2.

 But conversations with farmers in areas where FSR/E teams have been

 working, convince me that farmers remain greatly puzzled by such

 things as why researchers insist fields or plots should be measured in

 certain ways and what those measurements tell them or, what it is in

 the logic of researchers' world that makes them value, for example,

 certain livelihood activities such as field cropping above other

 activities which seem to the farmers themselves equally necessary

 components of their livelihood. The breakdown of communication and

 understanding seems the greater between women as farmers, food

 processors, traders and consumers and male researchers, but not only

 because of the socio-cultural distances between them: male researchers

 may understand little of the rationality of the domestic domain in

 their own worlds. The researchers' lack of an implicit standard or

 frame of reference in this sphere or a partial or biased one -

 influences, of course, their own set of mental constructs by which

 they perceive and interpret the world of women within farming systems.

 Communication difficulties thus are compounded.


There are a number of threads which might be disentangled here. I

want to pull out and untwist only one: the logic of flexibility within

the domestic domain, illustrated by examples from Lesotho and northern

Zambia (1). The data are not complete from the FSR/E point of view,

being collected for other purposes, but they do highlight a number of

points which FSR/E theory and practice needs to take into account. The

paper concludes with suggestions about how this might be done.


The data are drawn from areas of acute seasonal stress; in Lesotho,

from an area in which a longitudinal study of energy flows suggests a