Tradition et modernisation des economies rurales: Asie-Afrique-Amerique latine: Melanges en l'honneur de Gilbert Etienne (review)

This "Festschrift" honors Gilbert Etienne, upon his retirement at the Geneva Institute of Graduate International Studies. Professor Etienne, a Swiss citizen, is well known both in and outside the French-speaking world for his many studies on economic development, and particularly on agriculture.

The editors, his former students and now colleagues, sketch the engaging personality of Etienne. He is seen as intellectually curious and indomitable in his search for concrete evidence through the investigation of micro-communities in the countryside (over the decades, for example, he has been visiting Khandoï, a village in Uttar Pradesh). And he is a man of strong convictions who is "viscerally nonconformist," whether he is challenging the currently prevailing neoclassical paradigm—which in its uncomprompromising variety expects market forces alone, without strong government involvement, to be capable of ensuring sustained agricultural progress—or when he questions the convictions of naive fellow travelers in the sixties, who thought that Mao Zedong's breathtaking initiatives heralded the beginning of a definitive era of human progress. These are eminent qualities that also explain Etienne's nondogmatic positions and his sense of relativism—for example, when he takes into consideration the specific features of a given society and its historical background.

Etienne's interests and fieldwork have brought him to a great many countries over the span of his forty-year career, but his main involvement has been with India. This Festschrift transcends any particular geographical focus and assembles contributions by colleagues and friends that concern all regions of the world, including a number of African and South American countries.

Such a wide scope makes it almost impossible to discern the essential findings in this collection of essays. Accordingly, in the concluding chapter, the editors have centered on the basic features of "Etienne thought." They mention his emphasis on technological factors, paying special attention to his references to irrigation and his predilection for tube wells. Etienne stresses that each technological system, even if primitive, has its own rationality within its specific environment, but at some point reaches limits.

Only two out of the sixteen contributions deal with the Chinese world. This is perhaps regrettable, as Etienne has written fairly extensively about China, often in a comparative framework. For example, he has written "La voie chinoise: La longue marche de l'économie" (1972), "La Chine fait ses comptes" (1982), and, more recently, "Chine-Inde: Le match du siècle" (1998). The very enunciation of these titles also suggests that Etienne, while focusing on the agricultural scene, likes to take a broad view of the economy and of societal evolution.

In one essay here, titled "Rural China: The Resilience of the Rural Economy," the well-known expert on Chinese agriculture Claude Aubert has updated a 1993 article for the review Historiens et Géographes, in which he documents the reemergence of traditional rural communities, with their voluntary ties of mutual help between peasant families, after an interlude of more than twenty years of collectivization (1955-1979). The people's communes, even after the modernizing efforts of pragmatists like Liu Shaoqi end Deng Xiaoping in the early sixties, had re-centered economic activity on the teams, stifled initiative, and disrupted what had once been a more harmonious social arrangement. Aubert also relates the upswing in agricultural output in the wake of Dengist reforms to the impressive growth of rural industry, but without expanding on the latter. In an interesting excursion into sociology, he refutes the criticisms currently being leveled against the Chinese peasantry for their propensity to devote their supplemental incomes to housing and sumptuary outlays for funerals and marriages; he maintains that these expenditures are rational, in that expanded housing facilities attract more suitable daughters-in-law and that banquets help to establish "guanxi" links...