Norman Long

Small Product, Big Issues: Value Contestations and Cultural Identities in Cross-border Commodity Networks

This article follows the trajectory of maize husks from their production sites in rural Western Mexico to diverse consumption and commercialization locales both within the country and in the United States, showing how the uses and meanings of specific products are continuously reassembled and transformed within the livelihoods and social networks of Mexicans living in a transnational world. By highlighting the multiplicities and ambiguities of social value and cultural identities implicit in the workings of commodity chains and globalization processes, the study leads to a questioning of commodity-chain analysis. It also challenges theories of cultural production and circulation based on a unified and hierarchical system of value.

Equivocations on knowledge systems theory: an actor-oriented critique.

Knowledge systems theory, in our view, tends to obscure rather than illuminate an understanding of the fundamentals of knowledge processes in society. This tendency occurs primarily because both the theory, and the methodologies that are derived from it, fail to recognize that knowledge processes are social processes, and thereby that knowledge itself has to be envisaged as a social construction. As a result of this omission, knowledge systems theory and methodology can only deal poorly with issues of power and social conflict, and, at the same time, tend to make use of several inappropriate teleological and reifying notions. According to our view, the understanding of knowledge processes will benefit greatly from a more actor-oriented perspective. In such an approach, emphasis is accorded to human agency and the concept of multiple knowledge networks. Central purposes of actor-oriented methodologies then, are to clarify how actors attempt to create space for their own ‘projects’ and to determine which elements contribute to or impede the successful creation of such space for maneuver.

Rural Transformations and Development – China in Context

This unique book explores the varied perspectives on contemporary processes of rural transformation and policy intervention in China. The expert contributors combine a critical review of current theoretical viewpoints and global debates with a series of case studies that document the specificities of China’s pathways to change. Central issues focus on the dynamics of state–peasant encounters; the diversification of labour and livelihoods; out-migration and the blurring of rural and urban scenarios; the significance of issues of ‘value’ and ‘capital’ and their gender implications; land ownership and sustainable resource management; struggles between administrative cadres and local actors; and the dilemmas of ‘participatory’ development.