Keeping the home fires burning: The changed nature of householding in the Kofyar homeland

In the early 1960s, Robert Netting described households in the Kofyar homeland in Nigeria and explained their size, composition, and other characteristics as adjustments to agrarian ecology. Household changes attending movement to a frontier were analyzed in the same framework. By the 1980s, the economic rationale for homeland farming had all but disappeared, and some villages seemed on the verge of abandonment. Yet deliberate strategies for preserving homeland settlements had prevented abandonment. The demographic characteristics and household composition in the homeland now provide a window into a wholly different set of processes than what Netting described 30 years ago. Home settlement is kept viable as a facility to support ethnic identity and to attract government resources. Beneath superficial similarities are profound changes in the nature of the household and factors shaping it, reflecting the changed rationale for keeping the home fires burning.