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Since the 1960s, but more intensely since the 1980s, the factors affecting agricultural innovation adoption in the so-called developing world have puzzled scholars and development institutions. Although early studies recognised that adoption is affected not only by the promise of economic profitability but also by other attributes of the innovation, such as compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability, economic analysis that barely touched upon sociological factors or the non-contingent character of extension programmes dominated the literature until recent years. Scholars and institutions have analysed both external factors such as credit constraints, risk, and information or internal constraints such as farm size, farmer behaviour, and land tenure patterns, showing how these factors affect agricultural innovation adoption. Yet, even when constraints are lifted or improved, adoption does not seem to increase in overall terms. To explain so, new constraints have been researched, such as gender, age, and belonging to a social network but the answer is still elusive. This study reviews and summarises evidence on experiments of agricultural innovation adoption, particularly those related to improved pastures and forage seeds in the Global South. We found that, first, farmer’s social and cultural constraints must be properly mapped to explain, more in depth, the limiting factors to diffusion and the shortcomings of adoption incentives. Second, we found that perfectible transference strategies lay at the core of agricultural technology adoption, and thus we aim to amplify the debate onto how to map societal constraints and how, if so, new narratives and mechanisms should be put in place to achieve more successful innovation processes.

This article analyzes the conflicts between miners and farmers in Northeastern Antioquia between 1930 and 1950 to understand the problematic coexistence of ideas of public and private ownership of land and gold and the role of the state in regulating them. In the agrarian literature about Colombia, scholars argue that fake mining claims became a mechanism to hoard large extensions of land. To test this hypothesis, we study Colombian mining and land legislation alongside conflicts between farmers and miners that rest in the Archivo Histórico de Antioquia. Rather than a problem of land grabbing, the conflicts between mining and agriculture reveal that the antioqueño mining tradition of mazamorreros and the promotion of frontier colonization through colonos were in stark contradiction with the new agricultural and mining uses of natural resources and the model of regional development after the great depression. Since the laws protected both, mazamorreros and colonos, and mining and farming entrepreneurs, the access to natural resources became a source of conflict in places were mining and agriculture coexisted.

This article analyzes literature on the history of cattle ranching and agricultural innovation adoption in Colombia to understand how livestock production systems have evolved from the 1950s until today. Departing from new scholarship that has questioned the idea that cattle ranching has been only a land-grabbing strategy dominated by few elites, this article focuses on the adoption of improved pastures and the role of key institutions such as the CIAT on the transformation of practices and the shortcomings of technification. It shows that Colombia has had big transformations with the introduction of improved pastures, particularly Brachiaria, but these transformations did not translate into a radical change in the dominant extensive livestock production systems. Instead of promoting intensification, the adoption of Brachiaria has allowed producers to expand more, often resulting in large deforestation.  One of the main contributions of this article is the analysis of economic, developmentalist, and institutional reports that are not often used to construct historical analysis. It can also serve to scholars interested on adoption of agricultural techniques.

Cet article analyse la question peu étudiée des discriminations corporelles dans les écoles d’Afrique centrale, à partir des représentations du corps albinos dans les écoles coloniales et postcoloniales. L’auteur s’appuie sur une enquête de terrain pour montrer comment ces corps enseignés particuliers vivent l’école. Comment arrivent-ils à imposer leurs besoins et à gérer leurs différences ou leur handicap ? En partant d’appellations comme « nguénguérou », « ndundu », « Blanc », « bon Blanc », « White », « nègre blanc », « Noir pas comme les autres », pour désigner les albinos, l’auteur met en évidence les représentations sociales, cultuelles et culturelles à l’œuvre.

Centered primarily on the American Colonization Society (ACS), this article explores the movement to colonize free Black women and men in West Africa as a political—as well as a knowledge—project rooted in demography. Hostile to slavery and immediate emancipation alike, white colonizationists used quantitative rhetoric to transform African Americans along a vast spectrum of unfreedom into a “dangerous” and multiplying population in need of removal. While this demographic fearmongering proved effective, the ACS struggled to make large-scale expatriation appear equally so. To render removal “practicable,” colonizationists harnessed the fertility of African American women. By specifically targeting those in their procreative prime for expatriation, colonizationists believed they could gradually deplete the country’s Black population. The colonization project as envisioned by the ACS, then, was the clear inheritor of demography’s hierarchizing tendencies. Not only did colonizationists reproduce the epistemic violence of a system that fragmented and instrumentalized the bodies of Black women, but in specifically targeting the latter for expatriation, they produced a new category via which to define African Americans as a threatening and unassimilable population.

This article recovers the overlooked role of quantification in shaping antebellum Black knowledge claims about freedom and slavery. It uses the political controversy surrounding the census of 1840 to highlight the extent to which African American activists in New York City rooted a pro-Black and anti-slavery politics in the growing authority of numbers. Owing to a series of clerical errors, the disputed sixth decennial census—the first to solicit the number of individuals designated as “insane” or “idiots” throughout the population—indicated that African Americans in the North were far more likely to suffer from “insanity” than their counterparts in the South. Unsurprisingly, exultant pro-slavery ideologues wasted no time in adding the census to their growing repertoire of evidence supporting the peculiar institution. Black New Yorkers, however, understood that the conclusions drawn from the census were a product of a racist statistical practice, and not a true reflection of either Black freedom or of quantification’s radical potential. Using an 1844 memorial to the United States Senate produced by Black activists in New York City, this article argues that African Americans were resourceful quantifiers who strategically employed quantitative arguments to dispute the claim that Blackness was incompatible with freedom. Indeed, close study of the memorial reveals the extent to which activists’ use of quantification to undermine pro-slavery expansionism, represent slavery’s fatal violence, and affirm the degree to which they were thriving in freedom is indicative of a much more robust and underappreciated culture of numeracy among antebellum African Americans.

Le discours historique a longtemps considéré la pratique religieuse officielle comme un simple indice utile à la mesure des tendances d'adhésion, sans vraiment chercher à interroger le geste pour lui-même. Ollivier Hubert postule au contraire que le rite est un objet d'une grande fécondité pour qui veut construire une histoire sociale de la culture. Prenant ses distances avec le concept de religion populaire, il étudie comment l'Église québécoise des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles a fait de la gestion des rites l'instrument de sa définition comme institution et une des clefs de l'exercice de son pouvoir social.