by
P.B. Hayward
Sociologist
1. INTRODUCTION
The development of aquaculture in Africa is an element of broader technical development, regardless of its social context. However, it has been found that concentration on technical factors to the exclusion of broader social considerations had led to uneven, even distorted, ventures into aquaculture. Large-scale commercial farmers and large formal organizations (corporations, parastatals, and government departments) have taken up aquaculture with a certain measure of success. Except in the case of Fisheries Departments as such, these operations have usually represented a diversification of an existing economic enterprise. By contrast, small-scale farmers have shown less interest in raising fish. Aquaculture programmes have shown limited ability to reach this group. Consequently the potential of aquaculture for improving rural nutritional and income standards has so far not been realized.
The present report is based on a desk study of aquaculture in Africa for the Aquaculture for Local Community Development Programme. It focuses on socio-cultural factors in the relative success of aquaculture programmes.
Development goals are often expressed in terms of “integrated development”. While the various uses of the term are not necessarily contradictory, they refer in practice to different complexes of activities. These differences should be clarified if the potentials of aquaculture integrated with rural development are to be defined.
The phrase “integrated rural development”, is used to refer to programmes aiming primarily at vertical integration (in the economic sense) of productive activities. An example is ox-draught programmes which includes ox-training, training of ox-trainers, design of improved ox-carts and/or harnesses, establishment of small-scale industries to build the carts, rehabilitation of cattle dips and tsetse control facilities, etc. Horizontal integrative activities do take place but are more rare. It is more common for general infrastructural improvements, which affect a number of productive activities simultaneously, to be included in such programmes.
By contrast, “integrated fish farming”, as it appears in the aquaculture literature, refers specifically to the inclusion of other animal cultures (typically pig- or duck-rearing) as a source of organic manures for fish culture, that is, to the integration of other economic activities into aquaculture. It is often forgotten that this particular symbiotic system has been abstracted from a more general context of economic activities (e.g., of the Chinese peasant) and is now presented as a system in isolation. In examining the potential for aquaculture in rural development in Africa, the opposite process is denoted, namely integrating aquaculture into an existing yearly cycle of other economic activities. The focus on aquaculture for the rural poor virtually ensures that this is so. Only organizations with capital to spare can initiate aquaculture on a full-time basis. Regardless of what other economic activities are integrated into aquaculture as a subsystem, aquaculture must be integrated into dominant economic activities as a higher-level subsystem of the total action system of the village.
In order to put these mutual integrations in a broader context, the concept of integration as developed in sociological theory is a useful analytic tool. Integration in the sociological sense refers to the harmonious coordination of activities on all levels. This includes:
the integration of the individual personality; a primarily psychological focus, which has consequences for social organization;
integration on the social level; institutions of the society, e.g., the social division of labour, norms of behaviour applying to all its members, the norms and activities which interrelate and regulate the economy and policy;
integration on the cultural sphere as a system of communication expression, and moral evaluation.
Seen in this light, integration is one of the basic and essential functions of any society.
3.1 Differentiation
Societies in general change by processes in which their functions become differentiated among specific institutions. The kinship system in traditional society was functionally diffuse, taking care of tasks now allocated specifically among economic, political, educational, and other institutions. The differentiation process has involved a shift from particularistic to universalistic orientations. Examples are the growth of socio-political systems with broader uniformities of language, culture, literacy, laws and integrated economic and political systems. Universalistic rationality is also seen in the rise of capitalism. It replaces the particularistic ties of feudal and patrimonial loyalty by the impersonal calculation of advantage embodied in the contract. It also characterizes the spread of the world religions, which replace local spiritual loyalties grounded in land and kinship by allegiance to values applying consistently to the world as a whole. Similarly, the rise of bureaucratic organization involves the rationalization of organizational functions.
The rationalization involved in these changes is not only universalistic but also involves a shift from affective (emotional) to affective-neutral (impersonal) orientations. The feudal tie was a tie of personal loyalty; the contract relation is one of mutual rational calculation of advantage.
In addition, these changes involve a shift from ascriptive to achievement orientation. Where people were formerly assessed primarily by “who they are”, they have been increasingly judged by “what they do”. For example, refusing privileges to a racial group (an ascribed status) is tending to be replaced by awarding of privileges to those who perform well in education (an achieved status), regardless of origin.
Such changes have affected urban life in many countries far more directly than rural society. The difference between a European capital and an African capital is less than that between the African capital and villages in the same country. The capitals are already integrated into the world economy. Their rural hinterlands depend on them for imported commodities and for centralized services based on export revenues. However, the villages are often far behind not only in economic benefits but also in the changes in value-orientations that characterize what may be called a modern society.
This is not because villages are isolated. Nor does it mean a breakdown in social integration between urban and rural members of families. The former often help to support the latter by periodic remittances, and temporary shifts in residence between the two often take place. But a differentiation is taking place between people of more modern orientation, with more education and/or ambition, and those with less. Those who want improvement and have some hope of achieving it go to town and stay there; those who cannot cope with town stay at home or return there. In part this means that the urban population are younger while many villages are dominated by the old.
In this context, the justified concern with “integrated rural development” is directed to correcting an important imbalance. Healthy nations depend on a healthy and productive rural life. While African villagers, to a large extent, feed their urban compatriots, the benefits they receive are fewer than those they give. Reducing distortions is a necessary integrative task. This integration faces certain paradoxes, revolving around the problems of integrating peripheral rural areas more closely with national systems without making them more dependent.
In some countries, the problem of overcentralization has been targeted, with a corresponding turn to the policies of decentralization. In this context, integrated rural development programme have been located at the provincial level in hopes of building up a provincial development profile not submerged in centralism.
3.2 Rural-Urban Migration
In Africa rural-urban migration has accelerated since the 1950's. The higher skill levels needed for industrial production after the second world war led to the acceptance by the colonial powers of a stable urban work force. The rural-rooted African family of the 1930's with husband in town as a temporary labourer and wife and children in the village, gave way to an urban-rooted family life which still maintained strong ties to the village. The present generation of urban young adults are the first to include substantial numbers born and raised in town. Their experience has been different in many ways from that of people who only knew the village. However, the rural home has remained important as a place where older relatives keep younger children to remove burdens from the younger adults. Similarly, few villagers (except in remote areas) have not spent at least some time in town.
3.3 Traditional Values
For women, the traditional values including sub-servience are still taught in maturation ceremonies. No data have been compiled on the extent to which the increase in formal education levels for women have been associated with a decrease in women's traditional education. The modernization of women's education is behind that of men, with considerable value placed on child-bearing and keeping the home. The nuclear housewife role, not traditional in Africa, arose not only from the urbanization but also from missionary education, which impressed Western role models from the end of the 19th century. The continuing ideological importance of women's maturation preserves elements of feminine pride and solidarity, as against the earlier sheltered housewife role of Western women. Thus, for African women of today who wish to progress beyond their mothers, the traditional and modern role models offer alternative, often contradictory, sources of strength. This polarity is often associated in commonsense language with the relationship between village and town. The village is where the maturations are held, where only primary education is available, and where economic opportunities are considered limited. Town provides opportunities for higher education, jobs, and entertainments, but cannot “teach women how to be women”.
The same holds true for men, who were both educated by the missionary systems and trained by urban industrial employment to be separate, sole providers as against the more complementary division of work in the village. Even in the traditional setting, marriage among the matrilineal tribes who predominate in Central Africa has been described as “brittle” (Colson, 1949), with stronger solidarity within the descent group than with affines or with the nuclear pair as such. In many cases, urbanization has not strengthened this bond, and divorce is frequent. In addition, the polygamous ideology has survived under urban socio-economic conditions not conducive to it.
The Christian ideal of married love and unity, the Western ideal of romantic love, and the economic pressures toward nucleation of the family strengthen the urban marriage bond. The value of protecting the extended family however remains very strong, and the urban household typically contains several relatives in addition to the nuclear pair and their children.
Under these conditions, double-rooted extended families have arisen in which both the rural and urban poles can act as safety valves. With much of the employment in town, rural relatives often come to depend to a greater extent on urban salaried family members. But the village provides periodic supplies of local produce, child care and a place of retirement for the old and of temporary or permanent retreat for those who for one reason or another have left the urban scene. For the generation now adult, there is a common expectation that their retirement will be, if not their villages home, at least another rural area.
The double-rooted family also offers some protection from chronic interpersonal strains. The fear of witchcraft remains very much alive, and while this might strike as far as town, the major focus remains the village home, where it is considered a threat to urban folk because of their economic success. At home, the interlaced network of extended kin ties, with their interbalanced obligations which require considerable political skill to keep in equilibrium, is still of central importance. Individuals showing too much economic prowess, whether within this tightly balanced system or their relatives in town are threats to village unity and may therefore be a risk. More ambitious family members may prefer to keep the distance between village and town as a buffer against envious relatives. Others may move to another rural area in order to progress as farmers. The situation will obviously differ from one specific area to another, as much depends upon the mediating skills of local leaders.
3.4 Social Solidarity
Traditional norms are protected by the survival of traditional socialization by rough local justice that preserves the solidarity of the kin group. It is expected that in general, the more multiplex the kin network in village organization, the tighter this solidarity. In fishing camps in which kinship ties are less evident, overt conflicts are more frequent, while in more kin-related villages, mediation of conflict by elders is more the rule. These elders maintain effective control in such situations. The traditional round of economic and ritual activities still provides the basic definitions of rural life in many areas.
Consequently, the first question for the introduction of any new activity requiring concerted effort will be the state of social solidarity: the survival of the kinship system more or less intact, its extent of control over economic activities (such as allocation of land), the strength or weakness of individual local leaders in motivating common action and arbitrating disputes, and the extent to which people will feel a sense of common interest and responsibility. Where these structures remain in control, organized planning and decision-making can take place, disputes can be settled in ways that will be treated as legimate, labour can be recruited and controlled, and accountability can be maintained.
In town, these structures can easily be avoided; the diversity of interests are upheld by an institutional order based on the division of labour including police and other regulatory bodies. In the village these institutions are of peripheral importance.
It is a truism that any development project attempting to work in a rural area must work through the local power structures. The additional point being made here is that the levels of social solidarity existing in the community will be reflected in the degree of effectiveness that power structure can have. Furthermore, rural development projects aiming at strengthening the community should aim at strengthening the social solidarity, unity, and cooperation between people. Many efforts have failed because of failures in solidarity. As a result there have been breakdowns in accountability, routine labour and planning. Consequently, if the social integration of adaptive activities is to be modified, a new level of integration of local polity must be provided for, in which the villagers, other workers, and the project staff are able to contribute to the organization of activities. This is necessary so there can be viable local level organization which is capable of carrying on the activities. This is the central point: many projects fail because no one is motivated to take responsibility for ensuring that they succeed.
3.5 The Rural-Urban Continuum
Differences in social organization and culture have so far been related to an ideal-typical dichotomy between town and countryside. In fact, however, the extent to which the rural traditional way of life has been transformed by urban values and models of organizational practice may be conceptualized as a continuum between centre and periphery. The more remote a settlement is from the influence of town, the more likely it is that “traditional” solutions predominate at one end and more “modern” ones at the other, since neither is absolute at either point. The development worker “buys into” this dynamic equilibrium at a point in space and time by the choice of project site. Socio-cultural geography may be a factor in rural people's responses to development initiatives, and it is prudent for the development worker to take account of it.
Anyone will be prepared to make a certain degree of change in approach within the normal structure of activities but will not be interested or able in changing much further. The approach and the expectations of the development worker would therefore hinge on the degree of difference. Exposure to scientific measurement and/or notions of causality, experience with wage labour, experience in planting innovative crops, time spent in town or in external travel, and any number of other elements might be significant.
It may be that attempting to inculcate “modern” values and practices may be easier with villagers who are already more “modernized” in these or other ways to be discussed. However, this principle, if carried too far, could lead to concentration of effort on the “best prospects” and neglect of those with manifestly greater need for assistance. But if it is neglected entirely, it will lead to greater risk of failure. Like the citizens, who must find their own place along the continuum that best resolves their own ambivalences, the development worker must also make an evaluative choice.
4.1 Rationalization
In the previous section, the overall processes of differentiation and rationalization were outlined. These processes apply to change in organization and motivation in the way described by Weber as the Protestant Ethic (1930). This ethic involves the use of rational calculation to discipline one's energies, predict the outcome of one's efforts, and hence to project feasible innovations and acceptable risks; values of independence, hard work, thrift, and responsibility, with a strong emphasis on achievement and delayed gratification; affective neutrality and universality in economic relations. These values have long since become institutionalized in the structure of Western society, including the formal educational system, family, and the demonstrations of practical social experience.
With the conquest by capitalism of the society at large, the personal motivations and behaviour patterns that it required became differentiated into institutions which, are themselves now capable of rational calculation and saving. The personal attitudes remain, to varying degrees, the socialization process and can be recalled when considered necessary.
Weber also pointed out that although ambition, acquisition and profit have long existed, the specific combination of these with rational self-denial seems to have been specific to the capitalist epoch. The combination of entrepreneurialism, with its orientation to innovation, risk, and growth, with a self-disciplined approach to future gain provided the specific pattern of European capitalism, which has since become generalized throughout the world.
Also on the scale of an individual fish farm, the presence of achievement motivation, universalistic rational orientation, and a positive attitude toward innovation and risk are necessary components of success. These attitudes are not necessarily absent at the village level. To some extent they are contained within the traditional culture. To some extent they also are a part of popular attitudes due to modernizing influences of education, modern political and economic structures, urban experience and other sources of change. The traditional social structures offer sources of continuity and stabilization reaching into the future, in which new economic adaptations including aquaculture are also hoped to be contributing elements. However, infusing these structures with the necessary dynamism will not always be easy. Gerontocratic village leadership excludes women from formal decision making and usually from control of economic resources. In multi-ethnic situations, the owners of the land are likely to be unwilling to grant participation by members of other tribes in development schemes. Local rivalries can easily spring up and have caused difficulties in the past.
4.2 Intensification
The rationalizing attitudes apply to business enterprise in general and so are involved in aquaculture as in any development exercise. There is another complex of changes involved which applies specifically to aquaculture. This is the Boserup shift, from extensive, mobile production to intensive, sedentary, and conservatory production (Boserup, 1965).
Extensive production, whether shifting cultivation or fishing, is mobile and extractive. When the soils are exhausted or fishing conditions are adverse, the producers move on. In traditional Central Africa societies, low population densities with ample available land allowed extensive techniques with little pressure on resources. Full-time fishing was not practised. Instead, fishing was seasonal, with agriculture during the rains and fishing in the dry season when low water levels concentrated the fish (Imai, 1985; Gluckman, 1941, 1943; Brelsford, 1946; Hayward, 1985, 1986a, 1986b). Technological improvements in fishing and increased demand, associated with population growth and urbanization, have led to the differentiation of full-time fishing and fish trading. The numbers in these occupations have steadily risen since the 1950's (Hayward, 1986c, 1986d). The yearly cycle of farming/fishing has increasingly given way to a broader and longer-term cycle of fishing migration among water-bodies, moving periodically from depleted to less heavily pressured stocks (Hayward, 1986d, 1986e). In some cases, the increase in fishing pressure has been seen in sharp boom-and-bust cycles (Mwalyosi, 1986; Hayward, 1986e).
These developments represent all the phases of a Boserup intensification series, except the last, the shift to intensive sedentary production with conservation practices. At the time of Boserup's original formulation, when rural modernization was expected to come virtually on its own, it was not realized how difficult this shift actually is. As has been seen in the case of renewable resources in Africa and elsewhere, including fisheries, fuelwood, grazing land, soils, etc.; failure to make this transition contributes to environmental degradation and consequently to hunger (Brown, 1986). Without a change in approach, falling profits from over production merely call for greater mobility on the part of the producers.
Despite the great resilience of the fisheries, the hopes for increases in production needed to feed growing populations will depend on making the Boserup shift to aquaculture. But for people with long experience of a circulatory model of resource use, there is no immediate reason to suppose that such a shift would take place. Fishermen respond to catch failures by repetition of the intermigration cycle, alternatively by shifting out of the business, rather than by an alternative concept of managing fish populations or of fish production. For fishermen, aquaculture is counterintuitive. This has several consequences for the formulation of aquaculture policy. The introduction of aquaculture is consciously conceived by fisheries staff and by development agency personnel in terms of a shift to intensive production. This concept is analytic, based on the comparison of catch and production figures for the projection of national demands for fish and on the technical availability of methods for raising fish, while the fishermen are dealing directly with practical experience.
One of the effects of modern rationality is that it blinds the user to the other forms of rationality that it replaces. A number of analysts have noted that the traditional knowledge of the environment, while not structured like modern science, is a complex body of expert knowledge. The use of this knowledge is practical and frequently combines physical and spiritual attributions of causality, which modern natural science finds difficult to assimilate. Furthermore, the structure of reasoning differs from the experimental and hypothetico-deductive ideals of science. However, the comparative studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1956) and extensive collections of detailed materials by the cognitive anthropologists (Brokensha, Warren and Werner, 1980), have shown complexity and adaptive change in indigenous knowledge systems which offers scientific material of value to the researcher.
The ethno-ecological knowledge of the fishermen or other villagers should therefore be taken seriously as a source of information in developing a socially integrated fisheries policy in which aquaculture is one element. People from traditional fishing peoples will be better-endowed in this dimension than people without prior experience, who will have to learn about fish from the beginning. Thus, although fishing people are expected to have difficulty with the sedentarization involved in the Boserup shift, they will have the ethno-ecological background of knowledge which will give them an advantage in other ways.
Farmers, or rather farmer-fishermen preserving traditional part-time fishing practice in a pluralist adaptation (cf. Löfgren, 1982; Hayward, 1986b), will have a better chance of making this shift, since it involves conservation of resources for long-term stability. One requirement in any case will be a stable and secure system of land and water tenure. It has already been observed internationally and historically that small-scale fisheries in which land and fishing rights are allocated are associated with fish stock conservation (Berkes, 1985; Hayward, 1986a; Ruddle and Akimichi, 1984). Full-time fishermen, by contrast, are typically alienated from control over land and exploit open-access waters, a pattern associated with over-fishing.
Historically in Southern Africa, the undercutting of traditional fishing rights under colonial rule was associated with the colonial interest in removing the economic base of power from the local chiefs and bringing them under the colonial sway, as well as in opening up the waters for the more intensive exploitation to feed the growing urban areas. The older “seepage” distribution of fish to a radius around the fishing areas was supplemented and even supplanted by “catchment” marketing from a radius around a concentrated (urban) distribution point. Tributary systems were considered to be in conflict with “modern” economic practices, but have survived under custom in a number of areas. It is noteworthy that in some of the areas where traditional fishing rights survive, they are linked with traditional land tenure that provides long-term security to the owners and hence a long-term commitment. Relatively few cases have been observed in which full-time residents with other resources (fishing, farming and cattle) have made the step up into full-time artisanal fishing. In these cases, fish stock protection is not abandoned as it is by the unattached migrant fishermen. This leads to the conclusion that the Boserup shift cannot be expected among people without the economic resources to be able to make a commitment to it, namely control over land and water. Now, the articulation of this need with both the existing traditional systems of tenure and the legal systems in force is a problem of integration. It must be solved in order to make the Boserup shift something that can be diffused in a practical way instead of by happenstance.
However, the lesson of the full-time fishermen is also valuable. The skills of fishing are characteristically handed down within a closed community, united by its very marginalization from the society at large. While farmers held control of land resources landless fishermen acquired skills by apprenticeship and control of their own equipment. Their expertise and economic capability were protected by a system boundary. Protected by marginality and endogamy, they can preserve specializations and the associated resources. It is more difficult to imagine such specialized skills being transmitted by villagers without some functional equivalent of this system boundary.
The synthesis of both sets of attitudes and organizational practices -economic rationalization and the Boserup shift may be described as providential and stabilizing approaches to economy, environment, and society. “Saving” in the sense of conservation of natural resources needs to be encouraged and linked with “saving” in the sense of accumulation, investment, and deferred gratification, to ensure continuity for the future. The inputs of rational calculation, innovativeness, and self denial to this providential approach are all potential grounds for motivating people to become fish farmers. So are the expected benefits; improved nutrition, resource conservation, and economic profit. Hence, the attributes outlined here as necessary for success are not by that token “criterion” variables in the same way as soil conditions or water supply. If “some” of a requisite attribute is “missing”, that does not mean that the people in question cannot or will not become successful fish-farmers, but the deficiency should be made up through the communication process.
The complex of attitudes which must be embodied in social organization for these projects to succeed can be summed up in the shift from r- to k-strategies (Pianka, 1950). r-strategies depend on reproduction, k-strategies on long-term growth, increased habitat differentiation in smaller stable territories, and increased differentiation of behaviour. r-strategies rely on rapid turnover of biomass, k-strategies on the accumulation of tissue and more complex behaviour depending on experience. The shift to aquaculture from extensive fish production is exactly such a k-shift.
The following few case studies may serve to illustrate some of the principles that have been discussed here.
Mr T took the idea of fish-farming from his father, who had been taught by missionaries how to make ponds and ditches for irrigation. A teacher at a rural primary school, he invested his earnings little by little in hiring labour to dig his ponds. The ponds were ground-water-fed using an inlet/regulation ditch, and were cemented on the downhill slope, which had resulted in considerable expense. Fisheries officers had advised him to compact the soil instead of using cement, but he considered the cement a more complete job.
Mr T's ponds were in active use and were well filled with fish. However, over the eleven years that he had been building the ponds he had spent upwards of K 5 000. To date he had not realized any profit. Nonetheless, his friends were already beginning to ask him for advice on how to construct their own ponds. He had his eye on expansion, and wished to build a second tier of ponds downslope. Mr T also wanted to apply for a loan to cover agricultural fertilizers and seeds in addition to the costs of expanding the ponds.
Mr M was a retired senior postal official who had had a dream of raising fish for many years. He returned to his district, which was rapidly becoming popular because of its good soils and a policy of the local chiefs of encouraging immigration. Some of the immigrants were urban returnees like himself, while others were farmers leaving the more intractable soil conditions in other districts of the province.
Mr M used his pension and considerable personal labour to build a substantial house and to dig two fishponds. The ponds were fed from a perennial groundwater spring without substantial inlet waterworks. It was dry season, the flow was down to trickle, and the inlet was not in the best of maintenance. Mr M had sought advice from the Fisheries Department on proper construction and use of the ponds, and they had showed him the technique of manuring using burlap sacks. The pond had been stocked four months ago, and the O. andersonii in it were near marketable size. However, the pond was badly deoxygenated. Mr M stated that some had already died. Apparently no one had told him to remove the manure when oxygen levels were low, as he told his intention to put in fresh manure.
Mr M was still working on the second pond, incorporating some improvements from problems he had seen with the first pond, e.g., it was to be deeper. The excavated clay soil was being made into cement blocks, with which he was planning to build a second house. He stated that the ponds had been an object of ridicule from all his heighbours “until they saw the fish swimming around”. “Now they all want to build their own”. Mr M, a Seventh Day Adventist, did not wish to consider raising barbels, as he did not eat them, being forbidden to do so by the rules of his church. When asked how he would deal with thieves, he answered, “I would shoot them”.
Mr M also had an expansion plan. After completing his second pond, he wished to build an earth dam between the termitaria on either side of the valley floor and to stock the reservoir. He was interested in securing a loan for this project. Several months later, Mr M lost his entire crop to thieves.
Ms T was a female head of household in a traditional village. An older woman, she had learned from a relative who worked for the Fisheries Department that it was possible to keep fish, and had attended a training course. She had prior experience in self-support in small business, that is, keeping chickens, and had raised the capital to hire wage labour to dig her ponds by this means. At present she was concentrating on the pond nearer her home, since she was being troubled by thieves at the more distant pond.
Ms T also had an expansion plan. She wished to add an additional two ponds to the near pond to make it a set of three.
Mr N was a wage worker on a parastatal tobacco scheme. He had attended a training course and had been visited by fisheries staff many times. He had been groomed by fisheries officials for fish-farming. It seemed incongruous, therefore, that his pond was full of reeds that were symptomatic of a more general neglect. When asked why he had not cleared the reeds away, he answered, “The Government hasn't paid me any money to take them out”.
None of the four cases presented “typical” small-holder households. All had experience in wage-paying or profit-making enterprises, and had drawn on “non-traditional” resources for either skill or labour or both.
Of the three, Mr N was noticeable in not displaying an entrepreneurial attitude toward his fishpond. The labour apparently seemed to him to be excessive to his structured full-time employment on the scheme, but the exact source of his discouragement was not learned. The other three all had a growth perspective, with expansion plans already afoot, while the existing ponds were still not complete or the profit situation was still ambiguous.
No cases were seen showing innovative use of the traditional division of labour, e.g., setting youths to cleaning the ponds or married women to feeding and harvesting the fish. The ponds therefore, had rather the flavour of being set over the village economy as “modern” and somewhat odd activities. There is however, potential for integrating fish-farming into the social division of labour, such that each age and gender group can be made responsible for one aspect of the work. Adult men can dig the ponds; youths can carry out everyday maintenance and guard the fish against otters and thieves; women, traditionally responsible for the food supply, can feed and eventually harvest the fish.
If successful, this will integrate fish-farming much more fully into the economic life of the village:
it will increase the commitment of the whole family to the activity;
it will make it easier to rationalize production techniques by breaking them down into separately allocated tasks;
it will require coordination, and therefore, will provide work for old people;
it will spread the labour load more widely;
it will allow naturally for learning by experience and informal apprenticeship. The young people who learn it naturally will find it a personal novelty, not an unfamiliar activity. This will help lead to the incorporation of fish-farming into village culture as something to be carried forward spontaneously into the future;
it will provide an additional source of unity and solidarity within the family and increase its adaptiveness, hence its likelihood of survival.
In addition, aquaculture projects can also help integrate the “workers” (e.g., teachers, clinic staff, agricultural assistants, etc.) more effectively into the work of the village. These can offer valuable technical skills: literacy and numeracy, experience with formal organizations and with urban life and attitudes, and access to technical resources and information. All of these are important aspects of the rationalization process. Their participation in the planning and carrying out of village aquaculture projects will provide additional legitimacy in the eyes of villagers, beyond the necessary approval of local leaders, and will help cross-out their tendency to separation on income, status, and ethnic grounds.
Instead of working to create a separate identity for fish-farmers, efforts should be made to render fish-farming one of the normal village activities. If a visitor should come and ask any villager, “What do you grow here?”, the answer might be, “We grow mostly maize and soybean, and we keep cattle and fish”. This level of integration should be the aim of village aquaculture projects.
The villagers, fisheries staff, and project staff all have different background assumptions about how social organization is supposed to work, why people act the way they do, what is sensible action and what is not. These assumptions in return are related to different demand conditions. Each collectivity is pursuing different goals. It is therefore understandable that misunderstandings should arise. The fisheries officials, for example, have been formally taught their technical specialization and in addition are civil servants, that is, they are technocrats. The project staff are also technocrats, but the status gap between them and local staff is often wide. In addition, they have their own separate constituency, typically an externally-based organization, the expatriate community in the host country, and the development community more broadly. These are the people, and the standards, to whom they are accountable, as the local staff are accountable to their line of command, and when they interact with each other in a balanced way, they constitute a helpful division of labour.
From the point of view of the villagers, both the othes may be seen as nearly equivalent. However, it is expected that a closer distinction will be made. One important criterion will be their comparative ability to give practical assistance or to impose effective sanctions. Since the project staff will be superior in the first and the local staff in the second, the villagers will be presented with a situation of checks and balances. The situation will be made more complicated by the fact that the local staff will be familiar with the local situation (they will know the local culture and will be able to anticipate people's reactions). The problem is that this typified knowledge cannot be assumed to be correct. So the greater familiarity can in some cases lead to less perception of new potentials. In addition, the local staff will be expected to have a strong formal commitment to the ideals of modernity, and of formal organization, and a greater need to preserve their own status vis-a-vis the villagers. The response of the villagers to these complex forces is likely to include deference to the authority display and credence to the knowledge display, in the hopes of practical advantage. But in villages in which the political organization is intact, both sets of visitors will be submitted to collective scrutiny, and their motives, relative power, ability to help, and expected demands and sanctions will be analysed on the basis of past knowledge and their present conduct.
When misunderstandings arise as a result of these different understandings, the resulting friction can be used constructively by calling the assumptions up for review. This process of self and mutual discovery is not merely cognitive in nature but provides a way of mediating practical norms of conduct and hence of strengthening not only instrumental aims but also affective solidarity. When used effectively it can become a powerful tool of the development process.
The political processes set into motion by the project will affect the local balances of power. Since these are likely to change, with the inclusion of more groups in the process, the process of change should be one that is readily understandable, and can be justified in terms of generally accepted values.
In this effort, not just any cross-cultural understandings will suffice, but rather those that actually contribute to fulfilling basic needs in the long term. If villagers are tacitly taught habits of dependency under the name of self-help, this dependency will hurt them in the long run.
In the end, this brings the analysis full circle. It began with the possession of certain attitudes (rational and providential) on the part of villagers necessary for their successful uptake of aquaculture programmes. It ends with the recognition that complementary attitudes are required from project staff; openness to the relativity of assumptions and to the character and importance of social integration at the village level. Both must fit together into a single pattern of increased awareness and effectiveness through a conscientizing communication process. It is needed for each collectivity to be affected by the assumptions of the others for mutual learning and coordination to take place.
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