The Family Cycle in a Coastal Peruvian Slum and Village

'The Family Cycle in a Coastal Peruvian Slum and Village l E. A. HAMMEL University of California, Berkeley INTRODUCTION One of the more important problems facing students of Latin America concerns the nature of socio-cultural process in urban and rural mestizo communities of that area. This paper is an attempt to approach the problem in terms of the static kinds of information generally available in census mate­ rials and standard ethnographic reports. (See Hammel n.d.-a, for a statement of static differences between urban slum and rural village populations.) The data on which this study is based consist chiefly of two censuses. One of them deals with the slum (pop. ca. 1,000) of the city of lca (population ca. 33,000), located about 300 kms. south of Lima. The other deals with the village of San Juan Bautista (population ca. 700), about 13 kms. from the city. Both censuses give information on age, sex, occupation, household composition, and sanitation practices. The first was designed and carried out by the local sanita­ tion service (lca n.d.); the second was designed and implemented by the author in cooperation with the sanitation service (Hammel n.d.-b) and is wider in scope than the first. The censuses are supplemented by the results of a year's ethnographic observation which, although not providing the same statistical breadth, present material in much greater depth (Hammel n.d.-c). The com­ bination of these sources, subjected to an analysis which infers developmental sequences from static information, yields some hypotheses on the nature of particular cultural processes in the communities considered. PROCEDURE The investigation of cyclic processes in any society, and the relationship between the design of such investigation and the nature of the available data, deserve a thorough discussion of the methodological problems involved. Unfortunately, the exigencies of publication do not permit extended discussion of these matters here. I will therefore touch on them only briefly and trust that the reader will understand that the meagerness of discussion is a function not of lack of awareness but of lack of space for adequate exposition. 1) The social organization of the communities investigated and the nature of the information available are such that only one legitimate question on cyclic developmental processes may be asked here: Does the composition of individual households change in some direction during the span of their existence? 2) ,The lack of information about such processes in these and similar communities makes it advisable to conduct the investigation in an inductive