How Rice is Grown Tells a Great Deal About the Farmer

Growing Rice and Its Cultural Implications

Rice Terraces

City dwellers, which is likely to mean most of us, might not think it but the way a society grows its crops and the foods it eats have a profound effect on culture.  It is easy to understand the economic effect of agriculture but it seems a stretch to talk about the cultural implications of the manner in which a crop is grown.

Let’s take a minute or two and talk about growing rice.  Cruise ships on exotic voyages often call on countries where rice is the stable food of the people and, in many cases, is a major export or import crop.  When we visit Indonesia, South East Asia, the Philippines Korea, China, Japan and the Indian subcontinent we are in rice country.  Australia and America also raise a great deal of rice but the cultivation there has been transformed to a highly mechanized process that uses helicopters, airplanes and huge machines that apply insecticides, fertilizers and plant and harvest the crop.  What we are talking about today is rice cultivation in a more labor intensive way where entire villages or societies are engaged in and depend on growing rice.

It Takes Gravity & Personal Care

The main way that rice is grown in most of the world is a wet method called water culture.  Water culture is ideal for places where there is a large, inexpensive supply of two major components: water and labor.  Cheap labor and lots of rain make growing rice a natural for places like the ones mentIoned above.  Since the first domesticated crops  were grown in the Yangtze River Valley in China rice has served as one of the staples of the Chinese diet.  Rice is second to corn as the most widely grown grain but because much corn is used for animal fed and as an ingredient in other foods or products, rice is the world’s most important food grain.

As rice entered the daily diet its importance to survival was clear.  The planting, harvesting, care of rice was critical and became the center of village life.  Festivals, ceremonies, prayers and other forms of pleading with whatever gods might be listening became part of the rice powered society.  Rice was not a menu choice, it was subsistence itself and was worshipped because the availability of rice meant life or death.

From the need to make rice fields into the equivalent to a holding pond to the stoop labor to plant and harvest the crop rice farming is the definition of labor intensive agriculture.  The social aspect of the transition from hunter gatherer to farmer is nowhere more complete than when the agriculture in question is rice farming.  This is because the gender roles associated with the traditional man goes out, kills beast, woman stays home, cooks beast roles is out the window.  Rice farming needs both man and woman to go out to the field, usually called padi or paddy, and work side by side.  Equality at last.  After a full day of stoop labor I am sure the average woman would rather sit by the fireside waiting for her favorite spear carrier to return with some furry delight.

The role of rice in religion and society was not the only part of how rice effected people.  Many areas did not have perfectly flat fields that could be transformed into paddy.  Many tribes or villages live on hill tops or hillsides.  Control of huge tracts of land has never been easy to obtain.  This meant that rice fields had to be made out of difficult pieces of land.  Terracing of fields began.  To build terraces all members of the tribe or village had to bear a hand and work together.  From self centered hunters man had to become a socialized member of the larger society.  That socialization was not over when the fields were built.  Now the village was faced with the problem of deciding who would get what parcel and how the water was going to be allocated.  If a farmer was at the bottom of the hill he wanted to make sure that the guys further up, closer to the water at the top of the hill, filled that field and opened the gate to drop the water down to the field just lower down the hill and that person did the same for the person below him and so on.  It took cooperation.

Each Plot Could Be Owned by a Different Farmer

In Bali today, for example, there are over 230 separate cooperatives that control the equitable flow of water for all of the  members of each coop.  Each cooperative might have a total of 1000 acres in its single scheme but there might be 1500 families who actually own the individual half acre, one acre field that makes up a part of the total acreage. This kind of system requires that the farmer develops a sense of fairness, equitable treatment and cooperation.  All excellent skills for any citizen.  Immense, complicated water systems create the need for high levels of cooperation and belonging to a community directed to common goals.

I just used cooperation in two consecutive sentences.  The grammar police and the ghosts of my English Professors will come and get me but there is no better word that I can use to underscore the idea that water culture rice farming requires men to give up some level of independence for the mutual good.

In Vietnam rice is eaten at all three meals and 60 to 70% of the people today are still farmers.  Water rice production helps shape the attitude and socialization of a large part of the total population.  The Vietnamese society and culture come from or are tied to the land, The actual Vietnamese land, dat Viet in the local language, is part of every person.  The land of Vietnam is special to the Vietnamese and special land makes special people.  This organic relationship of the people with the fields, mountains and the environment is central to the ethos of the Vietnamese people.

What Sociologists call the Water Rice Culture has other effects beyond the obvious one having to do with Agriculture.  3000 years ago, when most historians think sizable groups of people first assembled in villages and communities in Vietnam’s Red River Valley, the change from hunter gatherer to farmer accelerated.  Rice became the major crop and water cultivation began to be the favored method of growing it.  The availability of enough food to thrive resulted in ever larger clans or tribes of the Vietnamese living in the Red River Valley.  Over time the easily farmed rice land was all taken and the Northerners began to travel South to find more land suitable for establishing settlements based on growing rice.  The huge delta of the Mekong River was a natural target and water culture rice growing of the people  from the North sparked the same kind of growth pattern there that was experienced in the North.  Not all of the people in the South welcomed the usurpers from the North.  Conflict between the North and South was a part of the development of Vietnam from the beginning.

Other less warlike effects of water on Viet culture included the development of the ability to weather the storms that brought abundant water to the countryside.  Typhoons and Monsoon storms were a fact of life.  Today an average of 5 typhoons come ashore in Vietnam every year.  Over their long history Vietnamese learned how to bend with the irresistible forces of nature and keep on keeping on.  Hunkering down, rebuilding, starting up again were the kind of life skills that make the Vietnamese who they are today.

It is no surprise that Water Puppets are part of Vietnamese local folk art and cultural expression.

Water Puppets at Hanoi's Puppet Theater