University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education

Time Allocation in a Machiguenga Community

Author(s): Allen Johnson
Source: Ethnology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Jul., 1975), pp. 301-310
Published by: University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher
Education
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 Time Allocation in a Machiguenga

Community1
Allen Johnson
Columbia University

The manner in which individuals spend their time is a basic dimension of

ethnographic description. Under such headings as "the daily round," "the
annual cycle," or "the division of labor by sex," most ethnographies
eventually describe the broad outlines of time allocation in the community.
This information is then used by theorists to construct comparative gen-
eralizations.
In general, however, ethnographic estimates of time inputs or product
outputs are rarely quantified. Sahlins (1972), for example, has recently
brought together some of the best quantitative production figures available
to anthropologists. Employing studies such as those of Lee (1968) among
the Bushmen and McArthur (1960) among Australian Aborigines, Sahlins
(1972: 41-99) argues that hunters and gatherers typically work relatively
few hours per day in obtaining ample food returns, a conclusion of partic-
ular interest for culture-evolution theory.
Despite the achievement of a relatively high level of quantification in a
few studies, some serious measurement problems remain. The most serious
concerns the representativeness of the data. Detailed study of time expendi-
ture has usually been restricted to a narrow time period, such as four days
(Lewis 1951: 63-71), or four weeks (Lee 1978: 36-39), during which the
researcher attempts to observe, or to elicit through intensive interviews con-
ducted once of twice daily, the ways in which a small number of indi-
viduals spend all their time throughout the period. But conclusions reached
by this method are weakened by the limitations on the sample: first, in
most subsistence economies seasonal variation in production is so great that
a brief sample of one part of the year is rarely a reliable estimate for the
entire year; and second, conclusions drawn from an intensive study of a few
individuals cannot automatically be extended to the remainder of the com-
munity. A researcher's belief that the time period and the individuals in
question are "average" (that is, intuitively representative) is not very much
to the point; a representative sample is strictly speaking a random sample,
and any departure from randomness is a cost which should be offset by
clear research benefits before it is accepted.
A second measurement problem is that full-time studies of human activ-
ities are both time consuming and exhausting, because direct observation
of activities is the only reliable technique for most purposes.2
301

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 302 ETHNOLOGY

A third problem is the absence of uniform means of reporting data.

Sahlins (1972: 14-21, 57), for example, cites labor figures for hunter-gather-
ers and swidden agriculturalists which are not strictly comparable because
of differences in reporting the data by the ethnographers. Thus, data on New
Guinea horticulturalists refer only to labor in gardens, whereas data on the
Bushmen refer to all food-acquiring activities, and the figures for Australian
Aborigines extend even further to include cooking and the manufacture of
implements. The data are perhaps adequate to demonstrate Sahlins' general
point, but more precise analysis would increasingly find these data-incom-
parabilities unacceptable.
A solution to these problems could be sought in devoting more field
time to the study of time allocation. Experience shows, however, that this
strategy rapidly exceeds the point of diminishing returns. For although time-
expenditure data are often crucial in anthropological explanations, they are
seldom the only matters at issue; rather, they constitute one data set in far
more extensive arguments. Devotion of major amounts of field time to col-
lecting time-allocation data results in degrees of accuracy too detailed to
interest most anthropologists, while simultaneously sacrificing such other
basic information as exchange relations or kinship structure, which anthro-
pologists also consider essential.
RANDOM VISITS

The data reported here, collected with the above considerations in mind,
represent the tabulated results of a large number of random spot-checks
on activities of members of a community of Machiguenga Indians in the
Upper Amazon of Southeastern Peru. The technique was designed to make
use of sampling procedures and computer processing (Johnson I970) to
increase the efficiency of a fieldwork project in which accurate estimates of
time expenditure were needed.
The data were collected by Orna Johnson and myself as part of a more
general investigation into Machiguenga cultural ecology, family organiza-
tion, and sex roles, conducted between June I972 and August 1973. Ten
months of that period were spent in the community of Shimaa, along a
tributary (Kompiroshiato) of the Upper Urubamba River in the Depart-
ment of Cuzco, Peru. The Machiguenga of the Kompiroshiato typically
live in small groups, either as single families, or as clusters of closely related
families, varying from less than ten to as many as 30 individuals in a
settlement. They derive most of their food from slash-and-burn gardens,
cultivated largely by the men, supplemented by smaller quantities of food
from the tropical forest and rivers, in the form of fish, grubs, wild fruits,
and occasional large game such as monkeys or peccary. Small family
groups are almost completely self-sufficient, except for occasional needs for
trade goods such as aluminum pots and machetes. Machiguenga hunt with
bow and arrow, manufacture their own cotton fabrics, and in the past
have preferred to do without trade goods rather than become closely bound
to traders or missionaries.
Through an increasing number of bilingual public schools, run by

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 MACHIGUENGA TIME ALLOCATION 303

Machiguenga school teachers, accessibility to trade goods such as shotguns,

manufactured cloth, and medicines is beginning to grow. The community
of Shimaa has a bilingual school. Some households in the vicinity (within
about two hours walking distance of the school) have been associated with
the school for as long as eight years, others for much less than that, and a
few have only arrived within recent months. In the meantime, others have
left, preferring the self-sufficient forest existence to which they are accus-
tomed. Those in the school communities are not yet strongly affected by
the school, in the material sense at least. Only a few men or women own
manufactured articles or clothing, and on the average less than 2 per cent of
their time is spent in labor for wages or trade goods. The Machiguenga
school teacher is the only member of the community who owns a shotgun.

Population
The population sampled included all households within reasonable walk-
ing distance (up to 45 minutes) from our house, so that they could be visited
regularly. Under the scattered settlement of the Machiguenga this resulted
in thirteen regularly visited households, with a total of Io5 members.

Sampling Procedure
The sample included all members of the thirteen households. Visiting
all households at the same time proved impossible as walking distances were
so great. Therefore, the community was divided into two parts, upstream
and downstream, which were visited alternately at random hours.
Households were visited only during daylight (6 a. m. to 7 p. m.),
both because travel after dark is hazardous, and because visiting at night
is not encouraged by the Machiguenga. Hours were selected in advance
with a table of random numbers, and housholds were visited during the
hour specified. Visits were not made every day because special events oc-
casionally interfered; in any week, however, many visits were always made.
Tabulations show that visits were evenly apportioned by hours of the day
and by season. Visits were made on 134 different days, resulting in 3,495
cases (observations of individuals).

Recording Data
Visits were generally brief, which is well suited to Machiguenga visiting
patterns. Visits could be as short as five minutes or as long as 45 minutes
if other information were desired. The ideal was to describe the activities
of housemembers at the instant before they became aware of the ethnog-
raphers' presence, but this was not often realistic, so sensitive are the
Machiguenga to their surroundings. Activities of all members were de-
scribed in longhand in notebooks, and the whereabouts of absent members
inquired into. When feasible, such information was immediately verified
by personal observation, but often individuals were fishing or hunting and
such checks were impossible.

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 304 ETHNOLOGY

Coding Data

After the first month of visits, coding procedures were devised. Longhand
notes were transferred after each visit onto coding sheets for later key-
punching. The codes included time, place, person and activity. Activity codes
were three letters arranged in order of generality, so that the first letter of
the code specified a main activity, the second letter specified a subsidiary
activity within the main heading, and a third letter, if necessary, specified
a still more detailed subdivision. The main activity codes were:
i. Eating, including meals, snacking, or drinking beer, specifying which
foods (maize, manioc) and how prepared (boiled, roasted).
2. Food preparation, including what food and how prepared.
3. Child rearing, whether nursing, holding, patting, etc.
4. Manufacture, specifying item and stage of manufacture.
5. Wild foods, including hunting, fishing, collecting.
6. Garden labor.
7. Idleness, including sleeping, awake doing nothing, awake chatting,
recreation at beer party, etc.
8. Hygiene, including laundry, bathing, defecation, etc.
9. Visiting, including who visited and what exchanged.
io. School (applies only to ages nine to eighteen).
I . Wage labor (mainly for Machiguenga school teacher in exchange for
tools).

Processing Data

The coding sheets are based on the 8o-column IBM card, and are easily
punched by professional keypunchers at low cost and low error. The data
for this paper were processed using the Cross-Tabs II program for the dis-
tributions in Tables I-3, and the SPSS T-TEST program for the signifi-
cance tests in Table 4. Midway in the research I returned briefly from the
field to have preliminary data processed. These materials were most helpful
in developing research questions for the latter phase of the research.
By randomizing the observations, problems of representativeness of the data
were eliminated. By including whatever people were doing at the moment
they were observed, the data constitute an essentially unbiased description
of all activities, not just those, such as productive labor, which were of
particular interest at the time of research. The brief time spent in recording
activities took only a small fraction of the total field time. In fact, the
visits brought us into frequent contact with community members who
could then be interviewed for other purposes. Finally, observations were
coded in the field and processed by computer during the fieldwork, so that
results of the investigation could be used in guiding research as an
integral part of fieldwork. The technique seems well suited to many
anthropological purposes, by providing essential, well-quantified data on
particular subjects without inhibiting the wide-ranging data collection com-
monly sought in holistic anthropological research.

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 MACHIGUENGA TIME ALLOCATION 305

TIME ALLOCATION

Tables i and 2 exemplify the data obtained by the method outlined above.
The time period covers the thirteen daylight hours from 6:00 a. m. to 7:00
p. m. The tables clearly reveal the transformation of time allocation from
infants to toddlers, occupied with idleness and eating, to the diversity char-
acteristic of adults, who reach a low of I8-I9 per cent of idleness. This
low figure for idleness is quite surprising; can it be that primitive
horticulturalist/hunter-gatherers, living under low population density, are
engaged in productive labor more than 8o per cent of their daylight time?
To be sure, the answer depends on how the notion "productive" is con-
strued. We might follow Sahlins (1972: 57) in considering only the amount
of time spent in gardens as productive labor. Apparently once a group has

TABLE 1

Male Activity: 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

INFANT XTDER YOUTH UNMARRIED2 MARRIED

ATIVITY (age 0-1) (age 2-5) (age 6-13) ADULT ADULT
(in peLcnt) N.=1001 No=358 N,=290 No=22 No=550

EATIN 16.1 12.9 6.8 (0) 9.1

FOOD PREP. 0 0 1.5 (0) 1.5

CILD REAR. 0 0 1.1 (1.7) 0.1

MANWCTURmE 0 0 1.2 (0) 10.4

WILD FODS 0 0.4 9.2 (7.2) 15.6

GARDEN IABOR 0.2 8.5 (8.5) 18.5

61.2 61.4 41.4 (56.0) 18.1

HYGIENE 6.3 1.5 1.8 (0) 2.5

VISITING 12.0 21.4 12.4 (5.2) 8.0

0 0 9.7 (17.8) 0
SCHOOL

WG;E LABOR 0 0 (0) 1.6

4.4 2.2 6.4 (3.6) 14.6

1. No - nruner of observations

2. Due to the small number of observations, the data in this column

are weak and presented only for the sake of campleteness.

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 306 ETHNOLOGY

TABLE 2

Female Activity: 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

INFANT TODDLER YOUTH I4ARRI ED RRID

ACTIVITY (age 0-1) (age 2-5) (age 6-13) ADULT AXLT
(in percent) N =115 N =288 N =405 N =344 N =815

EATING 12.3 16.5 11.3 9.5 7.0

FOOD PREP. 0 1.0 10.2 11.0 18.1

CHILD FAR. 0.8 0 3.3 6.4 8.8

MANUFACURE 0 0 1.0 14.6 15.9

WIID FOOS 0 0 2.5 9.2 6.6

GARDEN LABOR 0 0 1.1 3.0 6.6

IDLENESS 61.6 60.7 49.7 20.0 19.1

HYGIENE 6.0 5.7 5.2 4.1 4.5

VISITING 18.5 14.1 4.2 4.9 5.8

SCIHOL 0 0 8.3 11.8 0

WGE LABOR 0 0 0 0

0.8 2.0 3.2 5.5 7.6

No = nurber of observations

been classified as slash-and-burn horticulturalists, Sahlins takes their garden

time as an estimate of total productive labor. This definition, applied to adult
married Machiguenga, finds the men productively engaged only I8.5 per
cent and the women only 6.6 per cent of the time.
But I think this approach is overly typological. Simply because we might
classify the Machiguenga as slash-and-burn horticulturalists does not mean
that garden labor provides all their subsistence. Consideration of all food-
getting activities reveals the men active in production about 35 per cent of
the time, and the women 13 per cent. Furthermore, from here it is a smal
step to include as productive activities manufacture and food preparation.
Some might also want to include childrearing and time spent in eating,
hygiene, and even certain kinds of visiting. In that case, men appear to

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 MACHIGUENGA TIME ALLOCATION 307

be productively employed 65.7 per cent of the time, and women 73.3 per cent
(Table 3).
Depending, therefore, on which measure of productive labor we wish
to use, we could conclude that Machiguenga men spend less than two and
one-half hours or more than eight hours per day in essential subsistence
activities, and that women spend less than one hour or more than nine
hours per day. The advantage of providing a complete record of the activ-
ities performed by different categories of individuals should be clear: com-
parative theorists are then free to define variables in accordance with their
theoretical aims rather than having to accept the incommensurable figures
each idiosyncratic fieldworker may choose to publish.

TABLE 3

"Productive" Activities: 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Married Men Married Woien

All Food 34.1% (4.4 hr.) 13.2% (1.8 hr.)

Manufacture 10.4% (1.4 hr.) 15.9% (2.1 hr.)

Food Prep. 1.5% (0.2 hr.) 18.1% (2.4 hr.)

Child Rear. 0.1% ( - ) 8.8% (1.1 hr.)

Eating, Hygiene

and Visiting 19.6% (2.5 hr.) 17.3% (2.2 hr.)

TOTAL 65.7% (8.5 hr.) 73.3% (9.5 hr.)

A further breakdown of time allocation a

more complete view of the division between
ferences between men and women in the gr
are not statistically significant; but subheading
that men do nearly all the work involving w
are predominantly concerned with making cott
are statistically significant. In obtaining wild f
ers, but men and women both fish and collect
ture, women's only significant contribution
Machiguenga division of labor by sex is extr
havior. Yet each sex puts in a relatively long
broadly defined.

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 308 ETHNOLOGY

TABLE 4

Division of Labor by Sex (Married Adults)

MARRID 24 MARPID
MARRIED MEN MARRIED W3EN
ACTIVITY
(n=15) (n=20)
(in percent)
9.1 7.0
Eating
1.5 18.1
*Food Prep.
*Child Rear. 0.1 8.8

Manufacture 10.4 15.9

*Wbodwork 6.7 0.6

*Cotton Cloth 0.1 13.5

Other 3.6 1.8

*Wild Foods 15.6 6.6

Collecting 2.9 2.5

Fishing 5.7 2.3

*Hunting 5.7 0

Other 1.3 1.8

*Garden Labor 18.5 6.6

*Clearing, Burning

Planting 3.7 0

*Weeding 5.8 0.3

Harvest 6.1 5.1

Other 2.9 1.2

Idle 18.1 19.1

Hygiene 2.5 4.5

Visiting 8.0 5.8

Other 16.2 6.6

*Differences are significant at p 4 .01 level (t-test).

DIscUsssIoN

A large number of special-interest tables could be generated from the

data collected in the random visits. Tables which have already been of use
include the distribution of tasks by time of day, the distribution of tasks by
season, and the frequencies of visiting between different households. Presenta-
tion of these and other tables will be reserved for appropriate publications,

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 MACHIGUENGA TIME ALLOCATION 309

but a number of general points have emerged which bear on the value of such
data and techniques for collecting them.
The principal advantages of describing time allocation in this manner are:
I. The resulting data are quantified at a high level of measurement, and
can be compared with exactness across cultures.
2. Erroneous conclusions reached intuitively can be corrected. For exam-
ple, after months of being with the Machiguenga in a variety of settings, I
came to believe that the women were idle much more of the time than
the men. Table 4 reveals that there is no significant difference in idleness
between adult males and females. Women's work is more often conducted
in a sitting position and at a slower pace than men's work3, and that
probably led to my incorrect impression. Whenever anthropologists esti-
mate time allocation without some objective research method, errors like
this are bound to arise.
The randomness of the visits introduces an element of unpredictability
into the anthropologist's routine, counteracting the natural tendency to be
predictably in certain places at certain times. It thereby provides the anthro-
pologist with a wider range of experiences than he or she might otherwise
encounter.

A few rules of procedure should be observed in conducti

activity surveys:
I. Visits should be random (or occasionally stratified) samples
(a) the population.
(b) the time of day.
(c) the days of the year. Random visits scheduled in advan
not be missed except for good reason, such as special events or
of personal danger; and a minor inconvenience, such as a
should not interfere, since this would lead to just the kind of
avoided (in this case, a bias against rainy-day activities).
2. All activities should be recorded, not just those of specia
since the overall configuration of activities is the theoretically
form of the data.
3. All activities should be coded unambiguously according to pers
location, and activity. Activity codes may be as detailed as necessa
as codes have unambiguous meanings, those assigned in the f
punched directly onto IBM cards without time-consuming recodin

CONCLUSION

The data reported in this paper represent a random sam

activities of members of an Indian community of the Upper A
mates of time expenditure are basic data in ethnographic repor
be useful for cross-cultural theory construction they should reach
of measurement and constitute a truly representative sample of t
of the community being described. Owing to a natural tende
patterns through implicit mental processes, the memory of both
rapher and the informant in such matters is liable to be fau
these mental processes are culturally determined in part, reliance

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 310 ETHNOLOGY

is bound to distort descriptions of time allocation in some unpredictable di-

rection determined by cultural notions of what constitutes "spending
time." The ready availability of computer-processing of masses of quantita-
tive data has opened the door to descriptive techniques which avoid such
biases, yet at relatively little increase in field-time costs.
NOTES

I. I am grateful to Conrad Arensberg, Robert Carneiro, Gertrude Dole, and M

Harris for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Orna Jo
shared in the data collecting and coding phases, and her personal commitment r
in a more thorough sample than I would have obtained alone. My research assi
Paul Heikkila, managed the bulk of the computer processing. The National S
Foundation supported the research under grant no. NSF-GS-330I2.
2. Informant interviewing may be a useful supplement, to estimate time sp
locations where the researcher was unable to follow, but this cannot stand alo
reliable technique.
3. Measures of calorie energy expenditures by task show that Machiguenga w
consistently expend fewer calories at work than men.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Johnson, A. I970. On the Use of Computers in Anthropological Fieldwork

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Assoc
San Diego.
Lee, R. 1968. What Hunters Do For a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce
Resources. Man the Hunter, ed. R. Lee and I. DeVore, pp. 30-48. Chicago.
Lewis, 0. I95I. Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied. Urbana.
McArthur, M. i960. Food Consumption and Dietary Levels of Groups of Aborigines
Living on Naturally Occurring Foods. Records of the Australian-American Sci-
entific Expedition to Arnhem Land, Vol. 2: Anthropology and Nutrition, ed. C.
Mountford, pp. 90-I35. Melbourne.
Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago.

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