Village Elites Research Articles

Social capital and what it represents: the experience of the ultra‐poor in Bangladesh

The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) engaged in an experiment to build social capital for the ultra poor in rural Bangladesh by fostering linkages between members of their development programme, the Targeting Ultra Poor (TUP), with members of the village elite, known as the Gram Shahayak Committee (GSC). This paper assesses the quality of these social ties through two theoretical lenses: the conceptualisations of Robert Putnam and those of Pierre Bourdieu. It also draws upon primary research gathered in Holholiya and Boragari, two villages where the TUP and the GSC have been operating for several years. The findings illustrate that BRAC did provide a vehicle through which new forms of social capital were created for the extreme poor. However, another reality highlights that such ties are laden with relationships of dependency. The poor also are not passive victims within a hierarchical system, as both theorists suggest, but exert agency and show defiance in subversive ways.

Decrypting E‐Governance: Narratives, Power play and Participation in the Gyandoot Intranet

AbstractThe central themes addressed in this paper relate to the critique of the notion of e‐governance as an essentially administrative innovation facilitated by ICTs. It argues the need to recognize e‐governance as a social process involving not only attitudinal change and transformation of traditional forms of governmentality, but also as a contested arena of social forces shaping the trajectory of the evolution of this technocratic innovation.The paper is based on the experiences of the Gyandoot Intranet in Madhyapradesh, India. One of the critical issues that emerge in the context of exploring the interrelationship between technology and governance is the questioning of the assumption of the neutrality of technological processes enmeshed in the notion of e‐governance. Technical processes defining contours of e‐governance are embedded in the structures of power that reinforces the power relations that e‐governance is expected to eliminate. This is particularly obvious when scrutinizing the consequences of the introduction of ICT‐based administrative projects like Gyandoot in villages where the local managers play key roles in its implementation while benefitting from its public good.The study shows that the projects are often implemented with the active support and participation of village elites and their collaboration becomes a major aspect in the survival of the project. It discuses how the idea of ICT as an inherently liberating technology and e‐governance as a new way of transcending inept and inefficient bureaucratic systems which empowers ‘end‐users’ appears to be completely inaccurate in the rural setting. Moreover, despite the claims of active networking of people in Dhar made in behalf of Gyandoot, its ability to connect to multiple social and economic domains was found to be extremely limited and ostensibly mediated by the social power equations that enveloped its institutional setting.

Engaging elite support for the poorest? BRAC's Targeted Ultra Poor programme for rural women in Bangladesh

This article draws preliminary lessons from the experience of engaging village elites in support of a BRAC programme for ultra-poor women in rural Bangladesh. It describes the origins, aims, and operation of this programme, which provides comprehensive livelihood support and productive assets to the extreme poor. Based on field research in the rural north-west, the article examines the conditions under which elites can support interventions for the ultra-poor, and the risks and benefits of such engagement. It describes the impact of committees mandated to support ultra-poor programme participants, and attempts to understand the somewhat paradoxical success of this intervention. Conclusions and lessons from the experience involve revisiting assumptions that dominate scholarship and programmes relating to the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.

Serfdom and social capital in Bohemia and Russia

The ‘horizontal’ social capital generated by networks and communities is widely regarded as inherently antagonistic to ‘vertical’ hierarchies such as serfdom. This article examines this view using evidence from pre-Emancipation Bohemia and Russia. It finds that serf communes generated a substantial ‘social capital’ of shared norms, common information, and collective sanctions. But communal social capital was manipulated by village elites who collaborated with overlords in taxation, land regulation, and demographic control. This benefited communal oligarchies, but harmed ordinary serfs and the wider economy. Horizontal social capital and vertical hierarchies, the article demonstrates, can as easily collude as conflict.

BRAC - learning to reach health for all

Introduction BRAC (formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) was founded in response to the disaster of the 1971 War of Independence that created Bangladesh. Over 10 million people had fled the country seeking safety in India, and millions more had been displaced or killed in their homes. The founders of BRAC initiated relief work in the refugee camps and accompanied the refugees home on the trucks, boats and foot trails that led back to thousands of devastated villages. A new nation had to be built out of the ruins. From the outset, BRAC was located in rural areas, working with villagers to rebuild homes, and to re-establish farming, fishing and other livelihoods. At the same time, BRAC embarked on efforts to improve the fundamental determinants of well-being including health, nutrition, education and particularly the plight of women in a very traditional society. By concentrating on the most remote rural communities, BRAC was addressing a great unmet need that the new government could not possibly meet with its limited resources and experience. This situation allowed BRAC to develop models of development in collaboration with local communities, free from outside interference or control. Innovative approaches Innovation was critical to success in addressing such a range of needs with so few resources. The leadership of BRAC encouraged new approaches while constantly asking for proof of both impact and sustainability. Based on the daily meetings which took place each evening to share the experiences of the day, and the village gatherings in which plans and progress were discussed, BRAC critically examined and then documented its experiences in close collaboration with those it served. The results were in turn shared with those who provided funding for BRAC's efforts, enabling them to measure the impact of their support. Fund-raising became a matter of recording and disseminating the lessons of development. Traditional development models using outside expertise and workers rapidly gave way to close reliance on the efforts and wisdom of villagers themselves --the major and often only resource available. The importance and previous neglect of women in the development process led BRAC to focus increasingly on women and girls. Early efforts at village empowerment were all too often taken over by the village elite, excluding once again the poor and powerless; this fact eventually caused BRAC to focus its programmes exclusively on the landless. BRAC provided a protected space where the energies of people long suppressed by tradition and society could blossom and bear fruit; poor women organized and began to take control of their lives. Dialogue and receptivity to new ideas and approaches drove the agenda. Lets try it! was the response to suggestions. BRAC realized that it was vital to continue from the experiences gained by such an approach, the failures as well as the successes, and to find a way to evolve continuously. BRAC became known as a learning organization, plotting its course by analysing its own actions under close internal scrutiny. Soon, this de facto research and development approach was formalized by the establishment of the Research and Evaluation Division, whose role was to document, measure and assess the elements of each programme. The findings were then fed back to communities and workers to enable them to repair what didn't work, and develop further what had been shown to work well. The development community also profited from BRAC's introspection and documentation which over the years has become one of the hallmarks of BRAC's success. Health promotion Ill-health saps the strength of poor communities and retards their development. …

Shalish and the Role of Brac's Federation: Improving the Poor's Access to Justice

System of informal justice is a reality in all countries of the world - especially in developing countries. In Bangladesh as there is no formal administrative justice system at the village level, shalsih (informal justice system) plays vital role in providing justice to the people - especially to the poor. Village elite is treated as the judge or justice provider to the people. The main problem is that they over exercise and misuse their power to do this. Almost in all cases they provide biased justice. Therefore, BRAC as a National NGO strives to motivate poor to organize themselves through forming Federation to protest in one sense and make sure the equal justice to all the villagers in other sense. The findings show that Federation is getting lot of successes towards achieving their goal although they face lot of challenges in their way now and then and in future as well.

Transforming the State-Society Relationship from the Village in Post-Suharto Indonesia

It has been eight years since the fall of the Suharto's New Order regime. In parallel with the process of decentralization, the new legal framework for village government has been put in practice since 2001, which emphasizes the concepts of “diversity, participation, autonomy, democratization, and empowerment.” Much of the literature on political studies in post-Suharto Indonesia has focused on the theme of democratic decentralization, chiefly from the perspective of policymakers in Jakarta, and a disproportionate amount of attention has been paid to the technical aspects of the institutional design of democratic decentralization. Drawing on research carried out in a village of Bandung District, this paper examines to what extent the new legal framework has reorganized the old style of village government (in which power was centered on the village chief) by shedding light on the functions of some key village institutions.The policy changes with regard to village government codified in Law No. 22 1999 on Local Government marked a radical departure from “uniformity, demobilization, rationalization, monoloyalty, and depoliticization.” The most dramatic change in village government has been the establishment of the Village Representative Council (BPD), which replaced the defunct Village Consultative Assembly (LMD) under the New Order. Independent of the village chief, the BPD has prevented the concentration and overlap of power between the village chief and village officials. Moreover, the establishment of the BPD has diversified the backgrounds of the elected members, paving the way for the entry of new actors into village government.This paper also highlights two unexpected consequences of the institutional changes at the village level. First, despite its empowered position, the BPD is unable to function as a checks and balances system vis-à-vis the village chief. In response to the institutional changes, village elites have struck deals to protect their vested interests at the expense of the democratic functions of the new village-level institutions. As long as this consensus between the village executive and legislative branches is mutually respected, the two “democratic” institutions cannot achieve the stated objectives.Second, recruitment through examinations and elections has facilitated the emergence of a new type of village elites while creating hurdles for the traditional village elites in exercising influence in the formal political arena. During the New Order, village development subsides were dropped from the center to villages, which showed monoloyalty to Golkar during election time every five years. With the collapse of the New Order, which controlled villages through the vertical links between the state-bureaucracy-Golkar, villages must make proposals to obtain village development subsidies from the districts. With the changes in the political environment, villagers with practical knowledge and higher education are increasingly playing an important role in village government.Democracy in Indonesia has been discussed from various viewpoints. Seen against the state-society relationship, democracy in Indonesia must be built up from the village level, laying the foundation for democracy at the national level.

Converting women: gender and Protestant Christianity in colonial South India

With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, respectable community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a discourse of respectability, says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.

THE PATH TO PARADISE

The city of Palm Springs gained fame as an exclusive resort in the 1920s. Thereafter, the city elite became consumed with maintaining its reputation. Because public policies in Palm Springs increasingly re�ected the interests of local business, real estate, and village elites, social engineering and control over land use became the driving forces behind the city's political economy. Collaborating with local businessmen and attorneys, Palm Springs civic leaders persecuted their lower-income constituents who resided on the local Native American reservation . Attempting to dispossess the Indians of their tribal lands and erase any blighted neighborhoods that might degrade "the city beautiful," Palm Springs of�cials successfully removed the city's people of color and restructured the race and class con�guration of the city.

Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites

Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites

Agricultural Reforms and Economic Crisis: Their Effect on Work Motivations in a Rural Community of Buryatia1

AbstractAgricultural reforms in the village of Tory have resulted in three types of ‘private farms’: first, a ‘top-down’ measure to demonstrate accordance with government policy created well-supplied private farms for the village elite; second, the people who became farmers later did so without start-up capital or support from the administration and are now struggling; and third, there is a large number of ‘private farms’ which do not engage in farming and use the label as a front for carrying out business. Manzanova demonstrates why support for private farms has declined during the 1990s, and she shows how Buryats have a distinctive set of attitudes related to their historical way of life and values.

"This great evil": anticipating political obstacles to development

Many technically appropriate and economically effective development programmes fail because planners do not make explicit assessments of political risk. Projects face many potential opponents including village elites whose economic interests and political authority may be challenged by successful development. Several systematic methods for evaluating political risk have been devised and NGOs and development agencies have successfully utilized a number of passive and active strategies to minimize political risk. Effective programme planning should undertake systematic assessments of political risk and incorporate appropriate strategies to counter it.

The Caciques of Tecali: Class and Ethnic Identity in Late Colonial Mexico

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in Tempe, Arizona, November 10-13, 1994. Research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Frederic Hicks and Stephen Perkins for their comments on the meeting paper, and Perkins, Michael Barton, and Julia Hernandez de Chance for their help with the transcription and tabulation of Tecali's marriage records. Special thanks go to two anonymous HAHR reviewers. The following abbreviations are used for archival material: Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI); Archivo General de la Naci6n, Mexico City (AGN); Archivo General de Notarfas del Estado de Puebla (AGNP); Archivo Municipal de Cuauhtinchan (AMC); Archivo Municipal de Tecali (AMT); Archivo Parroquial de Tecali (APT); Archivo Judicial de Puebla, microfilm collection of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City (AJP-MNAH); and Archivo Judicial de Tecali in the same microfilm collection (AJT-MNAH). 1. The term cacique, of Arawak origin, was widely used by Spaniards in the New World and was initially applied to successors of pre-Hispanic rulers or ruling families. Principales could be relatives of caciques, successors of the pre-Hispanic second-echelon nobility (such as the Nahua pipiltin), or political officeholders and their successors. Pedro Carrasco, transformaci6n de la cultura indigena durante la colonia, Historia Mexicana 25 (1975), 182. 2. The classic conceptualization of caciques as brokers can be found in Eric R. Wolf, Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: American Anthropologist 58 (1956), 1065-78. Important substantive contributions on sixteenth-century Mesoamerican caciques and Indian village elites in general are numerous. Special influences on the present research include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-181o (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964); Delfina E. L6pez Sarrelangue, La nobleza indigena de Pdtzcuaro en la e'poca virreinal (Mexico City: UNAM, 1965); Ronald Spores, The Mixtec Kings and Their People (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1967); idem, The Mixtecs in Ancient and Colonial Times (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1984); William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1972); Carrasco,

Puissance, servitude, liberté. Les «casalers » gascons au Moyen Âge

Might, freedom and serfdom. The «casalers » of Gascony in the Middle-Ages. «Casalers », that is, men holding «casals » - an equivalent of the manse, may be seen in Gascony as a peasant elite linked to the feudal system. From the XIIth century on, the fate of its members tends to diverge. In the piedmont, they tend to disappear or to be identified with «serfs questaux». In the upper valleys of the Pyrénées, they remain a free and powerful village elite even after the end of the Middle-Ages.

Espaces, usages et dynamiques de la dette dans les hautes vallées dauphinoises (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)

Le crédit est à la fois bien connu des historiens parce que toujours mentionné et méconnu parce que peu analysé dans la diversité de ses pratiques. L'attention a surtout été portée sur l'analyse des transferts de propriété qu'il a permis, partant sur son rôle d'instrument économique. Pourtant, le crédit ne se réduit pas à ce seul aspect : il est aussi un lien social, culturel et parfois un instrument politique. L'objectif de ce texte est de montrer — à travers l'analyse des pratiques de crédit que l'on observe dans les communautés montagnardes du haut Dauphiné aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles— la diversité des espaces géographiques que dessinent les relations de crédit et les différents rôles qu'assume le lien de la dette.

Agrarian Change and Class Conflict in Gujarat, India

ONLY A FEW DECADES AGO RURAL INDIA was described in terms of poverty and stagnation, a society imprisoned in tradition. Gunnar Myrdal's well-known study published in 1968 provides a prominent illustration of this school of thought, which dominated Western debates on development around the middle of the twentieth century. While his Asian Drama had a wider setting, the author based his argument mainly on the southern part of this populous continent, more precisely on the incapacity for self-transformation that seemed to characterize former British India. Myrdal noted with concern that development efforts were largely nullified by the enormous population growth caused by a fall in the death rate and a continuing high birth rate. Major institutional reforms were urgently needed, in his opinion, to overcome the underutilization of labor, which hindered any increase of agrarian production. What he had in mind was a radical redistribution of agrarian resources, which would place land in the hands of the tillers. The objectives of such a basic reform were twofold: a political one, namely, reduction of the rigid inequalities in the social structure; and an economic one, namely, the optimal use that a much greater mass of owners would make of the means of production allotted to them. A closer and more realistic assessment of policies and politics, however, convinced Myrdal that government lacked the will and the capability needed for transforming the rural system in this way. In his opinion, the failure to introduce any fundamental change into traditional property relations and the ingrained attitudes of agrarian people who were perceived not to be development-oriented, was due to the soft character of the Asiatic state. That social dynamics were nevertheless not entirely lacking was shown by the concentration of landholdings among a comparatively small village elite, mostly members of upwardly mobile peasant castes who had in recent times gained political power. Myrdal was well aware of the growing weight of this class and the concomitant deterioration in the position of sharecroppers and agri

Traditional Grazing System and Seasonal Pasture Use in Upper Mustang, Nepal

This research was undertaken from March 2006 to October 2006. The main aim of this research was to analysis the grazing system and seasonal pasture use in the selected VDCs of Upper Mustang. Ground truthing data of the two VDCs were collected to identify the seasonal pasture type and units. The pasture units were delineated in Topographic map by observing the pastures from vantage points. Key informants were consulted at field for this pupose. In addition, focal group discussion and interviews were taken with the village elite, herders and grazers for assessing grazing rights and use patterns. The result of this study reveals that the pastures lying in political boundary of one VDC are not necessarily being used by the same VDC. People have been practicing the traditional use right irrespective of the political boundary. On the basis of seasonal use, 7 different seasonal pasture types have been identified in the pastures used by Chhoser VDC and 6 different seasonal pasture types in Chuksang VDC. Livestock compositions in the two VDCs are different. The density of livestock in Chhosher VDC is 35.74 per sq. km. whereas it is only 15.69 per sq km. in Chhuksang VDC. The grazing system and the use of resources are also different in these two pastures. Keywords: Conservation, Grazing system, Pasture conflicts, Rangeland, Seasonal pasture usedoi:10.3126/on.v4i1.500Our Nature Vol. 4(1) 2006 pp29-41