Cooperation, Credit and Social Integration

Abstract

It has been argued that an analysis of social change ideally requires a theoretical framework which can be used to analyse the scope that people, as individuals or part of social collectivities, have to make their own world, within the context of the structural constraints they face. The unit of analysis in the previous chapter was the household. It was shown that even leading farmers are constrained in their ability to enhance the viability of their production by the resource limitations they experience. If individual households by themselves cannot significantly improve their positions, then the onus falls upon the organisations that structure communal area societies. Accordingly, my concern in the empirical component of this chapter is to analyse the capacity of the two societies I worked in for effective, coordinated action at this supra-household level.

A critical social theory cannot remain satisfied with an ahistorical analysis of the constitution of our lifeworld through the agents’ perspectives. It is also necessary to place this lifeworld within a larger picture of the social whole, its limits and possibilities. Such social constraints are not formed by tales but by the logic of those unintended consequences that escape the lifeworld perspective of social agents. In this sense, the perspectives of systemic and lived crises, of the structural contradictions of the whole and the felt experience of individuals, is fundamental. The task ahead is to think their unity, not to emphasize one at the expense of the other. (Benhabib, 1986, pp. 349–50)