This chapter is organised in two parts. The first part is a review of the literature on women and agriculture. The second part sets forth the specific theoretical orientation of this study. This theoretical framework is meant to situate the study in its broader socio-economic context.
Previous research on Babukusu has been carried out on a number of issues pertaining to socio-eonomic development and change. Such issues include self-interest and corruption (Hamer 1981), co-operative societies and socio-economic development (Ogutu 1985), local leadership (de Wolf 1977) agricultural modernisation (Buch-hansen and Kieler 1983), biological diversity and innovation (Juma 1989), rural poverty and impoverishment (Lavrijsen 1984) as well as social, economic, and political organisations and religious beliefs (Wagner 1970).
Unfortunately, none of these studies took women as the focus of analysis. The only recent exception is Nasimiyu (1985) in which the author looks at the traditional roles of women in the Bukusu economy up to the end of the nineteenth century. However, even this particular study did not cover the issues dealt with in the present study.
The dearth of data on women has also been noted by recent ethnographers working in other African societies as well as in other Third World countries (Dwyer and Bruce 1988). Specifically, contemporary studies have tried to question the conventional "invisibility" of women in the ethnographic literature as well as to analyse how women have been affected by changes in their own communities (Fapohunda 1988; Guyer 1988; Munachonga 1988; Oboler 1985). Many of these studies maintain that the subordination of women is a result of the capitalist organisation of production and use of labour. It is argued that capitalism leads to the separation between production and reproduction and, secondly, there is always a mutual alliance and accommodation between capitalism and patriarchy which perennially leads to women being confined to the home compound and to inferior jobs if employed in the formal sector. In other words, the daily lives of women in many ethnographic contexts is overly dominated by men in the form of fathers, brothers, husbands, employers and other authority figures in the community (Masini and Stratigos 1991).
Arguing from a socio-historical perspective, Boserup (1970) stresses that colonialism was solely responsible for undermining the traditional roles of women in food production. In traditional societies, and within marital dyads, all productive and reproductive activities were culturally regulated and specified under a commensurate system of division of labour by gender. Colonialism led to a breakdown of this system. First, men out-migrated from the rural areas to work on European farms and in the major urban centres, leaving women behind to care for the family and family production single-handedly. Second, cash crops and modern agricultural methods were introduced and the onus of production and provision of labour for these new crops fell on women. Thus, women and their children produced food crops and engaged in cash cropping, sometimes to supplement the meagre wages of their employed spouses (UN 1986; Mead 1976; Boserup 1970; Nelson 1979, Ehlers 1983). The outcome was an unwanted "overload" for women.
Many of the other socio-historical studies have specifically focused on the inter-linkages between women and development. Such studies have demonstrated that very few development projects have given genuine consideration to the total well-being of women or, specifically, to the role of women in food production. In fact, the general belief prevailing now among many social scientists is the fact that until the participation of women in agriculture is duly and properly recognised, the production of food crops will still remain stagnated (Russo et al. 1989). For example, Fortmann (1981:205) states that: "agricultural development policies seem to proceed from the assumption that either agricultural producers are all male or the sex of producers is not a relevant factor... Women are seen as reproducers and consumers of both goods and social services. But their labour and their production are for all intent and purpose invisible."
It has been estimated that a majority (80%) of the direct beneficiaries and active participants in subsistence agriculture are males. Similarly, 90% of beneficiaries in commercial and industrial agriculture are men. The benefits which men enjoy at the expense of the women include education, training, decision-making, control of resources as well as access to credit facilities (ILO 1984; Beneria 1981; Traore 1984; Nelson 1979; UN 1985a). These studies therefore indicate that the needs and roles which women represent in the overall economy are masked and never addressed by development and policy makers. According to the United Nations, denying women access to resources such as land, education and services, ill-equips them to cope better in the economic sector and this will consequently lead to poverty in many households (United Nations Office at Vienna 1991). Furthermore, we cannot hope to fully comprehend the extent of economic and social changes in society unless specific attention is paid to the status and role of women in their marital dyads as well as in the wider society.
Nonetheless, a few development schemes have attempted to alleviate the domestic plight and drudgery of women. Such projects were aimed at developing those areas of life which are stereotypically considered to be the world or domain of women, for example, fetching water, providing fuel, processing, producing and storing of food. Even in such women-dominated activities it is manifested that the outcome has really been disadvantageous. Instead of benefiting women, both men and machines have taken over the traditional roles of women without providing them with alternate and viable productive roles (UN 1985b). For instance, men took over fish smoking and marketing in Senegal, South Asia, Sierra Leone, and Gambia (ILO 1984; Boulding 1981, Tinker 1981; Papanek 1981; Stevens 1984; UN 1985b); and handicraft production in San Pedro, Sacatepequez, Guatemala (Ehlers 1983). In some other cases, technological innovations aimed at alleviating the drudgery of women's work have instead aggravated the problems. For example, an attempt at improving chicken-rearing in Zaire made women go to the river more times than they had been doing before (Nelson 1979). In other cases, technological innovations and economic adjustment policies have often displaced women from the workforce (United Nations Office at Vienna 1991).
Alternatively, where such schemes have successfully integrated women, it has only been the urban and elite who have benefited. The majority of rural women, "poorest of the poor" (UN 1985a:18), have had "disbenefits" (Nelson 1979) and their situations actually worsened. In considering the situation of rural women in Bangladesh, Abdullah and Zeidenstein (1982:3) recommend that: "programs directed towards women cannot accomplish their objective unless they address the practices of women, recognising what women want ... Nor, obviously, can they accomplish their objectives unless women directly participate in the direction the program will take."
The United Nations Development Fund (UN 1985a:7), on its part, assessed the situation of rural women in Third World Countries and concluded that there is a dire: "need to provide women with "bridges" from their subsistence/reproductive activities to a more conscious and controlled participation in the mainstream of their societies." One of these "bridges" is the support of existing, or creation of new, opportunities that can lead to the self-reliance and self-employment of women in impoverished rural areas. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, employment "... embraces, for the most part, income-raising group activities, including clothing factories, animal husbandry, pottery production, smoking and marketing of fish, handicrafts production and other small-scale industrial activities" (UN 1985a:19).
The theory which was used in this study is delocalization. Delocalization from a social systems perspective or ecological approach has proved to be a useful instrument for describing different transformation processes or impacts of "modernisation" on small-scale societies. That is to say, the construct is germane for an analysis of macro-level and micro-level interactions of modern with traditional, showing the general processes of socio-cultural change and the nature of integration of systems (see Ortner 1984; Poggie, J. Jr. et al. 1992; Stonich 1992; Poggie and Lynch 1974). This concept was coined by Pelto (1973) in his original ethnographic study of the Skolt Saami (formerly Skolt Lapps) of north-eastern Finland. He used the term to refer to a wide range of interrelated processes which incorporate small-scale (micro-level) societies into the capitalist systems and whose local manifestations are a loss of autonomy for the affected local system. He writes (p. 166): "de-localization summarizes in a single term a large number of interrelated processes that make up the main elements of modernization all over the world particularly in previously non-industrialized (and non-Westernized) societies."
Pelto's concern was to describe the impact of the adoption of the snowmobile in the management of reindeer herds. He shows how the Skolt Saami shifted their production processes of reindeer herding from the local autonomous sources (humans and reindeer sleds) to a dependence on outside sources (gasoline-powered snowmobiles). One concomitant result was that the entire Skolt Saami population was pushed "sharply into the direction of cash dependency and debt" (p. 137). Consequently, there developed social stratification and socio-eocnomic inequalities in a society that had otherwise been largely egalitarian in nature.
This local dependence on the outside world has been described as "economic delocalization", a term which Poggie and Lynch (1974) extended to the economic realm and defined it as: "a chain of complex events that results when food, energy resources, and services which had formerly been provided within the local setting are transferred into market exchange commodities, most of which originate form outside the local area" (In Kilbride 1992:187-188).
Delocalization recognises that all members in a household are affected by processes of change. The processes are at times gradual while at other times they are sudden but nevertheless they affect all members of given households. In other words, delocalization affects and brings about profound changes in the economic, social and cultural matrix of small socio-political units.
According to Kilbride and Kilbride (1990) and Kilbride (1992), there are now in Kenya, for example, several modern forms of delocalization taking place because of the "ever-increasing connectedness and interdependency" (Bernard and Pelto, 1987) of the local human systems in Kenya to the supra-community or global systems (see also Poggie, DeWalt and Dressler 1992; Stonich 1992; DeWalt and Dewalt 1992).
Economic delocalization is one of these new forms and it has had a profound effect on "family structure and female power" (Kilbride and Kilbride 1990:13). Indeed, women, for example, in Bukusu society can never hope to achieve social power and status through their agricultural labour and other traditional tasks ascribed to them because of economic delocalization.
Delocalization was thus significant for this project since it emphasises the loss of local autonomy (resources), dependence on imported ideologies and technologies and lastly, transformation of society. And for the study region, all these resulted when the small-scale and undifferentiated world of Babukusu was incorporated into the world economy from the end of the nineteenth century with the coming of colonialism. It was, therefore, hoped that the theory of delocalization could be used to investigate the role of women in food production as well as the impact of this incorporation and the loss of independence in Bokoli location.
