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A widespread restructuring is currently taking place in Latin American agriculture, in the context of a broader transition towards an export-geared-cum-free-market growth strategy. Two forces are inducing these changes. The first is the radical shift that has been occurring for more than two decades in the international economic and political orders as a result of opposing trends, one leading to increased globalization of markets, the other to emergence of new trading blocs. The second concerns the restructuring of production and financial adjustments that multilateral agencies and the international banking system are imposing on Latin America as a result of the current debt crisis. Social scientists used to regard agrarian transitions as something linked to the remote past. In Latin America, in particular, the period 1930-50 has frequently been cited as the agrarian transition, i.e. the juncture when agriculture was restructured to cope with the inwardly oriented industrialization process. In this article, however, a longer perspective of agrarian transitions is adopted. The article attempts to develop a synthesis and reinterpretation of the mass of evidence on Latin America's agrarian transitions.

This article focuses on the debate on the rural culture. Rural culture in its historical guise is a complex of empirical experience constructs which are significantly opposed to those dangerous and detrimental traits of industrial culture. On close inspection, however, rural/agrarian/land culture leaves us with an equivocal impression of a way of life which became absolete in the wake of industrialization. In terms of ethnography and history it can be described as a registrative kind of culture, and it can still be found even amidst industrial society, contributing to a situation of conflicting value systems. Behavioral patterns emanating from both rural and industrial culture origins blend in regionally distinct stocks of knowledge of individuals or groups. The share of rural culture in these regional social identities is embodied in traditional reproductive behavior, that is to say it is determined by the demands of rural and largely agricultural family households. As long as those households remained, their reproductive needs controlled petty commodity production in the manner of rural culture. But when the mode of production begins to follow industrial norms, rural culture as a descriptive construct was bound to disappear. Governments and society face agricultural producers with a mass of contradictory demands. Consequently, farming and rural populations become extremely confused and feel helpless.

Disaggregation of farming regions, conditions, and production systems is necessary to unravel the current status of family labor farms in the U.S. and their future in competition with capitalist agriculture. The article draws on a number of themes in the literature on the U.S. agriculture, industrial structure, household economics, economic anthropology and agricultural economics to suggest that the family farm persists in many instances due to economic competitiveness. This competitiveness derives from the technical aspects of agricultural production and its compatibility with certain organizational and operational aspects of the family farm. Large scale production, whether organized as state farms in the Soviet Union, large communes in China or industrial capitalist farms in the United States, has experienced managerial diseconomies in many spheres of agriculture. The present analysis contrasts these features of agricultural production with features of industrial production as one seeks to understand, in essence, why agriculture has not gone the way of the automobile.

This article discusses on the topics commercialization of agriculture and commoditization of production. Writers in different schools' of sociology are often unfamiliar with one another's work even where the problematic is similar, a tendency encouraged by the diverse and conflict-ridden classical heritage of the discipline. This is also true for the case of the commercialization and commoditization literatures. At present, however, a dialogue has emerged between the neo-Marxist and an emergent neo-Weberian tradition in the discipline of the sociology. The dialogue is in part a response to the impasse created by the crisis in neo-Marxist sociology, a crisis that has been extended to neo-Marxist sociology of development. Modernization theorists tended to identify themselves with the state and its development efforts, without attention to the self-interested aspect of states or of the state as an organization of domination. Marxist approaches, by reducing everything to class or economics, took in the last analysis an instrumentalist view of the state, the major locus of intervention of the modernization literature.

This article is concerned with the slow erosion of traditional legal and social practices under the impact of industrialisation and of modernisation of farming in a rural district of Northern Catalonia (Spain) in the period following the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In the early 1940's the economy of the area was agrarian in character and the stem family, tied to a system of impartible inheritance, was the typical domestic and residential arrangement. When in the early 1960's industrialisation set in and many peasants left their farmsteads to migrate to town in search of new economic opportunities, family form was bound to change. Through a survey of over 500 cases of marriage, the paper examines the process of family transformation stressing the resilience of the stem family which, although a decaying institution in the modern conditions, has adapted well to the new situation both in the farming and the urban area of the rural district, in the absence of legal regulations specifically designed to update it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agrotechnical progress tends to be valued in terms of economic rationality of industrialized countries. It expresses a certain mode of using nature and natural resources. During the past two centuries mechanization has been implemented through industrialization and therefore both terms have become confused with one another. In order to understand the problem of agrotechnical progress in LDC's, we must start by understanding their relation to nature and agricultural production. Our terminological bias in yields and income impedes us from accurate interpretations. A model to collect relevant data for motivation is presented, to be used in terms of energy distribution and emancipation from natural and social constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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