This chapter is based on ethnographic data from a modern, predominantly subsistence-orientated, agricultural community in southern Greece. The community's environmental background is summarised with special reference to the inherent variability of factors affecting crop production, and several superficially ‘inefficient’ behaviours are identified as buffers against environmental variability. It is argued that these mechanisms do not all operate simultaneously or at the same level, but represent a hierarchised set of culturally specific responses to hazard. The interconnectedness of social and economic factors in these buffering mechanisms is discussed, and it is argued that several of these primarily economic behaviours are forces which discourage change in the social sphere.

It goes without saying that climatic – and, more broadly, environmental – factors play a crucial role in affecting agricultural communities and how they make a living. In the past, most writers on the subject of traditional or ‘primitive’ agrarian economies have tended to treat discussions of the environment in general, and climatic factors in particular, in a normative fashion, frequently not looking further than averages of rainfall, temperature and the like. This equilibrium-centred thinking frequently assumed that ‘the climate’ of a locality is essentially static from year to year, though accepting that it is punctuated by occasional hiccoughs or ‘crises’.