Re: Activity theory and agricultural change

From: Paul H.Dillon (illonph@pacbell.net)
Date: Mon Apr 30 2001 - 22:59:28 PDT


diane.

>
> the development research i've read here is referred to as "community
> development" and usually begins with a qualitative study on what folks
> want, how the community is structured, who controls the resources,
> what is "possible" and who is literate, and so on.
>

Community development is a totally general term and can imply anything frrom
the kind of marginal utility and cost benefit analysis practiced by folks
like Norman Uphoff of the Center for International Development at Cornell
(advisors to World Bank and other such entities) to what happens in a urban
village. The Vicos Project, is the best well known of the first
international community development projects, was considered a community
development project. It started when a Cornell anthropologist leased a
peruvian hacienda for "an experiment in social change."

> i've never read this term "farm systems analysis" but i am well read in
> community development in the development literature, where agriculture
> practices around the world are studied as a way to understand what is
> working, why, and what is lacking, and how to improve or alter traditional
> practice without subordinating people to the larger market - a lot of the
> communities supply their neighbours, so, facilitating this is part of a
> wider community network.

That's likely unless you were working directly with agronomists and such.
It's totally interdisciplinary, not within the "social sciences" but with
folks like irrigation and soil specialists or specialist in certain kinds of
crops or animals. I once worked with an Ecuadorean who as an expert on
beans and had a collection of hundreds of varieties of beans, each with its
own physical properties just like any plant variety. He really knew his
beans!. Since these different crops impose their own totally objective
material conditions on the production practices, the interaction leads the
"social cultural specialists" on such teams to focus on different things
than they normally would if left to their own devices. The kind of
constraints generated by such factors when the rains fall, the time it takes
a plant to get past its vulnerability to different weeds and pests, etc.
all these factors impose demands on labor, and then on the patterns of
access to the extra labor that's needed at certain times of the year, how
these cycles play into ritual systems, that coocur with the seasonal needs
for irrigation, or collective planting or other community level processes
that coordinate the mobilization of efforts that extend beyond the basic
productive unit (often an extended family based).. It's the kind of
approach you'd run into the agricultural ministries and it doesn't focus on
the community as such but on the productive unit. It's very much influenced
by the populist agronmists, notably Chayanov, who were also known as the
narodniks (pre-1917 Russia). I always thought Bourdieu did a great job in
"Outline" of illuminating the multi-layered symbolic dimensions that take up
these different rhythms of production in economic systems that don't have
internal circulation of money..

> there are, absolutely huge conflicts between capitalist investments and
> cultural assumptions about, say, gender, where it is the women who work,
> and so the women must learn the new practices, as well as continue to farm
> in the traditional ways, and raise the children, and so on = indicating
> the interventions are profoundly naive to cultural difference.

Women's work practices changed as a result of seasonal male migration to to
urban centers. Culture changes very rapidly under conditions of dependent
capitalist development. When I worked in Ecuador we were told that women
absolutely did not plow (Bourdieu also talks about this as an inversion) but
I took a lot of pictures of women walking behind various animals plowing
since their husbands had gone off to Quito or to Quayaquil for various kinds
of seasonal employment. The farms simply didn't produce any cash.
>
> as you note, it's a wildly suspect "intervention" =- i was thinking of
> Saskatchewan's subsidized farmers, and the
> investments in retraining these people into other areas of tech, or
> whatever -
> the fundamental conflict being between the traditions of rural farming in
> Canada and
> the recent introduction of a service-based economy.
> retraining involves not only new information, but new values about work,

I would think that Saskatchewan represents a totally different case than
what I have experience with since all of those farms (like those of the
northern midwest in general) have been articulated to the market since the
get go with wheat and other such grains that wiped out the tall grass
prairie. Nevertheless I knew people in the ag school at Cornell who had
done farm systems analysis in many types of family farm, particularly family
owned dairy farms in upstate new york. But as I said earlier, I wouldn't be
surprised if this approach has fallen out of favor since it doesn'st tend to
emphasize the development of strong linkages in the absence of some kind of
sustainability, a trade off not too favored by people who consider any land
not being exploited to its maximum current short term market potential a
waste of resources. HA!!!

Paul H. Dillon



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