8. Subsistence decision making

Scholars who study subsistence decision making in rural economies seek answers to questions such as, how do farmers decide which crops to grow? How do hunters decide which prey to pursue? How do herders decide what animals to raise? Here, I summarize a variety of attempts to study decision making under risk (variability) in rural Madagascar. I illustrate a formal, behavioral, normative approach using the z-score model; a formal, cognitive, descriptive approach involving experimentally elicited risk preferences; and a substantive, cognitive, descriptive approach describing cultural understandings of cause-and-effect relationships linking social, natural, and supernatural forces. In Madagascar's semi-arid southwest, unpredictably variable rainfall is the major cause of risk. When southwestern Malagasy people make subsistence choices, they consider expected mean returns, their own appetites for risk and reward, folk meteorological predictions, and their vulnerability to sorcery and ancestral wrath. Studying this requires a pluralistic embrace of theory and method.