David L. Clawson, “Intravillage Wealth and Peasant Agricultural Innovation,” The Journal of Developing Areas 12, no. 3 (Apr. 1978), 323-336.

Notes

• 323 – “Assistant Professor of Geography, University of New Orleans”
• “The purposes of this paper are to consider the role of poverty as an inhibitor of peasant agricultural innovation. To illustrate how inheritance customs contribute to poverty in a peasant community, and to analyze within the context of a culturally open peasant agricultural village the cognitive and economic explanations of peasant receptivity to agricultural innovation.”
• “In spite of yield or nutritional advantages offered by recently developed hybrid grains and associated technology, however, their diffusion among the world’s peasantry has been limited. Failure of peasants to increase yields is regrettable because peasants comprise over half the world’s population and an even greater proportion of the agricultural labor force. In Mexico, nearly half of the economically active are employed in agriculture, of which two-thirds are peasant farmers who work one hectare of land or less.”
• 324 – “. . . it is evident that one of the most desirable and urgently needed means of increasing world food production is to increase peasant agricultural productivity.”
• [SECTION: PEASANTS ARE POOR INNOVATORS]
• “Recent explanations of peasant conservatism and reluctance to innovate can be grouped into two general viewpoints. One interpretation, advanced principally by Foster and Erasmus, holds that the scarcity of peasant resources leads to the development of societal attitudes which restrict individual initiative.”
• 324-5 – “Foster’s model, entitled the ‘Image of Limited Good,’ theorized that, in the mind of the peasant, all things desirable in life exist in finite, not infinite qualities . . .. As a consequence: ‘in peasant societies and among other underprivileged peoples, innovative people tend to be seen as rapacious and greedy. Because they are upsetting the traditional distribution of ‘good,’ of the limited resources of the group, they are viewed as threats to community stability rather than as entrepreneurial models to be emulated.’”
• 325 – “Charles Erasmus’s cognition model also supported the hypothesis that peasant society is, by nature, intrinsically noninnovative. Peasant society is held to be in a closed stage of development in which man’s limited knowledge of his environment restricts his control of it and of his own destiny. Owing to the limited availability of goods, the accumulation of wealth is socially unacceptable. Innovation and individual achievement are strongly discouraged. In order to enforce this standard, peasants exercise ‘invidious sanction,’ permitting wealth to be displayed only through the process of ‘conspicuous giving.’ Religious and political rituals and positions act as leveling mechanisms, reducing differences between the wealthy and the poor.”
  • Does this hypothesis of peasant conservatism function as the ‘white man’s burden’ justification of Cold War development intervention?
• 326 – “Numerous other scholars have found peasant society to beinherently [sic] noninnovative. Lewis [Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied (1951)] determined that the society of Tepoztlan is not competitive . . .. Hogbin found that ‘the concept of progress is in primitive societies unknown [Social Change (1958)].’ Finally, Ingham concluded that in rural Mexican folk culture, life is considered to be a zero-sum game in which wealth and other good things are in such limited supply that expansion in one area inevitably results in a reduction in another [“On Mexican Folk Medicine” (1970)].”
• [SECTION: PEASANTS ARE GOOD INNOVATORS]
• “The viewpoint that peasant society is, by nature, intrinsically innovative has been supported by scholars who view peasants as essentially economic men, willing and able to respond to the presence and absence of economic opportunity.”
  • What does it say that social scientists can only essentializingly consider peasants as a homogenous whole inherently and “by nature” either noninnovative or innovative?
• “Advocates of this position have included [Theodore] Schultz, Mellor, [Clifton, Jr.] Wharton, and Acheson, who in 1972 published the results of his study of a Tarascan village.”
• “Such factors as a lack of needed skills and ready capital constituted, in Acheson’s opinion, the true obstacles to development . . ..”
• “[Gerrit] Huizer, in disputing Foster’s and Erasmus’s explanations of Latin American peasant conservatism, placed the blame for the absence of peasant initiative on an outwardly imposed ‘culture of repression,’ and stated that once the repression is removed, peasants become militant and ready to accept change.”
• “Crist and Nissly found that physical and economic barriers are the principal blocks to peasant innovation and cited such factors as roads, markets, lands, titles, level of living, size of landholdings, and the availability of technical advice and credit.”
  • Which lines up with all the proposals of Schultz and Wharton
• 327 – [SECTION: A POSSIBLE RECONCILIATION]
• “Supporters of both the cognitive and the economic viepoints of peasant behavior may have overlooked the interrelationships between the two, which are not mutually exclusive. [Frank] Cancian [Change and Uncertainty in a Peasant Economy, 1972], noting that there are no purely economic- or tradition-bound men, has called the debate a ‘bogus’ issue: ‘Economic man always operates within a cultural framework logically prior to his existence as economic man. . . . This cultural framework defines the values in terms of which he economizes.’”
• “Granting the accuracy of Cancian’s statement, it is nevertheless true that the economic behavior of different groups of peasants exhibits widely varying degrees of cognitive influence.”
  • Non-homogenizing and non-essentializing
• “Kunkel has observed that ‘the theoretically important questions raised by the debate concern the operations and relative magnitudes of these factors’ (italics added). He then noted that studies of peasant reaction to economic opportunity involve two assumptions: first, that the major determinants of a behavior are its anticipated consequences, and second, that peasants enjoy considerable behavioral and attitudinal flexibility. Studies favoring economic explanations assume that peasant behavior is malleable and easily changed in response to perceived economic opportunities. Cognitive or psychological explanations imply that internal stresses do not permit peasants to base their behavior upon economic considerations. Consequently, Kunkel hypothesized: ‘In villages where the social context is benign (in the sense of not attaching negative outcomes to innovation), economic factors will probably be the major components of opportunity, while in communities that are culturally closed economic factors are likely to play a minor role in the determination of risks people take into account. Evidently both economic and cultural factors contribute to anticipated outcomes, but their proportions and weights depend on the characteristics of a village and its circumstances. Hence the question is not so much whose position is correct but rather under which conditions Acheson’s and Foster’s explanations prevail.’”
  • In sum: this is not a hybrid view so much as simply that some communities are restrained by cognitive cultural factors and some communities are flexible to economic stimuli.
• “In an effort to determine the extent to and conditions under which cognitive forces exist as a constraint to peasant agricultural innovation, the author carried out field research from September 1974 to May 1975 in Nealtican, Puebla, Mexico [This is also the author, along with Don Hoy, of “a peasant community that rejected the Green Revolution].”
  • WHICH MAKES THIS THE PERFECT TRANSITION FROM MY ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTIONS OF PEASANT CONSERVATISM/INNOVATIVENESS TO MY ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION IN MEXICO
  • Let it also be noted that his explicit intention in Nealtican was to put to test theories of peasant mentality
• 328 – “Owing to historical development, there are no government-controlled cooperative ejidos in the municipio. In contrast to the situation in most of the surrounding villages, the Nealtican peasants own their land in fee simple, and are free to utilize it as they see fit.”
• 329 – “the soil consists of sandy volcanic ash of low fertility, the nutrients having been washed out by heavy summer rains and depleted through centuries of maize cultivation. If farm labor is timed properly to correspond to the annual moisture cycle, and if fertilizer is applied in correct amounts, an adequate harvest is almost assured.”
• In table “demonstrating” “evolution from a closed to a culturally open peasant society” one of the comparisons is “speak spanish” or “speak only ‘Indian’”
• “Since 1920, the year Nealtican achieved municipio status, the village has evolved from a culturally closed to a culturally open peasant society. This transformation is evident from changing language, footwear, marriage and religious patterns.”
• 333 – “Two cases illustrate the effect of equal inheritance customs upon farm size, wealth, and propsensity to innovate agriculturally. The first is that of Juan Luna, age 33, who with 12 hectares is the second largest landowner in the municipio. Juan’s great-grandfather obtained about 240 hectares shorty before 1900 when the owners of two of the haciendas began to sell out. Of this large original holding Juan’s three children will inherit four hectares each. Juan and his children own much of the credit for their relative wealth to having belonged to a family which has never had more than four heirs per generation. At present, Juan is one of the most progressive of the villagers. He rents a tractor to plow his land and has been active in numerous agricultural extension projects within the village. He grows a wide range of cash crops, including flowers and summer squash, which he transports to market by truck.”
  • What constitutes ‘progressive’
• “The second example, that of Carlos Torres, age 35, is much more representative of the typical villager. His grandmother purchased only five hectares of land from the haciendados, and had eight living heirs. Thus Carlos received less than one hectare from his father, and Carlos’s six young children, having no reasonable hope of an inheritance large enough to support a family, will most likely be forced to leave the village. Carlos would very much like to plow his land with a tractor but points out that the cost of 90 pesos per hectare is prohibitive. While equally desirous as Juan for progress to come to the village, he has withheld participation in the extension projects for fear of the new products resulting in crop failure. His crops, which consist only of corn, beans, crab apples, and few winter squash which he feeds his horse, are almost entirely consumed by the family with the small surplus being taken by bus to be sold in the Cholula or Atlixco markets.”
• [SECTION: WEALTH AND ACCEPTANCE OF AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION]
• “Data were collected on the size of individual peasant landholdings, the universal gauge for judging wealth and economic class in the village, and on the following variables, which were considered manifestations of peasant agricultural innovation: (1) use of pesticides or insecticides; (2) use of mechanized farm equipment; (3) cultivation of nonsubsistence crops; (4) utilization of government-financed credit; and (5) participation in cooperatives. Hybrid corn seed was introduced some years ago by personnel of the Rockefeller-supported Plan Puebla program but, for numerous reasons, was found by the villagers to be unacceptable and was totally rejected. Because none of the peasants utilize the seed, it was not possible to measure adoption differences between economic classes of the community.”
• The author hypothesized that if no significant difference was found between amount of land owned and adoption of the innovations listed above, the existence within Nealtican’s peasant society of cognitive influences restrictive of agricultural innovation would be supported.”
  • Unpack the assumptions in this hypothesis: that if a campesino own a substantial amount of land, and therefore lacks economic barriers to adoption, and doesn’t adopt the five “manifestations of agricultural innovation,” then (s)he must be constrained by “cognitive influences,” a euphemism for what, exactly?: traditionalism? The anthropologists listed above would call it “conservatism” but one what cultural-logical bases?
• 334 – “Conversely, significant differences in innovative activity between the land-based economic classes of the community would support a conclusion that level of wealth is at least a partial explanation of peasant receptivity to agricultural innovation.”
  • Why not use the same level of hedging for the previous conclusion about cognitive influences?
• “The innovation variables tested were not considered biased in favor of peasants with large landholdings. The use of pesticides or insecticides on the bean crop, for example, is mandatory for a respectable harvest, regardless of the amount of land planted in the crop. Similarly, while there exists a relatively wide range in the amount of land worked, even the poor cherish the thought of exchanging the hard labor of animal-drawn plowing for the ease of a tractor. Likewise, membership in a cooperative carried with it attendant obligations to cooperate and contribute time, information, and possible money, yet offered no crop security and was not a naturally attractive alternative to any economic subgroup.”
  • Predicated on the assumption that all classes find each of the components of “innovation” either appealing or unappealing and for the same reasons. Where is the survey asking what their opinions on each of these “innovations” are?
• “The peasants were then classified as poor, average, and wealthy, and their innovative activity compared by means of the chi-squared test.”
• “It was concluded that Nealtican’s culturally open society is not rendered inherently noninnovative by a psychological, cognitive worldview, and that a statistically significant correlation exists between level of wealth and innovative agricultural activity in the village.”
• “The poor peasant lives, quite literally in many instances, on the brink of starvation. If his crops fail, for whatever reason, he realizes that no person or institution is likely to support him. Consequently, he cannot afford to risk planting a nonsubsistence crop or to mortgage his future for credit or for membership in a cooperative. The land-poor peasant of Nealtican, owing to his poverty, is locked into the corn-bean culture, where innovation is neither practical nor possible.”
• “In contrast, the wealthy peasant can use one hectare to cultivate the subsistance crops of corn and beans and then, freed from biological necessity, can turn his attention to profit making, which is likely to motivate him to experiment with innovative products and techniques. Among the most remunerative innovations in Nealtican are the purchase of a truck and the sinking of a well for irrigation. A well is particularly valuable because it allows the winter cultivation of numerous drought-sensitive crops such as cabbage, lettuce, and cauliflower, which cannot be dry farmed. More importantly, it permits two harvests yearly on the same land and has the effect of doubling the amount of land owned. Wells have the potential to function as a temporary, partial check on the apparently inevitable out-migration that awaits the village youth.”

• “The literature on innovation diffusion is diverse in both scope and findings. Obviously, different types of people are capable of innovating under varying circumstances. It has long been axiomatic to recognize that industrialized societies are heterogeneous and that each societal subgroup may respond differently to innovation. However, peasant and other traditional societies ahve generally been regarded as homogeneous. Owing, perhaps, to intercultural differences, scholars from the industrialized nations have not recognized intracultural variation among the peasant societies they studied.”

• Directly compare to Billie DeWalt

• “Only recently has peasant heterogeneity been incorporated into development theory, Cancian and DeWalt, in separate studies, concluded that both the low and high peasant economic classes are more likely to innovate than the peasant middle class. This study argues that the wealthy peasant upper class is the most innovative in culturally open communities. Additional studies are needed to determine which peasant subgroups are more responsive to various forms of innovations under differing circumstances.”
  • I need to problematize “culturally open” as a euphemism for “influenced by western secularism, technologies, and services
• “A weakness of the cognitive explanations of peasant receptivity to agricultural innovation is their failure to consider the wide range of intravillage wealth. All peasants do not participate equally in peasant culture. Level of wealth influences peasant land use and culture attributes. In Nealtican, a culturally open peasant agricultural community, fatalism, reflected in the reluctance to innovate among poor peasants, does not appear to be a product of an inherent societal characteristic, but rather is a frank admission of economic reality, brought about in part by equal inheritance customs. Wealthy peasants, owing to their material resources, can afford to take risks and are anxious to innovate. Planners of Third World development policies should consider the possibility that peasant willingness to innovate might be a function of the level of peasant wealth, and that multiple development strategies, based upon the economic and cultural characteristics of each village subgroup, will likely result in increased agricultural innovation.”