Who shares ? : co - operatives and rural development / edited by D. W. Attwood and B. S. Baviskar

Systematic social-science research on co-operatives is still in its infan cy. A conference on social prerequisites for agricultural co-operatives held at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, in 1969 was a landmark in this field. The volume of papers produced for this conference (Two Blades of Grass, edited by Peter Worsley) remains one of the best collections on the subject. In 1973 another conference on co-operatives and related enterprises was held as part of the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. B.S. Baviskar participated in both meetings.

The editors of this volume have known each other since 1969, when Attwood became interested in Baviskar's pioneering research on the sugar co-operatives of western India. Since then we have worked on closely related topics, both jointly and independently. When we met in Delhi in 1978 for the tenth International Congress, we decided to organize a symposium on co-operatives and rural development as part of the eleventh Congress to be held in 1983 in Canada. Invitations mentioning topics most in need of comparative analysis were sent to potential participants around the world. Funds and other facilities for the symposium were generously provided by the Canadian agencies mentioned below.

In August 1983 a three-day symposium was held in a quiet country inn near Montreal. The papers in this volume were first presented at the symposium, and have since been revised in the light of the discussions. In addition to the authors included here, the symposium also included a number of other distinguished participants: Anwar ullah Chowdhury and Abdul Halim (from Bangladesh), Daniel K. Ndagala (Tanzania), Ben Henson (Zimbabwe), Wolfgang Trautmann (Germany), John W. Bennett, Michael R. Cernea and Ramon E Daubon (USA), J. G. Craig, David Glover and David King (Canada), and Roger Spear (UK). This book is the culmination of one phase of comparative study, but it is also the start of A new and more intensive phase. Scholars from India and Canada will collaborate over a number of years on a comparative analysis of rural co-operatives of various types and in various regions of India, with the hope that the questions and hypo theses generated in this book will be put to the test. This publication, and the symposium from which it derives, was made possible by generous support from McGill University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian International Development Agency, and especially the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. We wish to record our gratitude to these agencies and to all those individuals who worked with us to bring this project to fruition. Special thanks go to Ginette Lamontagne, Linda Anderson, Celia Bruneau, and David King