At the last meeting of the African Studies Association, I was presenting a paper on village labor markets in western Sudan when one of the panelists interrupted (we were an informal panel- last day, last session): "Wait," she said, "shouldn't you be stratifying your sample by landholding?"

If I had read Victoria Bernal's book Cultivating Workers, I might have given the panelist a more lucid answer. For Bernal has set out, in a straightforward and readable style, to clarify two of the enduring questions that have confronted students of agrarian societies over the past two decades; namely, the nature of peasant production systems and the dynamics of rural change.

Bernal shows that land is not the key to understanding either of these questions. Rather, assets and access to employment are the critical determinants of economic differentiation and change in Wad al Abbas, an irrigated-farming village along the Blue Nile. Wealthy villagers are able to afford education, obtain government jobs and employment contracts in the Gulf States, and trade as established wholesalers and retailers. The poor are confined to wage work, under-capitalized petty trading, and illegal migration.

Agricultural production, access to land, and household demographics, then, no longer play the role assigned to them by earlier theories of rural change (specifically, the Chayanovian, Farming Systems, and Leninist approaches). Bernal vividly portrays the agricultural stagnation that results from the particular form of incorporation of the village economy into wider spheres of production and exchange. Her rhetoric is clear, and the empirical details are convincing.

The main policy recommendations (and they are very similar to those suggested by Allan Low in his discussion of household strategies in southern Africa) are that labor-intensive agricultural techniques are not likely to be favored by households which have committed time and resources to non-agricultural strategies; solutions to the national agricultural problems thus require labor-saving innovations. In addition, rural development strategies need to diversify into assisting rural industry, craft production, and petty traders, much as the rural population has already diversified.

The emphasis of Bernal's book is an empirical demonstration of the imbrication of farm households onto the wider sphere of national and international labor and product markets. She succeeds admirably in this regard. She is less successful in incorporating the empirical study into the body of theoretical work on "peasantries" that has emerged over the past two decades. Whether by conscious design or lack of space, only about fifteen pages (out of two hundred) are devoted to theory. More attention to theory might have led to more emphasis on a few questions that deserve prominence; let me suggest three:

(1) We learn very little about intra-household issues, and the interaction between men and women that reproduces the sharp gender division of labor.

(2) While the class distinctions within the village are clear, those with the wider society are assumed to be one-sided, with the peasant-workers at the bottom. In fact, it seems that many of the villagers were hiring labor to work on their agriculture. Who are these laborers, and the sharecroppers? How do they fit into the class picture?

(3) Similarly, the author misses a chance to address one of the most interesting hypotheses about the evolution of Sudanese society: to what extent is the rising village bourgeoisie- that she describes so well- actively assisting in the spread of Islamic fundamentalism as a major element of ideology and discourse in the political, economic and social realms?

These are small complaints and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing addressed in future work by the author. Cultivating Workers is a well-written book, highly recommended to both researchers in the field of agricultural and rural development, and researchers in broader fields dealing with the study of Sudanese society and African transformations.