Book Reviews 429Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 4 No. 1 and 2, January and April 2004, pp. 00–00.Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 5 No. 3, July 2005, pp. 429–449.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2005.

Book Reviews

HENRY BERNSTEIN

The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, by JoanMartinez-Alier. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 2002. Pp. xi+312. £64.95 (hb); £25.00 (pb).ISBN 1-84064-909-7 (hb); 1-84376-486-5 (pb)

The purpose of this book is ‘to explain how the unavoidable clash between economy andenvironment (which is studied by ecological economics) gives rise to the ‘environmentalism of thepoor’ (which is studied by political ecology)’ (p. ix, emphasis in original). The ‘environmen-talism of the poor’ is an idea or term of recent provenance for a much older dynamic inmodern history: ‘the resistance (local and global) expressed in many idioms to the abuseof natural environments and the loss of livelihoods’ (p. x, my emphasis; the source of theterm is given as South Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, p. 209). Concern with the loss oflivelihoods distinguishes the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ from other powerfulcurrents of environmentalism, notably ‘the cult of wilderness’ (central to much environmen-talist sentiment in the North) and ‘the gospel of eco-efficiency’ (propounded by engineersand mainstream environmental economists). Moreover, the ‘environmentalism of thepoor’ is ‘potentially the most powerful current of environmentalism . . . (and is) becominga strong force for sustainability’ (p. ix, emphasis in original). Martinez-Alier declares his ownstake as ‘one of the midwives at the protracted births over the last 20 years of ecologicaleconomics and political ecology’ (p. xi).

A first chapter sketches the three main forms of environmentalism noted, while Chapters2 and 3 present some of the key elements of ecological economics: ‘a recently developedfield which sees the economy as a subsystem of a larger finite global ecosystem. Ecologicaleconomists question the sustainability of the economy because of its environmental im-pacts and its material and energy requirements, and also because of the growth of popu-lation’ (p. 19). Initially, ecological economics is presented as a kind of cousin of (moremainstream) environmental economics. ‘Ecological economists sympathize with attemptsat “internalizing” externalities into the price system, they readily concur with proposals tocorrect prices by taxes (such as “natural capital depletion taxes” or taxes on pollution) butthey deny that there exists a set of “ecologically correct prices” ’ (p. 21). Subsequently,environmental economics is assessed more tartly; for example: the ‘touching innocence’ ofthe belief of some environmental economists that ‘environmental damages arise becauseof “missing markets” ’ (p. 66), or their ‘pious invocations to “internalize the externalities”into the price system’ to promote ‘ecological modernization’, ‘eco-efficiency’ and the like(p. 54).

In fact, the ‘main thrust’ of ecological economics is ‘developing physical indicatorsand indexes of (un)sustainability, looking at the economy in terms of “social metabolism”’(p. 19) rather than the market/price framework of conventional (neo-classical) economics,including its versions of environmental economics. A number of these ‘indices of(un)sustainability’ are presented in chapter 3, together with the key argument that thereis a range of ways of valuing the environmental effects (costs and benefits) of differenteconomic relations and practices, and that these values are incommensurable (rather than

Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies(SOAS), University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK.e-mail: hb4@soas.ac.uk

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reducible to the common denominator of, often fictive, market prices). The necessity ofa ‘battery of biophysical indicators’ (p. 46) is combined with a commitment of ecologicaleconomics to ‘methodological pluralism’ (p. 35) and ‘postnormal science’ (p. 37) in the faceof the ‘unavoidable uncertainties’ of our knowledge (which make their own contributionto the incommensurability of values, p. 268).

The incommensurability of values appears to be something of a cardinal principle thatis invoked frequently throughout the book, sometimes formulated as different ‘languagesof valuation’. This refers not only to the languages of the different physical and humansciences relevant to such notions as the ‘social metabolism’, and to constructing andapplying indicators of its ecological (un)sustainability, but also to the languages (discourses,idioms, beliefs, and so on) used by various social groups and actors, classes and cultures, tocomprehend – and respond to – the massive environmental changes they have experiencedand that accompany economic growth in the modern world. (A list of such languagesincludes ‘Money, sacredness, indigenous territorial rights, uncertain future environmentaland health hazards, [and] national security’, p. 193).

There is thus a more radical break between ecological economics and environmentaleconomics than at first appears, and a break that promises to link the former with some ofthe key concepts and concerns of political economy: ‘Estimates of environmental valuesdepend on the endowment of property rights, the distribution of income, the strength ofenvironmental movements and the distribution of power’ (p. 45).

The first three chapters are ‘preliminaries’ (p. 54) to the main concern signalled by thetitle of the book and encompassed by the field of political ecology, introduced in chapter4 as the study of ecological distribution conflicts generated by ‘the unequal incidence ofenvironmental harm’ in the histories of modern economic growth – more exactly thedevelopment of capitalism on a world scale with its profound and ramified social inequali-ties (of class, gender, ethnicity), including their spatial configurations between North andSouth. This chapter begins with events in Ashio, Japan, in 1907 as an instance of environ-mentalism (and indeed environmentalism of the poor) ‘avant la lettre’: before the name.Ashio and other historical and contemporary examples of copper mining and the conflictsit generates are significant because some, or much, environmentalism of the poortoday may be ‘sans la lettre’ as it were: without the name. (Martinez-Alier is not always, orsufficiently, explicit about this, although on p. 238 he refers to ‘an environmentalism ofthe poor which is hidden to many as it frequently expresses itself in non-environmentallanguage’). The examples of copper mining illustrate some of the different forms thoseconflicts can take: from the plunder of primary resources (for export) without adequatecompensation or alternative investment, to uncompensated pollution that damages meansof livelihood (rivers, pastures, arable land) and, of course, damages health – above all thatof copper miners and their families.

Thereafter this chapter, like so many in the book, follows an idiosyncratic path inwhich ‘case studies’ as the author calls them (the term ‘vignette’ is usually more appro-priate) are juxtaposed with more general points or elements of arguments, and otherhistorical and/or contemporary illustrations, in ways whose expositional logic can beelusive. In Chapter 4, Martinez-Alier moves on from vignettes of conflicts caused by coppermining to aspects, and examples, of the politics of pollution in order to make the pointthat the form of resolution of a particular ecological distribution conflict does not neces-sarily resolve the problem underlying the conflict, and that often ‘In order to advancetowards problem resolution, what is needed is not conflict resolution, but conflict exacerba-tion’ (p. 68, emphasis in original, and later glossed as exacerbation ‘within Gandhianlimits’, p. 257). This is followed by a section on ‘the origins and scope of political

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ecology’, in which Netting’s advocacy of small-scale farming (1993) is given surprisingprominence (and commended for its ecological good sense if not for its sociologicalnaivety). The chapter then concludes with a section on ‘property rights and resourcemanagement’ that restates some of the familiar criticisms of Hardin’s (mis)understandingof ‘the commons’ as ‘open’ or ‘free’ access resources, rather than subject to their ownforms of collective possession and management (Hardin 1968).

The next two chapters ‘constitute the empirical heart of the book’ (p. viii). Chapter 5is on the expansion of global shrimp production, notably through its encroachment oncoastal mangrove areas in a ‘tragedy of enclosures’ (the opposite of Hardin’s ‘tragedy ofthe commons’) across the tropical world from Central America to Southeast Asia, and theconflicts this generates. Martinez-Alier links the issues of this particular arena of ecolog-ical distribution conflict to his wider concerns, making the (further) important criticismof conventional environmental economics that ‘externalities that fall on poor and power-less people are cheap, even when “internalized” ’ (p. 95; this idea is later explored furtherin the context of Union Carbide’s ‘compensation’ payments for the Bhopal disaster,pp. 246–50). He also points to tensions between Northern (wilderness) environmentalismand Southern environmentalism of the poor, centred on livelihoods, in international actionto protect/preserve tropical mangrove environments. And, in addition to extending, andillustrating, the central argument about valuation (and reiterating the principle of incom-mensurability of values), Martinez-Alier is also concerned to stress the structural nature ofthis arena of conflict, in contrast to the localism often emphasized, and celebrated, inethnographic/culturalist accounts of struggles in particular mangrove zones: ‘The shrimpversus mangroves conflict adopts slightly different aspects in different places in the worldaccording to cultural differences, but it has common structural roots. It is an ecologicaldistribution conflict, that is a conflict on environmental entitlements, on the loss of accessto natural resources and environmental services, on the burdens of pollution and on thesharing of uncertain environmental hazards’ (pp. 96–7).

Chapter 6 continues the exposition of the environmentalism of the poor with a widerange of ‘case studies’/vignettes, and accompanying commentary, of gold mining; oil/petroleum; the defence of forests against their destruction (including for plantations); thedefence of rivers against dams and hydroelectric power schemes, and of undergroundwater resources against their depletion; and of the defence of local knowledge andits value against international biopiracy. The more general discussion in the last part ofthis chapter perhaps helps explain the prominence accorded to Netting in Chapter 4, as itasks: ‘Has the march of agriculture in the last 150 years in western countries been wrong?’(p. 146). Although we have no idea (nor can we) of the ‘ecologically correct prices’for Western (i.e. modern capitalist) farming, the point is that the standard measures ofagricultural productivity omit the costs of (under-priced) fossil energy and of the ecolog-ical consequences of chemical pollution, genetic erosion, and of the unsustainable usesof soils and some fertilizers, like phosphorus (pp. 146–7; also pp. 214–5 in the contextof ‘ecological dumping’ of Northern agricultural commodities on world markets). Wecan take it then that the question is rhetorical; that its purpose is to reject agriculturalmodernization based on Western (or Northern) models as a development strategy for theSouth, for which better exemplars are found in their own peasantries with their inheritanceof ‘traditional organic’ farming (p. 144).

The arguments from – and about – agriculture, and Martinez-Alier’s self-proclaimed‘neo-narodnik’ stance on them, are, it can be suggested, at the core of the linkagesbetween ecological economics and political ecology proposed by this book, a proposi-tion supported by the trio of very different chapters that follow. Chapter 7 on urban

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sustainability and social conflict is the shortest and least substantive; its main point is thatthe scale of modern cities, their concentration of energy use (and production of pollu-tion), and the associated size – and weight – of their ‘ecological footprints’, all presentmassive environmental challenges. And a few pages into the chapter: ‘This is not a bookabout energy sources, nor is it particularly against cars. As a result of population growth,the absolute number of traditional peasants and landless labourers in the world was largerin the year 2000 than in 1900. Their disappearance . . . together with the disappearance oftheir agroecological knowledge and innovative capacity, is even more irreversible andpossibly a more important trend than the proliferation of the motor car’ (p. 155).

Chapter 8 is on the emergence and nature of notions of, and struggles over, environ-mental justice, above all in the USA and also in South Africa. The common thread is thatmovements for environmental justice in the two countries arise from ‘environmentalracism’, manifested in the concentration of toxic and other hazardous waste sites in local-ities inhabited by populations that are racially segregated (as well as demarcated in classterms). The importance of this for Martinez-Alier is that such movements and strugglesin the USA are the clearest manifestations to date of an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (or‘popular environmentalism’) in the North. They disclose, then, some promise or hope ofa kind of popular environmentalist International (‘an International in the making, withouta politbureau’, p. 206), linking struggles of the poor in both North and South, albeit withdifferent immediate objects of struggle and in very different conditions. Central amongthe latter, once more, is that popular environmentalism in the North lacks ‘peasant strug-gles to keep control and manage sustainably communal resources threatened by privateenclosure or state takeover’ (p. 177, emphasis in original).

One of the most salient features of ecological distribution conflicts in cities (Chapter 7)and of struggles for environmental justice in the North (Chapter 8) is thus an absence: bothlack an environmentalism of the poor qua ‘peasants’. In Chapter 9 Martinez-Alier isinclined to view the state as an ‘anti-environmental actor’ (p. 195), but tries to assessjudiciously its (variable) potential and actual roles in relation to big international corpora-tions, environmental movements, and notions of environmental rights. This is followedby reiterations of (some) environmentalist ideas and practices as (popular) resistance; asomewhat baffling excursus on SEN (‘standard environmental narrative[s]’, pp. 207–9);and a concluding (brief ) section on ‘gender and environment’ which takes us back squarely,once more, to the peasant question as constructed by the ‘environmentalism of the poor’.Now it is no longer enough to proclaim traditional farming communities and practicesas the antidote to the environmental depredations of both capital and state in their pursuitof economic growth, because such communities were, and are, riddled with patriarchy.What is needed, say eco-feminist writers, is ‘new communitarian institutions basedon eco-feminist economics and values rather than a return to (patriarchal) traditions’, aprescription with which Martinez-Alier ‘cannot but agree’ (p. 212). Presumably this is inthe same sense that one ‘cannot but agree’ that the world would be a nicer place withoutimperialism, say . . .

This moment of definitive agreement seems to bring the discussion of the environ-mentalism of the poor to a rather abrupt conclusion, as the text now returns to the terrainof ecological economics with a consideration of international trade and ‘the ecologicaldebt’ in its long Chapter 10. Here the ecological analysis of poverty and wealth is mappedon to a framework of poor and rich countries, that includes national economic account-ing, and national and international governance, issues of regulation and eco-taxation, andso on. Two forms of ecological debt are distinguished that arise from, and exemplify,‘ecologically unequal exchange’. These are illustrated by the historical cases of extractive

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export sectors in nineteenth-century Peru and twentieth-century Argentina, before a briefdiscussion of issues in quantifying ecologically unequal exchange and the ‘repayment’of ecological debt. That such monetary valuation contradicts the principle of incommen-surability of values (and ‘implies the monetization of Nature’s services’) is acknowledged(p. 228) but justified on the pragmatic grounds, first, that this is the ‘language’ of theNorth (and indeed the lingua franca of global capitalism), and, second, that monetarycompensation/ecological debt ‘repayment’ can provide one positive form of environmentalregulation of economic behaviour, similarly to eco-taxes (also considered in this chapterin relation to ‘carbon debt’ in particular). Chapter 10 concludes with sections on GMOsand transgenic crops, and resistance to their adoption, especially in Rio Grande do Sulin Brazil, which has been waged tenaciously against Monsanto but ultimately unsuc-cessfully, it seems (p. 246); and on Union Carbide and Bhopal, presented as an exampleof ‘a failure of organized environmentalism’. The last connects with a broader politicaltheme of this chapter, namely the problematic nature of ‘green protectionism’ as imposedon the South by Northern policies that incorporate ‘ecological conditionality’. Rather,there is a range of ‘true win-win policies’ available from Fair Trade networks to ‘paymentof the ecological debt and its application to sustainable technologies’ (p. 240, emphasis inoriginal). The double ‘win’ suggested is that of improvement in both environmentalconditions and the living standards of the poor in the South, without ‘false expectationsof the “trickle down” from economic growth’ (p. 240) and presumably at the cost ofNorthern consumers (and of capital, both local and international?).

A final Chapter 11 considers ‘the relations between political ecology and ecologicaleconomics’, with an emphasis on notions and experiences of ‘the environmentalism of thepoor’ as the key link, both intellectually and politically, between these two recent fieldsof study.

The range of this book and the scale of its ambition should be evident from thissomewhat laborious chapter-by-chapter summary and commentary. The book condensesand reflects on the results of several decades of concentrated intellectual work and politicalcommitment. It is passionate and also often eccentric, veering between grand intellectualhighways, occasional idiosyncratic detours and some alarming – and avoidable? – cul-de-sacs. A first question concerns the audience its author had in mind. It may be reasonableto assume that the reader has ‘a working knowledge of concepts invented by humans inthe course of history, such as “joules and calories”, “heavy metals”, “greenhouse effect”,“second law of thermodynamics”, “genetic distance”, and “sulphur dioxide” ’ (p. x). Is itreasonable to expect readers to deal with such key concepts of the new ecologicaleconomics as ‘ecological rucksacks’ and ‘ecological footprints’, which are as barely explainedas they are widely deployed in the book? To refer to and apply ‘Liebig’s law of theminimum’ (pp. 47, 214) without saying what it is? To omit Liebig from the bibliography,in common with such other key references cited as Hardin, for example? (And one alwayshopes that authors will spell ‘narodism’ correctly, not least those who claim its heritage.)

A second source of frustration is the fragmentary character of the text. Its juxtaposi-tions of more or less careful conceptual exposition; vignettes of popular interventions inecological distribution conflicts; bits of history of environmentalist politics and policies;summary descriptions and assessments of complex environmental policy issues, manouevresand measures; and sweeping assertion, are likewise not friendly to the reader (other thanthe already conceptually adept and ideologically confirmed ecological economist and/orpolitical ecologist?). In effect, the book appears as much an assemblage of ideas and exam-ples/experiences as it is a convincingly integrated synthesis and argument. (Too) much ofthe text reads like a series of mini-essays or, in the worst instances, like notes for essays

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(for example, Chapters 7 and 9, and sections of 10), which may well reflect tensionsand lacunae intrinsic to the structure of the argument rather than the author’s possiblyanarchist (or ‘postnormal’) sensibility.

Here are some examples. First, Martinez-Alier locates his ecological economics in thelineage of classical political economy, albeit with considerable ambivalence in relationto Marx (not unreasonably). At the same time, he frequently asserts the primacy ofconsumption and/or distribution relative to production in ecological economics, and moreor less polemically so in relation to Marxian economics, without any systematic consid-eration of relations and circuits of production, distribution and consumption, and theirinter-relations, in the political economy of capitalism. This is not a purely formal orgestural observation because theorization of the circuits of production, distribution andconsumption, and their changing inter-relations, provides one means among others (suchas forms of competition, trends in profitability, patterns of accumulation and class strug-gle) of constructing a periodization of capital on a world scale, of great potential utility to theconcerns of this book. Surprisingly, given the author’s formation and capacities – andthe intellectually dynamic field of environmental history (on which he draws for ‘casestudies’) – the book is quite devoid of history in any analytical or theoretical sense, and forthis as well as other reasons lacks a convincingly dialectical engagement with its world-historical subject matter (a much better starting point here is the outstanding book byMcNeill (2001)).

In the absence of any theoretical framework for its history, what remains is the familiarand simple prelapsarian myth: a (stylized) prior time, occupied by farming (and fishingand herding) communities that generated ecologically friendly knowledges, values andpractices, enabling them to reproduce, or ‘sustain’, both themselves and the natural re-sources on which they depended. The subsequent fall from grace came with industrializa-tion (including industrialized agriculture), urbanization, the formation of a world economy,and the rise of the modern state and its doctrines of development and modernization,together with the dramatic growth of population, of the consumption (of some), ofglobal social inequality, of pollution, and so on. Martinez-Alier is much too sophisticatedto believe in so simplistic a myth of the golden past, but it occupies a strategic place in theoverall shape of his book by default: because he suggests no alternative historical frame-work, properly theorized (and problematized), of the worlds before industrial capitalismand their contradictions and forms of development, and because ‘traditional’ peasants areat the heart of his environmentalism of the poor as the bearers of a virtuous (if threatened)continuity from that golden past.

The argument from continuity has two principal effects, two sides of the same coin.One is that the environmentalism of the poor appears above all as defensive struggles. Theother is that the viability of future alternatives appears to rest on the strength of survivalsfrom the past: communal property rights and agroecological knowledges, albeit com-bined with social organization from which patriarchy (the sole blemish of the prelapsarianinheritance?) has been purged. This stereotypical position does no favours for the intellec-tual and political objectives of the radical ecological project – the environmentalism of thepoor – that Martinez-Alier seeks to advance, and to convince his readers of. To repeat oneof the instances cited above: ‘the absolute number of traditional peasants and landlesslabourers in the world was larger in the year 2000 than in 1900’ (p. 155). Why should wesuppose that these social categories are fundamentally the same at the end of that pastcentury of massive capitalist upheaval and globalization as at the beginning (the continuityor ‘persistence’ position)? The rest of us are certainly not. How can we take seriously thesuggestion that the strength of Gallic resistance to GM crops derives from the ‘remaining

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peasant groups in France’ (p. 155; and ‘remaining’ from when: 1900? 1789? 1600?)? If theKRRS (Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha) in India opposes the introduction of (geneticallymodified) Bt cotton seed while also campaigning for subsidized industrial fertilizers, howadequate is it simply to observe in passing that ‘reality is contradictory’ (p. 144) withoutrecognizing the need to investigate such contradictions among contemporary farmers?And how plausible is it to propose the KRSS as emblematic of a poor peasant movement( Jonathan Pattenden, personal communication)?

The irony is that these kinds of weaknesses, and indeed the incompleteness theyrepresent, at the centre of the book will undermine its impact, and especially on those ‘oldleftists’ and Marxists who need to take environmental change seriously. This entails seek-ing to incorporate, theorize and investigate some of the key questions raised by ecologicaleconomics and political ecology within the framework of a materialist political economythat has to demonstrate its relevance to understanding the global capitalism of today (andpace the valiant, and interesting, attempt of Bellamy Foster (2000) to suggest that Marxdeveloped an ecological materialism, on which I share the scepticism of Martinez-Alier(2003)). Furthermore, that understanding has to reject the traces of any inherited classpurism in my view, and in a sense to take populist politics more seriously, recognizingthe kinds of class contradictions and ‘contradictions amongst the people’ that lurk withinmany populist struggles, that give them their dynamism and are central to assessing theirdemocratic or progressive potential. It is ironic too, then, that Martinez-Alier’s environ-mentalism of the poor is generally stronger on advocacy and passion than it is on theanalysis of contradictions that would advance our understanding of ecological distributionconflicts, hence our capacity to assess their politics in different conditions and conjunc-tures of struggle.

Perhaps Martinez-Alier is still marked by some of the (problematic) traditions of the‘old left’ as he is by the seductions of neo-narodism. His final chapter opens thus: ‘Ecol-ogical economics provides the theory on the structural conflict between the economy andthe environment. Without such a theory, this book would merely become an entertainingcatalogue of environmental struggles, with a tendency to select anecdotal evidence show-ing a black-and-white picture of the good guys (and girls) against the bad guys’ (p. 252,emphasis in original). Apart from the wit of this revelation – and its temerity: an authorialhostage to fortune if ever there was one? – to me it echoes the old claim of communismas a programme of human emancipation that it rests on a unique science of social reality(with all the manifold tensions and tragedies associated with that claim). And the bookconcludes with a notion of ‘procedural power which, in the face of complexity is ablenevertheless to impose a language of valuation determining which is the bottom-line inan ecological distribution conflict’, and then asks ‘Who then has the power to decide theprocedure . . . ? Who has the power to simplify complexity, ruling some languages ofvaluation out of order?’ (p. 271). Could it be that – in the final analysis, as they say – thenew environmentalist ‘International in the making’ requires a politbureau after all?!

REFERENCES

Foster, J. Bellamy, 2000. Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature. New York: MonthlyReview Press.

Hardin, G., 1968. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Science, 162: 1243–8.Martinez-Alier, J., 2003. ‘Marxism, Social Metabolism, and Ecologically Unequal Ex-

change’. Paper presented to Conference on World Systems Theory and the Environ-ment, Lund University, 19–22 September 2003.

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McNeill, J., 2001. Something New Under the Sun, An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury. London: Penguin Books.

Netting, R. Mc., 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of IntensiveSustainable Agriculture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

HARRIET FRIEDMANN

Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, by Julie Guthman. Berkeley:University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xviii+250. US$55.95 and £35.95 (hb); US$21.95and £13.95 (pb). ISBN 0-520-24094-4 (hb) and 0-520-24095-2 (pb)

Standards are a hidden weapon in the arsenals of food politics. Few people know thatCodex Alimentarius, an obscure food standards body of the United Nations, is empow-ered by the World Trade Organization to set standards for food safety and quality. Yetarmies of scientists and lawyers gather there to battle over matters of great import, suchas whether genetically modified foods must (or must not) be labelled, whether animalfeeds must be traced back to farms and even seeds, and what can be called organic ininternational trade. Although food scares have made national regulatory practices into hotpublic issues, the mass of picayune rules governing details of a stupefyingly complicatedtransnational food system defy easy political positions.

Ordinary people are more familiar with private brands of manufacturers, such asHeinz and Nestle, and of retailers, such as Sainsbury or A&P. Like government regula-tion, private brands originated in the nineteenth century in order to satisfy public andconsumer concerns about food quality, many of which arose because of intentionaladulteration (Goody 1982, 171–3). Those concerns remain. However, the very farmingand manufacturing corporations that grew up in tandem with ramifying governmentregulations in the 1950s and 1960s became the target of health and environmental concernin the 1960s and 1970s (Lang and Heasman 2004).

The back-to-the-land and whole foods movement of the 1960s and 1970s respondedto perceived dangers of industrial foods, such as pesticides and preservatives. After WorldWar II, a chemical dependency grew up in industrial agriculture and the manufactureof complex edible commodities. The movement was eclectic but relatively coherent,based on a combination of philosophies about ecology, community, small-scale farm-ing, cooking and eating. Yet it was also a livelihood for farmers in that it combined theskilful, autonomous, experimental work of growing food and tending animals in harmonywith relatively bounded cycles of soil, water and seasons in each farm, with the returns towork, that is, the means of life, particularly food. Collectively, farming, cooking and eatingfit together in a self-styled ‘counter-culture’. Perhaps the classic document of the time,Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971), connected eating and cooking (veg-etarian, generically ‘peasant’ combinations of grains and legumes) with larger questions ofinternational political economy and early popular awareness of ecology. Food cooperativesand other experiments with direct local distribution gave farmers cash and spread com-munity. This whole array of ideas, practices and relationships in North America underlaythe word ‘organic’.

Harriet Friedmann, Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place,Toronto ON M5S 3K7, Canada. e-mail: harriet.friedmann@utoronto.ca

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Paradoxes emerged within this heady array, which manifested in a series of problemsrelated to standards. The fascinating trajectory of California organics is a precursor to thehigh stakes negotiations over international standards, and a microcosm of what is at stakein the setting of food standards. Julie Guthman has written a major study illuminating theproblematic results of the struggle for standards in the organic farming sector of California.It sheds needed light on the larger issue of standards at all scales.

Early certification came from within the California farming sector, and can loosely beseen as cooperative self-regulation by growers. Rules varied among certifying agencies,reflecting growing differences among growers, especially between movement pioneersand later entrants attracted by premium prices. Multiple certifiers defeated the purpose ofinforming consumers. Prompted by traders interested in the price premium of the label,in 1979 California passed its first law defining organic but legislated no enforcement pro-visions. The temptation to fraud led to ‘instant organic’ farmers (p. 113). After revelationsof fraudulent practices, enforcement provisions came in 1990.

The US Department of Agriculture, under the influence of industrial farmers and theirindustrial chemical suppliers, had long resisted demands to regulate – and even consideredbanning claims of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’! However, large food manufacturers followedthe market and appropriated the word natural. Energy and foreign aid issues (includingthe idea of sustainability) also entered into the closed world of agricultural lobbies andofficials. The 1980s saw a number of legislative openings to low-input farming. Foodsafety scares ratcheted market growth in the late 1980s. A national organic trade groupwas formed and allied with consumer groups in a counter-lobby to the productivistagriculture-chemical industry lobby. The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB),created in 1990, was modelled on the California law.

Nonetheless, USDA officials continued to resist anything to do with ‘organic’. Theproposed set of standards it finally released after seven years were written by corp-orations. They allowed, among others, irradiation, genetically modified organisms andsewage sludge as fertilizer. The cynicism of converting principles of consumer health andagricultural sustainability into this list of allowable inputs because they were not chemical,led to one of the great popular political mobilizations of the decade in the US. The USDAwithdrew the list and ultimately instituted rules demanded by protestors, but consistentwith what had paradoxically become a niche organics ‘industry’.

The result is a niche market favouring large scale, often monocultural producersof organic crops (and ingredients) for the national retailers and manufacturers. BothCalifornia and national laws created an incentive system to support the market premiumof the word organic. Regulations list permitted inputs. These are continually adjudicatedat the NOSB. Once brought under the rubric of federal regulation, interests press relent-lessly against broader agro-ecological or democratic principles. Now the USDA ‘ownsthe word organic’. (A small farmer – a woman who runs a subscription farm in Florida –who for a time sat on that board described to me gruelling sessions in which impatientlawyers representing industry applicants glanced at their watches to emphasize their valu-able time she was wasting by demanding to understand the details in voluminous docu-ments supporting applications to approve new inputs; meanwhile this farmer was losingtime in Washington!)

The premium prices of organic products are in turn capitalized into land values. Thecapitalist transformation of organic farmers is thus reinforced by regulation. Large growers,traders and manufacturers are investing in increasing the scope of markets and in keepingdown costs, including labour costs. Customers in Whole Foods supermarkets – a brilliantmarket appropriation of a sixties counter-culture term – may retain some principles, but

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the prices that distinguish the organic industry dictate a shift away from the sixties idealsof local, community sharing of ‘whole foods’ and towards privileged consumers ofprecious, increasingly prepared, expensive meals.

Guthman’s detailed empirical investigation of the ‘paradoxes of organic farming’reveals how deeply political are questions of standards: do they apply to processes orproducts? Are they a specialized task, based in expert knowledge and third-party distance,or are they made by producers – or merchants or consumers or governments or somecombination of these? Do they include labour standards? Do they include ecologicalstandards and in what senses? How do standards affect price and accessibility of con-sumers? Can standards be consistent with both democracy (by growers and eaters) andagro-ecological and cultural diversity? Is there any alternative to standards as a way ofguaranteeing trustworthy claims about ecological processes and the quality of foods?

Guthman’s inestimable contribution is to ground her careful analysis in land owner-ship – the locus classicus of the agrarian question – and its implications for labour. Whatcould easily have been a satisfactory account of how interest politics overtook and under-mined a social movement consistently brings the reader back to land and labour. Guthmanlocates the land and labour questions in the history of California capitalist agriculture andimmigrant labour controls, both highly structured by the government laws and selectiveenforcement practices. Organic farmers, for all their communitarian and counter-culturalideals, have been too fascinated with American agrarian rhetoric to seriously questionindividual land ownership or to understand themselves as employers (not to say, exploiters)of labour.

By coming to these courageous conclusions, Guthman guides politics towards analternative future. Of course, the founding ideals of agro-ecology and community did notdisappear but regrouped in new relationships, such as subscription farms, farmers’ mar-kets and other ways to connect growers and eaters in local food systems. Local networksof growers and eaters, paradoxically, often operate without certification. The question ofthe basis of trust is posed more starkly. Guthman’s analysis challenges those who want tocreate a sustainable and just food system to take up, once again, the land question, and ofcourse, the question of labour. She shows that agrarian ideology no less than productivistmania, makes it difficult to argue that land is a common good (and more than a ‘resource’)and that farmers are the most important occupational group, whose labour must besupported and skilled in ecological agronomy. To increase and value farm work, to assistfarmers and prospective farmers in working common land to enhance its fertility and tofeed people in local regions (what Kloppenburg calls the ‘foodshed’ – Hallwell 2004), toensure that rural workers and communities share in entitlements and amenities oncerestricted to cities, these are among the goals of the international farmers’ movementVia Campesina. Guthman contributes to this struggle throughout the world a guide forAmerican citizens to return to the political issues that cannot go away: labour and land.

REFERENCES

Goody, J., 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Hallwell, B., 2004. Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket.New York: W.W. Norton.

Lang, T. and M. Heasman, 2004. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds andMarkets. London: Earthscan.

Lappe, F. Moore, 1971. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books.

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CHRISTOPHER CRAMER

No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts, by Paul Richards(ed.). Athens and Oxford: Ohio University Press and James Currey. 2005. Pp. 288.US$49.95 (hb) and US$24.95 (pb). ISBN 0-8214-1575-1 (hb); 0-8214-1575-X (pb)

Readers of this book can eavesdrop on a range of voices from a variety of violent con-flicts. These voices include, among others: local state functionaries in Burkina Faso, man-aging daily dilemmas of their social identity on the borderline between the state and localgroups, and negotiating the delicate fusion and tension between state law, local norms,justice and ‘social peace’; the ‘moral ambiguity’ of people with prolonged firsthand expe-rience of war in Sarajevo; Mayans recalling and living experiences in Guatemala that callinto question the projection of what Löfving calls the ‘neutrality paradigm’, which envis-ages indigenous communities as passive victims trapped between scheming rebels and aheavy-handed state; people living in Southern Zimbabwe who ‘have been living in a statebetween war and peace for several decades now’ (p. 171); and Tibetan students for whomliving in a diaspora means ‘living the conflict’.

Such an eclectic collection could become unruly. But this collection – the product of agroup of anthropologists based in Uppsala and organized, after the death of BernhardHelander, by Paul Richards – is largely coherent as a book. At one level, the collection issimply a useful addition to the set of case studies exploring the seams of experiences andmeanings of violence that anthropologists have been working in recent years. It adds, forexample, to Nordstrom’s (1997) work on creative responses to the experiences of violencein Mozambique, to Scheper-Hughes’s (1992) work on the ‘everyday violence’ of the lifeof the poor in north-eastern Brazil, and to other collections such as Aijmer and Abbink’s(2000) Meanings of Violence or the extremely useful anthology edited by Scheper-Hughesand Philippe Bourgeois (2004).

However, the book works more interestingly at another level of coherent argumentand method. For the pieces are linked by the unifying theme of subverting categoricalboundaries. War, for these authors, is not something sharply distinct from peace. Rather,they advance a continuum that runs (and that shapes the order of chapters) from ‘peace’through ‘war’ and then to a different ‘peace’. This is a continuum that in Staffan Löfving’scontribution overlaps explicitly with a stretching of the meaning of violence to incorpo-rate ideas of ‘structural violence’. Thus, he argues that ‘the war–peace rupture is a politicalconstruct that conceals the nature of human agency in contexts marked by the violence ofpoverty and exploitation’ (p. 94). In Löfving’s specific example, the argument is put towork to show how Mayans in Guatemala cannot simply be assumed to be neutral pawnsmoved about by ‘demonic powers’. Understanding their so-called normality as a condi-tion of ‘no peace’ is politically necessary if Guatemalan society is to find mechanisms toachieve ‘no war’.

Similarly, Jan Ovesen argues that the category of ‘genocide’ is inappropriately used inthe Cambodian context, despite the extreme levels of extermination under the KhmerRouge regime. What is achieved by using the genocide label is ‘that the period of the[Democratic Kampuchea] regime is bracketed off, so to speak, as an historical aberrationrather than seen, more justly, as a continuation, albeit grotesquely intensified, of theterror-as-usual pattern pursued by all Cambodian post-colonial rulers’. This and other

Christopher Cramer, Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, RussellSquare, Thornhaugh St, London WC1H 0XG. e-mail: cc10@soas.ac.uk

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examples of the perspective taken in this book reflect the analytical preference for studyingprocesses behind violence and war as opposed to isolating ‘causes’. The search for clearcauses appeals to many people, including policy makers internationally, with an interestin preventing violent conflict. But this quest has also sent many commentators downblind alleys of essentialism in studying ‘identity’, of commodity fetishism in studies of the‘resource curse’, and of silliness in arbitrarily distinguishing ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ andlabelling as greed what might easily be actions reflecting political grievance.

So the breaking down of categorical boundaries, above all in the war/peace distinction,while not exactly new, in this book serves an adamantine commitment to the role ofanthropology in studying violence but also in making peace, or rather in ‘making peaceless dangerous’. War makers need, and need to create, categorical distinctions and to makepeople believe in their certainties: distinctions between good and evil, Hutu and Tutsi,and so on. Ambiguity is not the stuff of war makers. The challenge to peacemakers is tofind and encourage precisely this ambiguity. Then, in a dimension beyond the typicalrealms of conflict resolution involving international intervention, the social creativity ofwartime, and of resistance during war to categorical certitude, may become a resource fora less violent peace.

One of the more hopeful examples in this book is Fithen and Richards’ brief discussionof the Bo Town Bike Renters Association in Sierra Leone. War in Sierra Leone emergedfrom a process in which categorical patron–client relations were failing under the strain ofeconomic crisis, macroeconomic reforms and demographic structure: too many clientsdepending on too few patrons who had little to offer. The war itself shifted the kaleidoscopeof material conditions, ideas and social relations. After the war, former combatants of theRevolutionary United Front (RUF) and the pro-government Civil Defence Forces (CDF)were, the authors argue, in a position effectively to challenge the hierarchical categories ofpatron and client more constructively. Ex-combatants from both groups combined in Boto set up an association renting motorbikes, mostly to women traders who had been criss-crossing frontlines during the war and who had lost their inhibitions about riding on theback of a motorbike. The motorbikes were also more effective in a context where manycars had been destroyed and where roads were in disarray. Fithen and Richards argue thatthe success of the association was a function of the rise of a new balance, during the war,between ‘individualism’ and ‘egalitarianism’ and that this enabled the demobbed soldiersto bypass the control of would-be patrons, to register their association under commerciallaw, and to organize an effective strike with women traders against police harassmentover delays in issuing registration papers by the Road Transport Department.

In that example, Fithen and Richards touch on the political economy of the peace–war–peace continuum, as they do when they discuss briefly some of the labour marketdimensions of the conflict in Sierra Leone. However, it is striking in a book pushingforward an agenda of breaking down categorical boundaries that there remains quite acategorical distinction by analytical discipline. The Introduction, for example, at timesconfirms the gulf between perspectives taken by different disciplines. It rightly showshow naïve some economists have been in criticizing the empirical work of anthropol-ogists, and it slams the arbitrary distinction these same economists make between thepolitical and the economic. But the Introduction returns the compliment a little – bythrowing all economists and political economists into one pot and assuming, for example,that none of them ‘does’ contextual detail or fieldwork. Further, while Richards in theIntroduction is right to suggest that much of the secondary data used by many economistsare misleading, it is also true that many economists who do work with secondary data arealso extremely careful with and critical of what can be done with those data.

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There is a risk that the approach taken in this book has thrown out the politicaleconomy baby with the dirty bathwater of neo-classical economics and econometricmethod. Similarly, there is no reason why a process-oriented perspective on violentconflict, driven by anthropological methods, cannot also draw on insights from thepolitical analysis of collective violence, for example insights and questions aboutthe mechanisms that escalate violence and help determine the salience of violence inpolitical encounters and the degree of coordination of collective violence (see, for example,Tilly 2003).

No Peace No War, then, makes a positive contribution to ethnographic knowledge ofparticular cases and should increase awareness in the problems with categorical distinc-tions in the study of violent conflict. However, for all its interest, it also shows how hardit is, in a world in which inter-disciplinarity has become increasingly fashionable, actuallyto combine the methods and insights of different disciplines.

REFERENCES

Aijmer, G. and G. Abbink, eds, 2000. The Meanings of Violence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.Oxford: Berg.

Nordstrom, C., 1997. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N., 1992. Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. and P. Bourgeois, eds, 2004. Violence in War and Peace: An Antho-logy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tilly, C., 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LANCE VAN SITTERT

Re-creating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and NorthernNamibia, by Emmanuel Krieke. Oxford: Heinemann. 2004. Pp. x+293. £56.99 (hb); £16.99(pb). ISBN 0-325-07077-6 (hb); 0-325-07076-8 (pb)

Re-creating Eden is a tale of paradise lost and regained on the Ovambo floodplain,which straddles the modern Angola–Namibia border, in the eighty years c.1880–1960. Itfollows the fortunes of the agropastoralist Oukwanyama people from the destructionof the pre-colonial kingdom of that name on the northern floodplain by rinderpest,Portuguese invasion and famine, to its recreation on the middle floodplain and easternOvamboland as a native reserve in South African-occupied Namibia in the four or sodecades after World War One. Kreike structures his narrative around the twinnedconcepts of oshilongo–ofuka used by his informants to narrate this period in their lives. Theformer, oshilongo, is an environment domesticated by human labour into villages, farmsand fields, while the latter, ofuka, is ‘wilderness’ defined by the absence of a human-created environmental infrastructure. The forced migration of the Oukwanyama from thenorthern to the middle floodplain is thus remembered as one from oshilongo to ofuka,requiring the domestication of the wilderness in the new homeland (the ‘re-creation ofEden’ of the title).

Lance van Sittert, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, Private BagRondebosch, 7700, Cape Town, South Africa. e-mail: cdude@humanities.uct.ac.za

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The book traces the transformation of ofuka into oshilongo on the middle floodplainprimarily and most compellingly through some fifty-odd formal interviews withOukwanyama informants who lived through the period. Skilful and subtle use of thisrich oral record enables Kreike to reconstruct the process in forensic detail at a homestead-level resolution. His central contention is that although ‘everything appeared the same. . . much was different’ between old and new Oukwanyama (p. 177). The most impor-tant difference, he shows, was the decline in the position of women in the recreatedOukwanyama society of the middle floodplain. Migrant labour, mission Christianity andthe masculine discourse of colonialism all served to erode women’s ownership of themeans of production and social power through the matriclans, at the same time as trans-ferring the main labour burden for both transforming ofuka and maintaining oshilongo onto them and their children. New Oukwanyama was thus a highly gendered paradise inwhich men, particularly migrants and Ovachristi, were able to mobilize the extra-clanresources of preferential labour contracts, missionaries and colonial administrators to shiftthe balance of wealth and power in the society decisively in their favour.

Re-creating Eden derives from a 1996 Yale doctoral thesis and, despite its presumedreworking over the intervening eight years, still shows traces of its origin in the occasion-ally clotted prose, and endnotes and bibliography that comprise fully a third of the book.That the endnotes further lack a pagination header is an inexplicable omission on the partof the publisher, rendering them all but useless for reference while reading.

Stylistic and layout issues aside, how does Re-creating Eden relate to the wider concernsof African (environmental) history? Kreike argues against current orthodoxy for the needto refocus attention away from the ‘high colonialism’ of the inter-war period to the‘classic’ colonialism’ of the scramble in seeking to understand the environmental trans-formations wrought during European superintendence of the continent. In particular, hesingles out the so-called ‘small wars’ of the post-scramble ‘pacification’ as constitutinga hidden socio-environmental holocaust whose true dimensions remain still largelyunknown. Kreike thus takes the ‘small wars’ of Portuguese ‘pacification’ on the Ovambofloodplain as his narrative’s starting point and Re-creating Eden offers a greening of theanti-colonial resistance narrative as its innovation of current scholarship. The Oukwanyamaresist Portuguese colonial conquest first by relocating beyond its reach and second byreconstructing the pre-colonial oshilongo decimated by the invaders.

Comfortable as the notion of a feisty peasant yeomanry pulling itself up by its sandalstraps is to both the established canon and post-colonial sensibilities, it requires a series ofsilences and elisions to sustain, which when voiced and re-inserted, point to the possibil-ities of other, altogether less triumphalist, readings of the floodplain’s bloody history.Kreike’s use of the socio-environmental cycle of Oukwanyama ‘fall and rise’ acknowl-edges, but otherwise ignores, the existence of previous and subsequent cycles on theOvambo floodplain, represented by the ruined oshilongo of the early nineteenth-centuryKing Haudanu (pp. 15–34) and the subsequent ruining of the re-created Eden documentedby the book in the liberation war (1966–89) (p. 185). That the oshilongo–ofuka cycle isboth narrative device and ideological construct is a point Kreike recognizes, but does notpursue, beyond the possibility that conditions at the time of his main fieldwork (1992–93)may have pre-disposed his informants to lay particular emphasis on this fact about their past.

The existence of at least one pre-colonial oshilongo–ofuka cycle (that of King Haudanu)surely points to indigenous drivers and calls into question Kreike’s insistence on colonial-ism as an ‘apocalyptic’ divergence from pre-colonial norms. Such doubts are furtherreinforced by his discussion of the pre-conquest period (c.1879–1904), where his ownevidence suggests that the indigenous ruling class and its client omalenga warlords, newly

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equipped through long-distance trade with horses and modern firearms, imposed aprotracted reign of terror on their subjects under the flimsy guise of customary okashavaexactions. Kreike’s glossing of this remorseless predation as a response to the pressures ofan encroaching colonialism, and hence indirectly attributable to Europeans’ account, morethan strains credulity.

Then there is the question of Oukwanyama occupation of the middle floodplain ofuka.The Oukwanyama oral tradition follows the form of settler societies everywhere (includ-ing those of the European diaspora) in conjuring an empty land, which claim Kreikeuncritically accepts. Yet the reported abundance of wild game and presence of water holesintimates that what was ofaku to the agropastoralist Oukwanyama, was oshilongo to Sanhunter gatherers. Rightly contemptuous of colonial disdain for the Oukwanyama oshilongo– ‘Homesteads with elaborate grain storage facilities and palisades were referred to ashuts, carefully managed fruit trees were characterized as wild, intensive mound agricul-ture was dismissed as subsistence cultivation, and wells were denigrated as water holes’(p. 13) – Kreike, however, quotes one of his own informant’s memory of the Oshimolo,that ‘No people lived in the ofuka . . . [M]any bushmen were there . . . just moving around,not living in one place’ (p. 158), without comment. The San hover like ghosts along theedges of Kreike’s informants’ memories and his own narrative history of the expandingOukwanyama oshilongo, particularly in eastern Ovamboland, always magically disappear-ing before the advancing agropastoralist settlement frontier. Although Kreike’s discussionof Oukwanyama–San interactions is fleeting at best, he always suggests fraternal rela-tions. Given what we know of pastoralist–hunter gatherer relations elsewhere and theOukwanyama elite’s means and capacity for violence, this too is hard to credit.

If Kreike’s determination to portray the Oukwanyama as victims rather than alsopractitioners of colonization fails to convince, his contrary efforts to brand Europeansas the purveyors of apocalyptic devastation on the floodplain are ultimately equallyunpersuasive. Indeed, on his evidence alone, the South African colonial administration inNamibia, especially during the tenure of the long-serving ‘Cocky’ Hahn, can claim nosmall part in the re-creation of the Oukwanyama Eden on the middle floodplain, pro-viding land, food aid, roads, water infrastructure, preferential migrant contacts and (indi-rectly) access to the Oshimolo in Portuguese Angola, as well as recognizing, defendingand devolving power to the traditional authority represented by the omalenga warlords, allunder the long pax South Africa that followed the crushing of the last Kwanyama king,Mandume, in 1917. Then there is the fact that a significant number of Oukwanyamaeither did not relocate to or else subsequently returned from Eden to live under thePortuguese yoke. Kreike offers no clues as to who stayed behind in, who fled and whoreturned to old Oukwanyama and why, but his picture of a brutal and insatiable colonialorder north of the border must have been tempered to a significant extent in reality, ifonly by Portuguese inefficiency and lack of means.

Kreike’s attempted greening of African history’s stock anti-colonial resistance narrativethus fails to address its more fundamental problem of writing history ‘backwards’, whilefitting his narrative to its procrustean bed forecloses the possibility of a more complex andambiguous reading of period and place (see Cooper 2000). This is in no small part, too, aresult of his reliance on Kwanyama informants who together constitute a gerontocracy of‘winners’, in that all by definition survived the fall of old Oukwanyama and prospered,however modestly, in its re-creation on the middle floodplain. While Kreike discussesgender at great length, class is noted, but neither systematically analysed nor treated as asignificant social fault line. This is not surprising, in that the poor are naturally selectedout of his informant sample, literally failing to reproduce themselves in Oukwanyama or

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to the advanced aged or both that would make them available as potential informants toan American graduate student doing fieldwork there in the 1990s. In this regard, Kreike’sending of his narrative in c.1960 and hence complete omission of the liberation war is alsorevealing. Anti-colonial guerrilla wars invariably take the form of class wars in the colonialcountryside and it would be instructive to know what happened in Oukwanyama duringthe 1966–89 Namibian liberation war. We can safely assume that the omalenga warlords-cum-headmen’s cosy relationship with the South African colonial administration made themprime targets for PLAN guerrillas, but whether the latter included significant numbersof Oukwanyama in their ranks is the question that really begs an answer and, if so, whothey were and exactly what local issues were they fighting to redress?

New Oukwanyama was not the earthly paradise suggested by the title, but not onlybecause it took its inhabitants’ lifetimes of hard labour to make and maintain oshilongo.The oshilongo of the middle Ovambo floodplain was a fallen world for another morefundamental reason too, because it was built on the violent expropriation and dailyexploitation not just, or even primarily in this instance, of Africans by Europeans, or (asKreike demonstrates) women by men, but also of Africans by other Africans; of San byOukwanyama and commoners by omalenga.

REFERENCE

Cooper, F., 2000. ‘Africa’s Pasts and Africa’s Historians’. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34:298–336.

GAVIN KITCHING

Soviet Power and the Countryside: Policy Innovation and Institutional Decay, by Neil J. Melvin.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. xvi+279. £52.50. ISBN 0-333-69252-7

It is a long time now since John Stuart Mill suggested that there might be an inverserelationship between political authoritarianism and socio-economic complexity in humanlife. Mill’s supposedly ‘naïve’, ‘Victorian’ faith in progress rested in part on the view that‘despotism’ (as he called it) – even ‘enlightened despotism’ – could not be made to work,in the long run, in any society which had developed a highly complex division of labourand in which the assent of ever more occupationally specialized and functionally diversegroups of people to the existing set of political and social arrangements had to be won andmaintained. This was in part, Mill claimed, because as the division of labour becomesmore complex the vulnerability of society to non-cooperation by specialist groups in-creases, and there is really no lastingly effective way for ‘the despots’ to substitute directcoercion for that non-cooperation. But it was also because, with growing socio-economiccomplexity, and the rising educational levels and growing material prosperity that comeswith it, there is not only a diminished willingness of the population to assent to authori-tarian solutions to political and social problems, there is also an equally diminishedwillingness of political leaders to employ them. According to Mill, this is because progressin society brings with it a generalized ‘softening of sensibility’ which embraces leaders aswell as led, and renders the former less and less inclined to violently coerce the latter.

Gavin Kitching, School of Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales,Sydney 2052, Australia. e-mail: g.kitching@unsw.edu.au

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(Because they now see such people less and less as ‘subjects’ to be ordered around, andmore and more as fellow ‘citizens’ to be placated and persuaded.)

As the quotation marks around ‘naïve’ and ‘Victorian’ above were meant to signal,these kinds of ideas have not been fashionable for a very long time. Indeed, they havebeen the object of scorn and derision among generation after generation of more knowing‘realist’ intellectuals throughout the twentieth century and into this one. But perhapsMill is another much-whipped nineteenth-century dog who is about to have his day.Certainly, he would have enjoyed reading Neil Melvin’s excellent book on the develop-ment, and then ultimate collapse, of Soviet rural policy-making from the 1950s onwards. Hewould also have learned something new from it too, something to add to, and rendereven more prescient and sophisticated, his original thesis. He would have learned that, asa society becomes ever more complex, it not only generates political, social and economicproblems which are less and less amenable to coercive solution, it also creates more and moregroups of people who both want, and feel qualified, to have a say in intellectually formulating whatthose ‘problems’ are, and (thus) to influence how they should be ‘solved’. As Melvin says in theexcellent conclusion to his study, ‘most writers on policy issues in the Soviet Union haveassumed that problems are fixed or objective . . . however . . . problems are not objectiveentities in their own right “out there” . . . Rather problems are the product of imposingcertain “frames of reference” on reality. Understanding an infinitely complex reality isessentially a process of interpretation in which certain parts of reality are given signifi-cance while others are ignored . . . The foci of Soviet problem agendas were not theresults of indisputable external realities but were instead deeply influenced by the socio-economic, cultural and political organization of Soviet society and polity which served todirect attention down some avenues and away from others’ (pp. 185 –8).

And as he shows, in the USSR between the early 1960s and the 1980s, the ‘avenues’down which the rural policy-making agenda were ‘directed’ not only ‘shifted’ markedly,that ‘shift’ was one made increasingly under the influence of intellectual and professionalgroups outside the Communist Party (human geographers, agrarian economists andsociologists and even a ‘ruralist’ literary intelligentsia). Those groups were never able tomake rural policy (that power remained formally, and to a large degree substantively, inthe hands of the Party) but they were able to influence it profoundly through, in effect,colonizing the thinking of leading Party figures, including Gorbachev, about what theSoviet Union’s ‘rural problem’ was and how (therefore) it might be ‘solved’.

As a result, as Melvin also brilliantly shows, the increasing ideological divergencesamong such ‘expert’ groups, both about the nature of ‘the problem’ and about whetherthe state could solve it (or only exacerbate it), were in their turn reflected in divergencesbetween different individuals and regional groupings within the Party, divergenceswhich resulted in the growing fragmentation (and ultimate collapse) of any coherent‘Soviet’ rural policy-making by the early 1980s, several years before the ending of theUSSR itself.

In short then and to repeat, Neil Melvin’s book is a fine case study of the intellectualcolonization of the Communist Party of the USSR by broader social groupings, group-ings which it had originally (in the early 1960s) created, and intended simply as utilitariantools of its own narrow policy agenda, but which by the 1980s had in effect exploded thatagenda. They had done so through a long process of criticism, criticism which began inthe 1960s in the spirit of a technocratic ‘improvement’ of policy ‘formulation’ and ‘imple-mentation’, but which, from the mid-1970s, became slowly, but ineluctably, ever morequestioning of the fundamental premises of that policy, and, indeed, of the state’s capacityto carry out any effective or desirable policy of rural transformation at all.

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Obviously, such a case study of Soviet policy-making raises far broader questions(about the very nature of the later Soviet Union as a society and polity), and Neil Melvinis very aware that it does. Is his study, for example, to be conceived as sketching, how-ever partially, the growth of a state-independent ‘civil society’ in the Soviet Union? Moregenerally, what light does it shed on dominant Western conceptions of state–societyrelations in the Soviet Union? What can it tell us about the mistakes made by thoseinnumerable Western ‘Sovietologists’ who persistently underestimated and downplayedthe extent and depth of political change being wrought by Gorbachev, a downplayingwhich lasted almost up to the moment that he signed the USSR out of existence? Stillfurther, what light can Melvin’s study shed on what appear (in retrospect) to have beenthe fundamentally distorted conceptions of the Soviet Communist Party (and of the stateit superintended) held by many Soviet citizens themselves, including – perhaps especially –those who were most fiercely critical of both? (So that such domestic critics were almostas taken aback by its collapse as any Western theorist of Soviet ‘totalitarianism’.)

The light it sheds on all these things is as follows, I think. The Soviet Union wasa polity which worked in such a fashion that the social ‘embeddedness’ of state andparty cadres in the wider society over which they ruled (and the many implications ofthat embeddedness) was continuously and systematically underestimated by many Sovietpeople – including (perhaps especially) by the ‘para-statal’ professionals and intellectualswho became the state and party’s most vociferous critics. That is to say (and to go back toMelvin’s specific study), the rural sociologists and human geographers who succeeded,eventually, in colonizing, and confusing, Communist Party thinking and policy-making onrural Russia, had succeeded in doing this, long before they realized that they had done it.

But this is perfectly understandable. The secrecy that surrounded the lives and activi-ties (let alone the thoughts and feelings) of senior party and state officials, the persistent,and highly coloured, culture of rumour and gossip about such people that that verysecrecy produced, all these things occluded any remotely accurate popular perception ofthe Soviet Union’s ruling elite. That is, the bulk of the citizens they superintended simplydid not grasp (or if they did grasp did not internalize) that their leaders were a group ofRussian (and a few other ethnic) people living in ‘the same’ society as they, reading ‘thesame’ newspapers, journals and even (yes) samizdat books, perhaps even listening to theBBC World Service and Radio Free Europe, and enjoying the same ‘semi-tolerated’counter-cultural music and art as their critics. And to return to the subject of Melvin’sbook and this review, some probably had contacts and relatives who experienced theeffects of ‘rural policy-making’ first hand, who were not overly impressed, and madetheir dislike (or at least their qualms) known, directly or indirectly, to the powerful oneswith whom they were connected. In short, the policy-making elite of the 1960s to 1980sSoviet Union was in a position (a sociological and cultural position) where ‘outside’intellectual and cultural influences could reach it much more easily and effectively than many ofthe progenitors of those influences imagined. In short, the Soviet Union, or at least a certainpart of it, was much more a single universe of ideas than most (than any?) of the participantsin that universe imagined. And as such it was, by the 1980s, already a sort of limping‘quasi-democracy’ or, perhaps better, a suffocated ‘proto-democracy’.

Therefore it could only become – or even begin to become – a real democracy when,among other things, the wall of secrecy that had rendered the ruled significantly (in factever more) deluded about their rulers was removed, and a single universe of ideas andinfluences, previously present but unknown, became plainly open to view. Which reallycomes down to saying that the end of Communist Party rule was the prerequisite ofRussia becoming subjectively, as well as objectively, a single society. For by the time the USSR

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collapsed, the only thing that remained of the party’s original raison d’etre – its supposedideological omnipotence and omniscience – was a chronic, and crippling, lack of trans-parency, a wall of silence and secrecy behind which there lurked no ideological vision atall, in fact nothing except confusion and uncertainty.

These are the kind of ideas to which Neil Melvin’s fine book leads one. And they arereally nothing more than intimations of the kind of revisionist scholarship on the laterdecades of the Soviet Union which will, I feel sure, become more and more widespreadover time, and to which this beautifully researched and well-written little book will havemade an honoured early contribution.

MERLE L. BOWENStrategic Women and Gainful Men: Gender, Land and Natural Resources in Different RuralContexts in Mozambique, by Rachel Waterhouse and Carin Vijfhuizen, eds. Maputo: LandStudies Unit, Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering, University of EduardoMondlane. 2001. Pp. 248. No price. No ISBN number.

An ongoing and hotly contested debate in Mozambique and in other southern Africancountries is over how best to promote ‘growth with equity’ in the agricultural sector. Thequestion of equal rights and benefits of women is central to the debate, as women consti-tute the majority of the work force in agriculture, especially in domestic production. In anattempt to protect peasant (or smallholder) rights while encouraging outside investment,the Mozambican government passed a new land law in 1997 and, later, approved itsregulations and a technical annex on delimiting community land. Although the state stillowns the land and it cannot be sold or mortgaged, individuals and communities havethe right to occupy their land and gain a title document, and then to use the land, developit and even rent it out. Women have equal rights to men: they can inherit and obtaintitles to land. Customary norms and practices are recognized as long as they respect thenational Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. On the onehand, Mozambique’s new land legislation has been praised as exemplary, in its attempt toprotect peasant land rights and guarantee the equal status of women. On the other hand,the legislation has been criticized for its unmitigated acceptance of neo-liberal growththeory, including the gendered premises by which it is informed.

This volume seeks to contribute to the debate by exploring women’s and men’s rela-tionships to the land and other natural resources, specifically the ways in which they useand benefit from – or are impeded from benefiting from – their land and their labour. Theeditors are concerned primarily with rural women’s strategies for access, use, control andbenefit from land and other agricultural resources – an issue overlooked in the literature.In particular, they seek to understand how rural women respond to and overcome theconstraints they face. Contrary to studies on women’s land and agricultural resourcerights that portray women either as passive victims of patriarchal structures or as freeagents unhampered by gendered power relations, this volume provides a nuanced pictureof women as socially differentiated strategic actors, with various needs and opportunities.

The first two chapters set out the research questions and theoretical framework.In their introductory chapter, editors Rachel Waterhouse and Carin Vijfhuizen contendthat Mozambique’s new land law is based on three key assumptions, which warrant

Merle L. Bowen, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 702S. Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. e-mail: bowen@uiuc.edu

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investigation: (1) women lack adequate land rights under discriminatory customary laws;(2) the law, implemented by the state, can and will guarantee equal rights and improveliving standards for rural women; and (3) if women have secure tenure rights over landthey will improve their position through more efficient production. In this vein, BridgetO’Laughlin explores the gendered premises of neo-liberal growth theory by explicitlylinking the debate on rural poverty and gendered forms of land tenure and the debate overwhich forms of land tenure are most appropriate for economic growth in Chapter 2. Herdiscussion is central to the volume’s thesis. She argues that the neo-liberal agenda cannotcome to terms with the problematic relationship between rural poverty and economicgrowth because it is based on implicit and gendered assumptions about both labour andclass through which land is used and worked.

Subsequent chapters explore some of the issues around which the three assumptionsthat underlay the new land law are made. Seven contributors present case studies investi-gating the livelihoods and strategies of women and men in different locations and set-tings. The experiences from the field show that customary tenure systems vary widely.Not surprisingly, where patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritance predominate (e.g.in the South and parts of the Centre) these are often biased in favour of men. Despite this,Waterhouse argues that women have important rights to land under customary systems,which are flexible and adaptable. Her case study in Maputo Province shows that womenalso use a wide range of relationships and networks to make claims on land. Similarly, thecomplexity of claims over land and trees in northern Zambezia Province, influenced byboth patrilineal and matrilineal inheritance patterns, leads Anne Pitcher and Scott Kloeck-Jenson to warn against simplistic assumptions that obscure women’s negotiating power,the flexibility of customary tenure arrangements and opportunities for change. Theyshow that although residence is predominantly patrilocal, many women inherit land andare also able to make a variety of claims over land and trees through their labour con-tributions. In the different context of a matrilineal society and in an area in NampulaProvince where, at this point, there is no serious competition for land, Signe Arnfred alsohighlights the flexibility of local land tenure arrangements. In another patrilineal settingin central Mozambique, and in a context of increasing pressure on the land, Cesar Tique’sstudy shows that women’s lack of mobility means their land is more vulnerable to ex-haustion than that farmed by men, while men are better able to access fresh and fertileland. With more tenuous rights than men, under a patrilineal inheritance regime, womenare further afraid to leave their land fallow in case their claim to that land should bechallenged.

Some of the chapters raise a concern that women are becoming less secure on the landas, in some instances, tenure arrangements seem to be shifting from matrilocal to patrilocalresidence. The context in which customary rules operate is changing Arnfred asserts, asland comes to be valued as a scarce and/or marketable resource. These changes in thecontext for and the use of customary rules often signify the erosion of important rightsfor women, concerning both land and labour. Yet the shift from matrilocal to patrilocaldoes not always lead to less security for women. In Cabo Delgado Province, as JosefinaDaniel suggests, the long-term trend toward patrilineal inheritance does not seem to beundermining women’s claims to the land. Women use a variety of channels, includingclaims as daughters and wives, to access the fertile lowlands. The chapters show thatwithin the broad frameworks for organizing customary tenure, all types of negotiationsgo on, making generalizations difficult.

Several case studies challenge the assumption that the law can and will guarantee equalrights and improve living standards for rural women. A major problem is that the vast

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majority of rural women presently lack the financial capacity, time or bureaucratic know-how required to apply independently for individual land titles from the state. Further-more, state ‘guarantees’ are compromised by a number of problems that have to do withambiguities in the law and its implementation. Occupation rights apply to land occupiedfor ‘10 years or more, in good faith’. The ‘10 years’ clause is highly problematic forwomen in patrilocal communities. The issue of what constitutes ‘good faith’ can also besuperseded by an unspecified ‘public interest’, determined by the state. Indeed, in NiassaProvince, Carla Braga argues that land tenure security for local people is threatenedthrough state interventions which claim to protect peasant lands rights and gender equality.The state has reallocated land to the South African-led Mosagrius project to develop privatecommercial agriculture at the expense of national small-scale farmers.

In addition to individual titles, the recent legislation permits local communities toapply for collective land titles and to participate in managing community resources.In theory, women as well as men can play an active part on local management councils.Yet several of the chapters illustrate that women can easily be excluded and ignored, ashas been the case with the Mosagrius project, the Farmers Associations, the IrrigationManagement Boards, and the agricultural extension schemes set up by the NGOs.

Acquiring formal entitlement to the land through projects or associations may havesome benefits, since the state is not likely to relocate that land. Yet as Vijfhuizen’s chapteron the Massaca irrigation scheme shows, holding titles is not a sufficient defence againstlandlessness. Instead, land tenure security for women or other registered plot holdersdepends on the individual’s capacity to meet the conditions of the irrigated project.

Overall, this is a highly readable book that adds to a rich, but limited body of existingwork that explores gender in relation to land and other resource rights in post-warMozambique. All of the chapters are written in an accessible style and the case study chaptersare densely packed with empirical material. They feature abundant detail and complexexplanations, exploring key concepts laid out in the introductory chapter, such as landtenure security, use and control rights, matrilineal and patrilineal descent systems, socialvalues and core values, and livelihood. The collection could be stronger if some of thecase studies combined qualitative and quantitative data to measure women’s access to andbenefits from resources. Still, the essays are coherent, since each of the cases is exploredwithin the same theoretical framework. Gender can no longer be ignored in studies onaccess to land and other natural resources in Africa.

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