Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 West Africa's economic backwardness in anthropological perspective
- 3 The organization of agricultural production
- 4 The state in agricultural development
- 5 The market and capital in agricultural development
- 6 The social impact of commercial agriculture
- 7 What is to be done?
- Notes
- Select annotated bibliography
- Supplementary bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
6 - The social impact of commercial agriculture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 West Africa's economic backwardness in anthropological perspective
- 3 The organization of agricultural production
- 4 The state in agricultural development
- 5 The market and capital in agricultural development
- 6 The social impact of commercial agriculture
- 7 What is to be done?
- Notes
- Select annotated bibliography
- Supplementary bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Summary
Our facts do more than illumine our morality and point out our ideal; for they help us to analyze economic facts of a more general nature, and our analysis might suggest the way to better administrative procedures for our societies.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift (1967:69)Labor mobility and the rural exodus
The impact of modern developments on West Africa's rural societies is manifested in a number of ways, none of them easy to measure. Those who consider the commercialization of agriculture to be an enormous source of various pathologies would emphasize the impoverishment, class contradictions, and social disorganization that they imagine to be characteristic of rural life today. These judgments imply a comparison with earlier times that is even harder to make concretely. Not everyone would express his or her opinion as decisively as Polly Hill (1977:172): “This miserably inefficient, competitive, ill-equipped rural economy, where most men work far less hard than they would wish, shuffles along much as it did forty years ago – only relieved by the migration of some married men and their dependents.” But in this chapter I will pursue such themes with some degree of analytical interpretation and rather less documentation. Probably no topic captures the vicissitudes of recent changes in the countryside more completely than the massive shifts in population that have accompanied urbanization since World War II.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Political Economy of West African Agriculture , pp. 121 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982