Demographic and social differentiation among Northern Peruvian peasants

In this paper, we apply the concepts of demographic and social differentiation to the analysis of inequality among rural households in the northern Peruvian department of Cajamarca. While we demonstrate that social rather than demographic differentiation is the more important process in this area, we illustrate the complementarity of Chayanov's methodological analysis of the family life cycle with a Marxist class‐theoretic framework. Both enrich the study of patterns in the agricultural sector of household labor use, family structure and composition, and income inequality.