Dear Colleagues, I am writing to ask for assistance in producing an online resource that should be useful to all of us who are interested in the topic of agricultural technology in Latin America. My request is occasioned by having been asked by Oxford University Press to produce an article and extensive annotated bibliography on “Agricultural Technology” within their Latin American Studies section. This product will be available on an ongoing basis with opportunities to update and modify it as time goes by. I am interested in any sources in you may recommend, including books, articles, institutional reports, on-line resources, and films. They may be in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.
This is a challenging task and one that will be most representative, comprehensive, and useful if it reflects a collaborative work rather than simply my individual knowledge and effort Please feel free to recommend your own work and that of friends and colleagues. While the end product must reflect a balanced treatment of ongoing controversies and unanswered questions, individual references may be controversial and polemical. Whatever descriptions you may offer about your suggestions will be much welcomed, as will be any guidance to how they may be obtained for my examination and for the future users of the resource. If you can send url’s or full text, that would be helpful. I am interested in resources that may treat the topic from historical, cultural, anthropological, geographical, sociological, economic, scientific, and technical points of view. I am aiming for a broad and fairly comprehensive overview that is both historical and contemporary, necessarily slighting highly specialized discussions of particular technological developments. Your contribution will help in making this a genuinely useful tool for all of us and for others, and I thank you in advance for any suggestions you can offer. While I am being paid a nominal honorarium for the work, as you might expect, my compensation represents, in the immortal words of California Governor Jerry Brown in referring to the wages of the state’s professors, an almost purely “psychic reward.” Please feel free to forward this to others, including to other list-serve groups or institutions. Angus Wright Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies California State University, Sacramento
