An Agricultural Project Comes to Town: Consequences of an Encounter in Sudan

According to an old saw there are only two stories a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey. When an agricultural development project comes to town it is stranger indeed. This narrative wanders through some of the unanticipated consequences of one such visitation by capital on Howa, a subsistence farming village in central-eastern Sudan. I spent 1981 in Howa studying the relationship between the changes imposed by inclusion in the agricultural project and local processes of social reproduction particularly the production, exchange and use of knowledge among children.' I watched as social scales shifted under the impact of global processes, and witnessed the local ecology, intrahousehold dynamics, and even the villagers themselves drawn into the national decline in agricultural productivity.