Back	Plants, Animals, and People. Agropastoral Systems Research
	edited by Constance M. McCorkle Small Ruminant Collaborative Research and Support Program Westview Press, Boulder 1992

Foreword

Michael F. Nolan

The responsibility for writing the Foreword generally falls to a presumably neutral outsider who is expected to provide an aura of external legitimization. This Foreword departs from that model significantly, however. The author is in many ways the consummate "insider," having served as principal investigator for the Sociology Project of the Small Ruminant Collaborative Research Support Program (SR-CRSP) since its inception in 1978. This may lay my comments open to charges of being self-serving and biased; but it also affords them a unique vantage point.

In 1977 when my colleagues and I first encountered the things we've come to know as CRSPS, and specifically the Small Ruminant CRSP, my initial reaction was bewilderment. "What on earth," I remember thinking, "would sociologists be able to contribute to a program like that?" Interestingly, In 1990 this continues to be a common question among many of my social science colleagues (not to mention biological scientists) whenever the subject of the SRCRSP is raised.

In a sense this book constitutes the best possible answer to that question. The volume offers a deliberate sampling of the products of over ten years' effort. It reflects the quality output, the wide range of research topics, and the global span of the SR-CRSP Sociology Project -the only one to have worked in all five of the program's host countries. This broad scope has allowed the project to tackle not only issues specific to a given location but also subjects that span multiple sites. Both perspectives are represented in the chapters that follow.

Over the past decade, two overarching themes have emerged in the work of the SR-CRSP Sociology Project. First, the project has given considerable attention to piecing together the puzzle of how livestock (especially small ruminants) interface with crops and people in a farming systems context. The chapters by Perevolotsky, Primov, and Mendes and Narjisse are good examples of how this theme was developed in Peru, Brazil, and Morocco, respectively. A prominent subtheme has been the social organization of SR production. This focus is exemplified in the chapters by McCorkle and Fernández, who look at how families and communities organize themselves to meet the unique labor demands of livestock production in conjunction with crop production.

Indeed, "agropastoralism" -the complex blending of crops and livestock in a farming system- is the unifying thread running throughout all these analyses. Early on we determined that agropastoral production systems are far more common than " pure pastoralism." Moreover, relatively little research had been done to understand the features of such systems. Thus, we choose to emphasize them in our work.

The second major focus of the Sociology Project has been the examination of how technology "fits" into the social environment. Assessment of technology impacts on different biosocial groups such as women, evaluation of the effects of long term trends on the current environment (see, e.g., the chapters by Mbabu and Conelly), and models for disseminating new technology are key topics here. In programs like the SR-CRSP, sociologists have a special responsibility to help ensure that people's lives will not be worsened by the technology being developed. In that sense, off-station/on-farm research is a critical part of the program's overall effort. In addition, social scientists must also function as constructive team members; as such, they must be prepared to make positive recommendations concerning how to "package" technology so as to maximize its benefit to the target group. Chapters 7 through 11 in this volume present good examples of how we have tackled these tasks.

The road traveled to reach the point where a volume like this seemed both desirable and feasible has not always been easy. Elsewhere, we have reflected on the dilemmas that confront sociologists and anthropologists who participate in programs like the SR-CRSP (The Social Sciences in International Agricultural Research: Lessons from the CRSPS, C. M. McCorkle, ed., 1989). Suffice it to say that reconciling programmatic "needs" with disciplinary "respectability" has not always been easy. The reader will no doubt detect different styles of compromise in the research topics chosen and in the approaches taken to presenting research results. We believe, however, that the end result will be considered "good" sociology/anthropology by our disciplinary colleagues while also being of use to our colleagues in the biological sciences. I think all these groups will find this book interesting reading.

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