farmers on collection of their produce,
often keep goods until inflation sets in. Moreover, the practice of traders making
advance payments for crops still to be harvested to farmers in urgent need of
cash enables these traders to appropriate produce on the cheapest possible terms,
because once the farmer has pledged his crops the trader can demand them as
soon as they are ready for harvesting and then sell at any time that suits her.
The economic leverage that women traders, as brokers in produce and as
moneylenders, have over farmers is socially misrecognised in various ways.
Farmers often pretend to treat their traders as sales agents in the way the big
farmers treated their female dependants in the early decades of this century. As
the regular traders do not usually buy from their farmer-customers by agreeing
on a price when the crops are collected, but instead settle accounts after crops
have been sold, the transaction looks like one in which the farmer is paying a
commission to the trader and reimbursing her expenses, as in the past. In actual
fact it is the trader who decides how much the farmer will receive, and the true
amount of the 'commissions' she keeps is something the farmer can only guess
at. As a result there are often tensions and disputes between farmers and
traders. Farmers commonly refer to their regular traders as onibara (customer).
Since a good customer should be allowed time to pay up, the fact that the trader
usually settles accounts with the farmer after selling the crops seems to justify
the term. Ambiguity sets in when the relationship is reversed and the term
onibara is used by the trader to refer to the farmer (cf. Trager i98i), especially
when she advances money and he pledges his crops to her.
Farmers were uniformly unambiguous in -rejecting the suggestion that
women-traders, in their role as creditors, should be called olowo. Yet while they
refused to acknowledge that by receiving credit from the traders they became
indebted to them, at the same time they were careful to keep marital and onibara
relations separate. Igannans consider marital jealousies likely to develop in such
a separation to be a lesser evil than the strain put on a marriage when the husband
has to ask his wife for a loan, or the wife must trust her husband to honour his
pledge to let her have his crops when ready for harvesting.
Despite these precautions, marital relations have become very brittle.
Although since the promulgation of the Native Ordinance of I914 a woman
legally could, independently of her relatives or intended new spouse, sue her
husband for divorce, it is significant that Iganna women started to use this right
actively only in the I950's, by which time they had taken control of the middle
trade in food staples. Nowadays weekly court sittings are taken up largely by
divorce cases, which during the period I97I-5 averaged twenty-five a month.
This high rate of divorce (also remarriage) is consistent with the forms taken by
alienation under conditions of peasant production. Not only do farmers, as
742 MARC SCHILTZ
initiators of the productive process, become alienated from their produce when
they channel it into the middle-trade, but in the same process they lose control of
their household dependants; that is, co-producers become alienated from one
another.
It is these new forms of alienation which inflate the 'social price' of reproduc-
ing the idile symbolic capital. As this social price is high in economic terms,
people seek constantly to obtain co-operation by recreating social solidarity
through remarriage or membership of new groups such as social clubs and
occupational associations, political parties, churches or mosques. Assessing the
effectiveness of these endeavours lies beyond the scope of this article. While
none of these new associations has actually created an alternative form of
solidarity upon which to base agricultural production, the fact that there is such
a proliferation of groupings, appended to household-centred production units,
is a further indication of habitus generating new practices.
Conclusion
Peasantisation in Iganna refers to the process in which individual farmers, as
petty commodity producers, have become directly dependent on capitalist
spheres of exchange for access to credit and for the reproduction of their
productive enterprises. Historically this process was started under colonialism
with the enticement to increase foodcrop production and channel it in the
long-distance trade with expanding urban markets.
Money returns from cashcropping in this system are shared out to big and
small farmers alike through the external market mechanism, a reflection of the
overall structural dominance of the economy even in peasant production. This
does not mean, however, that commercial agriculture in Iganna is characterised
by capitalist relations of production, or by what Amin has called 'a degenerate
agrarian capitalism, corrupt and poor' (I974a: I04). If capitalist relations of
production were to emerge, this would depend in the first place on the
separation of the mass of producers from the means of production (Kahn I978:
II 4); but as long as Iganna peasant smallholders continue to farm on their idile
land with their own tools, such a separation is unlikely to occur.
The idile, then, as a property-holding group, sets up the necessary conditions
for the reproduction of its constituent household units of production. More-
over, as a group defined by descent, its 'symbolic capital' of renown and
prosperity is epitomised by idile land and other material assets. The onus of
maintaining this patrimony rests on all members; in acquitting themselves of
these socio-cultural obligations through idile-related festivities and other prac-
tices Igannans give expression to 'habitus', the generative principle of practices,
in the form of internalised, durable dispositions carried over from previous
epochs.
So rather than deducing an explanation for the peasantisation phenomenon
from the structures of underdevelopment within the Nigerian social formation,
I have related the specificity of certain practices to habitus, itself the product and
yet reproducer of structures. This revealed that the various practices through
which agricultural producers attempt to reproduce their idile symbolic capital are
MARC SCHILTZ 743
in effect instrumental in reproducing at the same time modes of domination

which are different now from those in pre-colonial social formations. In the
past, small producers gained access to credit for honouring their expensive idile
obligations by tying themselves to wealthy chiefs and patrons. Economic
dependence was then dominated by bonds of servility and communality
inasmuch as those who controlled credit were also the controllers ofpolitical and
ideological power. Now, with the overall structural dominance of the econ-
omy, producers sell their produce and gain access to credit by tying themselves
to traders. If they want to expand production they depend increasingly on the
labour of agatu. Thus, the interconvertibility between symbolic and economic
capital is no longer controlled by wealthy chiefs and patrons. Instead, individual
producers can gain economic capital only through the external market mechan-
isms. In these conditions the onus of subsidising the reproduction of idile
symbolic capital weighs most heavily on those tied to the land. The further one
moves from the orbit of home affairs the easier it becomes to escape the
obligation of converting one's economic capital into idile symbolic capital. As
more and more Igannans tend to follow this centrifugal course, the dispersal of
the household can be seen directly to benefit the formation and reproduction
of various social strata.
My conclusion contradicts the oft-heard claim that the resilience of extended
family ties militates against the development of social strata in Africa. While the
ideology of safeguarding one's patrimony remains compelling, under con-
ditions of peasant production idile ties slacken unequally through dispersal and
occupational diversification. The resulting unequal demands on idile members
then tend to promote stratification.
NOTES
This article is based on fieldwork carried out in Iganna in I974 and I

made it necessary to cut ethnographic data and secondary source mat
choice to condense ethnographic data in favour of theoretical argumen
massive literature that exists on Yoruba.
I The Yoruba term for cultivator is agbe. In Nigeria this word has always been translated as
'farmer'. At the descriptive, ethnographic level I continue to use this convenient term, rather than
'peasant', even though I use 'peasantisation' as an analytic term to denote a process of qualitative
changes in the system of agricultural production.
2 Kahn (I978: i i i), in fact, argues that it is the incomplete penetration of capitalist relations of
production and the persistence of pre-capitalist economic forms that causes underdevelopment.
3In Marx's criticism of Feuerbach he states that the 'external object, reality, the sensible world'
must be grasped notjust 'in the form of an object or an intuition, but . . . as concrete human activity,
as practice, in a subjective way' (Marx i888).
4Bourdieu's own criticism of 'economism' is directed explicitly at those Marxists who tend to
limit research on the formations they call 'pre-capitalist' to scholastic discussions about typology of
modes of production' (I977: I77). More generally he criticises as 'ethnocentric' any analysis in which
there is no place for 'strictly symbolic interest . . . In fact, in a universe characterised by the . . .
interconvertibility of economic capital (in the narrow sense) and symbolic capital, the economic
calculation . . . [is bound to seem] economically irrational' (I977: I77). See also Li6nard & Servais
I979: 2I5-I6.
I The Yoruba shift from communal land tenure to private ownership seems to hav
744 MARC SCHILTZ
Lagos as far back as the I860's. From there it spread to other major towns such as Abeokuta and
Ibadan. Land sales in the rural areas developed with the introduction of cocoa cultivation during the
colonial era. There were also numerous instances in which farm land planted with cocoa was
mortgaged, or cocoa farms were pledged for debts or loans (Fadipe I970: I70, I78-9). Clarke (I980)
has analysed the shift to private ownership of cocoa farms in the Ifetedo-Okeigbo area of the central
cocoa belt. In the mid-70's, and in contrast to Clarke's findings, land sales had not yet been
concluded in Iganna, despite the fact that since the I950's farmers from towns further south had been
growing cocoa on Iganna land. In return for usufruct, and especially as a recognition that the land
was not theirs, non-native farmers paid isakole, a customary token rent, to their Iganna hosts.
6 Apart from the core agnatic group, the actual residents of the agbole included other individuals,
or sometimes entire segments of other descent groups. The tendency of the idile to disperse over
various compounds was (apart from fission following disputes) a result of virilocal residence on
marriage and the recurrent practice of sending children to live with maternal kin. Often young men
stayed with their matrikin after marriage, becoming the progenitors of lineage segments that
remained in an ambiguous relationship-partly cognatic, partly affinal-with the core agnatic
group within the agbole. In practice, this meant that many individuals had strong claims to the home,
land, titles, deities and other assets of the patrimonies of both their parents. Mutatis mutandis,
individuals could have taxing obligations towards various idile through cognatic links. The
important analytical implications of these observations have not been properly acknowledged in the
vast literature on Yoruba social organisation.
7 The break-up of the Qyo empire starting from the centre by the defection of many leading
chiefs, rather than the gradual defection of its outlying dependencies (Law 1977: 26Isqq), can be
explained by the Alaafin's failure to deploy his accumulated wealth-power as a source of credit.
Indeed, the main beneficiaries of the Alaafin's assets were the members of his palace staff, with the
subordinate chiefs and provincial kings largely left out.
8 This assertion does not claim that (in terms of role analysis) there were no substantive
differences between these status categories. Indeed the position of slaves was quite different from
that of freeborn sons of the house, and so on. For my purposes, however, the analysis of social
relations in terms of 'bundles ofrights and duties' has limited usefulness, since that constellation does
not by itself yield an understanding of the relations of production in the Marxist sense (cf. Kahn
I978: I I3), or how modes of domination (Bourdieu I977: I83sqq) are established and reproduced
within a given social formation.
9 Olowo literally means 'a person who has money', implying 'a person of means'. Abraham (I958:
495) translates the expression olowo mi as 'my creditor'. When used by an iwofa (debtor, pawn), olowo
mi means 'one who has control over me; my master, my superior'. The big farmers who initiated
cashcrop production for the distant urban markets in the beginning of this century are still referred to
in Iganna as olowo because they drew on the labour of large numbers of iwofa. Today olowo continues
to be used in its loose meaning of'a well-to-do person', usually one who lends money at interest.
10 This ethic applied to all types of productive activity, irrespective of the producer's sex or social
status. For example, a young man who during his spare time was allowed to cultivate some plots
which his father had given him was free to allocate the products of his labour according to his own
discretion. A woman who specialised in processing shea-butter had a free hand in running such a
business (she could recruit co-workers such as iwofa girls by giving out loans; she controlled the sales
of shea-butter and more generally her own finances).
11 In the past, women acting as sales-agents for their husbands were entitled to a commission out
of the proceeds (Fadipe I970: I 82). These market activities were quite distinct from the petty-trading
or craft activities which many women carried on alongside. In retailing imported commodities or
their own handicraft women could control their own finances, independently of their husbands (see
also Sudarkasa I973: I20). That nowadays the term onisowo (trader) is extended to include the
women trading in food crops reflects people's consciousness of the commoditisation of their own
produce; many old men seemed indeed to be very conscious of this form of alienation.
12 Often the settler farmers hail from towns short of land. Farmers from southern Yoruba towns
also introduced cocoa which they planted in the forested areas southwest of Iganna town. However,
not many Igannans have followed their example. Like most northwestern Yoruba they concentrate
their efforts on the production of food crops. Population figures for I975 indicated that out of an
estimated I9,000 Iganna natives approximately 4,ooo had emigrated to the urban areas, mainly
MARC SCHILTZ 745
Ibadan and Lagos. The non-native residents out in the farm settlements I estimated at 3,000
(including also some Fulani pastoralists).
13 In spite of the colonial Administration's opposition to the iwofa institution, and especially the
pawning of children, the practice continued in Iganna throughout the I940's. Now, when
moneylenders charge prohibitive interest rates of up to io per cent. monthly, farmers turn to them
only as a last resort.
14 Traditional money pooling societies, known as esusu, are widespread among Yoruba (Bascom
I952). In most occupational or cult societies in Iganna money pooling (da ajo) takes up much time
during the weekly meetings. Nevertheless, I found that individual savings tend to be spent mainly
on planned expenses and repayment of previously incurred debts rather than on emergency
expenses. Government controlled co-credit and loan societies are now gaining popularity in Iganna.
As these societies give loans only for projects deemed to be 'profitable', none are given for such
'unprofitable' projects as burying the dead. Yet for Igannans these unavoidable practices continue to
be momentous in terms of symbolic capital.
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Frank, A. G. I980. Crisis in the world economy. London: Heinemann.
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Habitus and Peasantisation in Nigeria: A Yoruba Case Study

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Habitus and Peasantisation in Nigeria: A Yoruba Case Study

Author(s): Marc Schiltz

University of Papua New Guinea

Unlike the dual economy models (traditional v. modern) of gradualist

Structures as 'objective regularities/conditions' produce habitus. Habitus, then,

underlying the emergence and reproduction of peasant relations of production

Pre-colonial modes of domination

In this sense, idile in Iganna should be understood as the individual's patrimony,

The emergence of a commercial peasantry

situated precisely in the persistence of certain communal or even servile bonds,

The consolidation ofpeasantproduction

would, as Kahn argues with reference to Minangkabau petty commodity

birth of children, this belief in women's power is at the bottom of fears of

in effect instrumental in reproducing at the same time modes of domination

This article is based on fieldwork carried out in Iganna in I974 and I

Abraham, R. C. I958. Dictionary of modern Yoruba, London: Univ. Press.

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