The discussion so far has taken the village as the unit
of analysis, depicting villages as conforming to particularly
developmental ‘categories’. This clearly overlooks
the degree to which villages are becoming more unequal,
internally, as market integration proceeds. 12 Each
community supports households that can be depicted as
‘winners’ and ‘losers’, those that have built productive
and sustainable futures based on farming, others which
are scraping by on the land, and still more that have
embraced various non-farm activities whether as a survival
mechanism or as a means to accumulate a modicum
of wealth. To understand this intra-village diversity
and, even more so, the dynamism that is built into
livelihoods, it is necessary to examine household strategies
rather than village generalities.