Contents
Anthropological attention to Peasant
study:
Characteristics of peasants in
continuum model
Characteristics of peasants in
peasant as a social category model:
Economic approach: or the
specific economy approach
Peasant:
Peasants
are small-scale agricultural producers organized into households that rely on
family labor in a subsistence-oriented economy that is nevertheless a part of a
larger state system that extracts various forms of rent from the communities it
controls.
In
peasant communities households are the basic units of production and of
consumption. Such households depend overwhelmingly on members of the household,
both adults and children, to provide the labor needed to run a peasant farm and
participate in a variety of reciprocal labor arrangements during peak labor
periods. Peasants try to avoid hiring regular outside laborers except during
periods of planting or harvesting, when they serve to supplement the labor
provided by household members. Characteristically, outside helpers are often
treated as if they were members of the household, particularly in the case of servants
or adopted children (Chayanyov 1966).
Teodor
Shanin, defined peasantry as having “four essential and inter-linked facets”: The
family farm as the basic multi-functional unit of social organisation, land
husbandry and usually animal rearing as
the main means of livelihood, a specific traditional culture closely linked
with the way of life of small rural communities and multi-directional subjection
to powerful outsiders.[i]
History of the usage:
The
word “peasant” appears in English in late medieval and early modern times, when
it was used to refer to the rural poor, rural residents, serfs, agricultural
laborers, and the “common” or “simple” people. As a verb in that period, “to
peasant” meant to subjugate someone as a peasant is subjugated. Earlier Latin
and Latinate forms (French, Castilian, Catalan, Occitan, etc.) date as far back
as the sixth century and denoted a rural inhabitant, whether or not involved in
agriculture. Very early on, both the English “peasant,” the French “paysan” and
similar terms sometimes connoted “rustic,” “ignorant,” “stupid,” “crass” and
“rude,” among many other pejorative terms.[ii]
The
word could also imply criminality, as in thirteenth-century Germany where “‘peasant’
meant ‘villain, rustic, devil, robber, brigand and looter.”[iii] According
to anthropologist George Dalton, “Peasants were legal, political, social, and economic
inferiors in medieval Europe. The structured subordination of peasants to non-peasants
was expressed in many ways, de jure and de facto, from restraints on their
physical movement to sumptuary restrictions on what kinds of weapons, clothing
and adornments they could wear and use, and foods they could legally consume.”[iv]
Anthropological attention to Peasant study:
Although
Robert Redfield’s fieldwork in Mexico as early as 1926 is considered to be the
first attempt to see peasant as an analytical category, the study of peasant or
the use of the term peasant is quite old. Historians of medieval Europe,
jurists and political theorists, Russian economists and 'rural statisticians'
who carried out sophisticated peasant studies on a national scale, Eastern
European ethnographers of folk-life, rural sociologists stimulated by LePlay to
record family budgets, and others. These scholarly traditions produced a wealth
of theory and data that has been discovered by
contemporary
anthropology, but they do not constitute the historical back ground of the anthropology
of peasantry. To the extent that they dealt with peasants, the point of
reference of such traditions was specific peasant groups, usually the
politically problematic peasantry of particular nations. The roots of the
anthropological interest in peasants were elsewhere, in the comparative study
of the human condition.
This
comparative interest led anthropologists to do field studies in settlements of
small-scale agriculturalists within civilized, state societies—and sometimes to
refer to their subjects as 'peasants'—long before they treated peasants as an analytic
category. The central issue to which the early studies were addressed was the
nature of human communities; they were, first of all, village studies, and only
incidentally studies of peasants. The earliest of these village descriptions, Redfield's
Tepoztlan (1930), emerged out of a concern with the 'human ecology' of
communities, which marked the school of urban sociology developed at the
University of Chicago under the auspices of Redfield's father-in-law, Robert E.
Park. During the 1930s this school, along with Robert and Helen
Lynd's
ground-breaking work on Middletown (1929, 1937), and W. Lloyd Warner's early
initiatives stimulated a number of studies of 'communities'— from metropolitan
ghettoes to whole American towns and, small communities in other societies.
During
the 1960s and 1970s, peasants excited new interest among social scientists.
Over the previous half century, peasant wars and revolutions—in Mexico, China,
Algeria, and Vietnam, among other places—indicated that peasantries had become
important political protagonists.[v]
Development
imperatives in what was then widely termed the “Third World” required in-depth understanding
of rural populations. East-West geopolitical competition and spreading anti-colonial
struggles also fuelled concern about the peasantry, which was at the time and
by almost any definition the majority of humankind.
Continuum vs social category:
Anthropologists’
early efforts to define peasants emphasized that peasantries emerged in order
to provision the first cities and market towns. The category “peasant” was thus
only meaningful in relation to a larger society that included non-peasants.
Such definitions tended to be ample, often including rural artisans,
fisherfolk, pastoralists and small-scale miners in addition to
agriculturalists. Some scholars emphasized generic cultural or “folk”
characteristics of peasants.[vi] These
scholars are the generations of researchers inspired most notably by Robert
Redfield’s Folk Urban Continuum. Redfield's
formal statement on 'the folk society and culture,' as a comparative type apart
from any specific cultural setting, appeared first in 1940— appropriately
enough, in a volume edited by Louis Wirth. Publication of 'The Folk Society' in
the American Journal of Sociology in
1947 then stimulated a
large
literature (much of it critical) on folk-urban and rural-urban types and continua
both in anthropology and in sociology. Later scholars would find a shift in
terminology from 'folk' to 'peasant' an easy step to take; for instance, Foster
commented in 1967 that when he had talked about 'folk' in his 1953 article
'What is Folk Culture?', in fact he was talking about 'peasants' [1967:4].
However, the term 'folk' addressed a specific set of interests, which are not
identical to the range of interests encompassed by 'peasant' studies.
Redfield's corpus of writing reveals consistent themes: recurrent references to
'life in' a place, 'the way of life,' and 'the good life'; a stress on values,
meanings, and understandings; and a view of social relations primarily as a
vehicle of communication of ideas. When he devotes himself specifically to
social dimensions, he reveals an evaluative framework. The reader is left with
no doubt about his preferences as between 'the folk society' and 'urbanism as a
way of life,' and the social polarities in the folk-urban continuum carry
explicit evaluations—clearly, organization is more valued than disorganization,
sacred ways more than secular, group relationships more than individualized
ones. The central interest of Redfield's work appears to be in the quality of
life and the quality of human relations, as these are shaped in communities of
different kinds and in different phases of the human career.
Characteristics of peasants in continuum model
Characteristics
of peasants therefore according to Redfield include severalconsistent themes: recurrent
references to 'life in' a place, 'the way of life,' and 'the good life'; a stress
on values, meanings, and understandings; and a view of social relations primarily
as a vehicle of communication of ideas.
Other
scholars, notably Eric R. Wolf, sought to delineate social structural “types,” based
on whether they had secure land rights or, alternatively, were tenants,
sharecroppers or resident laborers on large properties. “Peasants” tended to be
distinguished from “farmers,” since the former were said to aim at
“subsistence” and produced cash crops primarily for survival and to maintain
their social status rather than to invest and expand the scale of their
operations, as was allegedly the case with the latter.[vii] In
several widely separated zones of the world, such as in much of Latin America
and Indonesia, peasants were found to be living in territorial “corporate communities”
that barred membership to outsiders, held exclusive rights to land and systematically
redistributed surplus wealth through obligatory ritual expenditures. Indeed, as
David Mosse points out, “[a]lmost every region of the world that experienced
colonial rule had some form of ‘government through community.’”[viii]
These “closed” communities contrasted with others elsewhere in which residence
was more open, property and market relations more fluid, and cash crop
production more extensive.[ix]
Characteristics of peasants in peasant as a social
category model:
Wolf
further argued that peasants characteristically had to produce a “replacement
fund” that provided a caloric minimum and assured biological reproduction; a
“ceremonial fund” to support weddings, community festivals and other social responsibilities;
and a “fund of rent” that consisted of wealth in labor, produce or money transferred
to superordinate sectors, such as landlords, moneylenders, intermediaries,
religious specialists, and tax collectors.
Approaches:
The
most fundamental point about peasantry is the structural relationship between
it and the rest ofsociety. This relationship, and the prevailing economic
forces that impinge upon the countryside, have stamped certain qualities on the
peasants and largely determine the underdog position in which they continue to
live. We need, however, to move beyond this broad structural relationship to
consider more closely both peasant culture and peasant economy. Following is a
discussion of the major approaches to the study of peasantry.
Economic approach: or the specific economy approach
This
approach views peasant social structure as being characterised by a specific type
of economy, which is a kin-based small farm enterprise, highly autonomous and
consumption-based. This in turn generates a typical peasant social structure
and a /non-peasant dualism at the national level," The roots of this
approach go back to Marx, but its main proponents are Chayanov (originally
1925, this edition 1966), and more recently the anthropologists Firth (1951)
and M. Nash (1966), and the
geographer
Franklin (1969) . In economic anthropology, some scholars have adopted a 'substantivist'
approach which rejects the claim of 'formalists' that the conceptual framework
developed by modern economics can be used to study any form of economy (to know
more on formalist substantivist debate click
here). In contrast, they emphasise that the economies of non-Western
peasant or tribal societies have to be studied in their own right and that
processes such as production, distribution and exchange should be seen in the
context of these particular societies and their peculiar institu[1]tions
. As Firth has noted, a 'production relationship is often only one facet of a
social relationship. .. . Economic relations can be understood only as a part
of a scheme of social relations." This is clearly true of the Andean
peasantry: a number of scholars, such as Alberti and Mayer (1974) and Murra
(1972) have shown how important the roles of reciprocity and redistribution are
for understanding Andean peasant society over time and as it continues to
function today. Reciprocity is of vital importance not only for understanding
relations among peasants themselves.!" but also between peasants and
mestizos'! and be[1]tween
peasants and their deities."
Moreover,
as the analysis of Gonzalez de Olarte (1984) shows clearly, the production and
consumption behaviour of Andean peasants is explained partly by the
semi-mercantile and non[1]capitalist
character of communal production as well as the extreme poverty of the
peasants. A 'communal economy' is characteristic of the peasantry, with the
organisation of production and work being affected by a system of family interrelations
that has a 'communal effect'. While economic benefits in production, income and
well-being are gained that are higher than would accrue to peasant families
that operated entirely individually, it is also true that the comunidad
(community) as an organisation induces through its poverty a series of
individual and collective behaviours and survival strategies (such as levelling
devices) which reinforce tradition and the subsistence priorities of the family
components. A logical consequence is the formation of restricted markets
characterised by small volumes of merchandise traded.
Cultural approach:
This
approach treats peasants as representatives of an archaic rural social order,
the heirs of an earlier national tradition. Such societies, inherently
conservative and traditional, are characterised by inertia and acculturate only
slowly to Western and urban standards of rationality. Such an analysis often
arises from developmentalists who focus on traditional obstacles to industrialisation
and 'modernisation'. A number of well-known studies of peasantry use this approach.
Erasmus (1968) concluded that peasantry disappeared only because great changes
occurred in infrastructure and technology, permitting a transition from a
'paleotechnic ecotype" to a neotechnic (machine age) ecotype. In this
transition process, the encogido personality syndrome (the timid and withdrawn personality
of the 'passive peasant' who avoids persons of higher status except those who
serve as culture or power brokers) becomes less common as a prominent type
among rural lower classes; and the contrasting syndrome of the entron
personality becomes more common. The entron person is aggressive, con[1]fident,
achievement-oriented, extroverted and not opposed to making contacts with
higher status individuals whose friendship will be to his advantage.
Another
variant of this approach was offered by Foster (1965) as an explanation for the
reluctance of peasants of Tzinzuntan, Western Mexico, actively to follow
development-oriented strategies. In this corporate peasant community, the
desirable things in life - whether land, money, livestock or women - existed
only in finite quantities, and one could obtain the desired goods only at the
expense of someone else. One person's gain is another's loss, and the person
who appropriates more than his fair share of the 'limited good' is strongly
criticised and condemned. This concept helps to explain the reluctance of
peasants to innovate, to become achievement-oriented or to show more
entrepreneurial spirit than their neighbours." Rogers's model of the
'sub-culture of peasantry'," derived from the work of various social
scientists, also exhibits this approach. A sub-culture contains many elements
of the broader culture of which it is a part, yet it is also characterised by
other qualities that separate it from other sectors of the general culture.
Peruvian peasants share many national characteristics with other , but as
primarily subsistence farmers who have experienced poverty and exploitation
over a long period, the Southern Andean people possess certain traits that make
them members of a 'peasant culture' which transcends national boundaries.
Political approach:
This
school ofthought, which usually employs a two-class model of society , studies
the peasantry in terms of power relationships. Peasants are viewed as the
suppressed and exploited producers of pre-capitalist society, and contemporary
peasantry appears as a leftover from an earlier social formation, with its
members being powerless to climb out of their position since they remain at the
bottom of the social pyramid. In this approach the state is usually seen as
representing and maintaining the position of the dominant class; state
institutions fetter the majority of the masses, including the peasantry, in the
historical development of the pre-capitalist and capitalist sys[1]tems.
Powerlessness and productivity are the two key aspects of peasantry under such
a definition. The peasants are dominated by powerful outsiders or minorities
and their agricultural sur[1]pluses
are expropriated by the ruling class, leading to repeated attempts at peasant
revolt. The process of expropriation leads to accumulation of capital and
creation of new class structures, culminating, it is believed, in the
disappearance of both the old rural aristocracy and the peasantry as
such."
In
Peru the Marxist approach to the peasantry has been used to explain the
exploitation of the Andean peasant by the local hacendados (estate owners), middlemen,
government employees and the state bureaucracy. Many approaches in Peru and in Latin
America draw on the seminal work of Wolf (1957 and 1966), which emphasises the
structural position of the peasantry in relation to the rest ofsociety rather
than dwelling on peasant culture. Wolf's analysis is not characteristically
Marxist, but in identifying and emphasising the importance of power relationships
in peasant societies he has made a major contribution. The relationship between
the hacendado and the peasants is not purely economic: the patron is also a
power broker who is expected to reciprocate with certain social obligations,
from helping 'his people' avoid the draft to the armed services, to baptising their
children. In the same way the economic surplus of peasants, whether in labour,
produce or cash, is siphoned off by the local power structure in return for
some small acts of reciprocity. Although peasants are quite aware of their
dependency on the local power structure and the extreme asymmetrical nature of
many such relationships, there is little they can do about it as they have few
options available.
A
variant of class domination and exploitation is the 'internal colonialism'
thesis. This view suggests that relationships between regions such as the Andes
and the dominant coastal region are similar to those between a colony and its
metropolis.
Another
variant is the 'triangle without a base' approach." The apex of each
baseless triangle is the patron. He is not only sovereign in the local area
because of the power he wields over his subordinates (peasants or serfs), but
he also represents the essential link with the outside world from which all
information is likely to come that might be used by the subordinates towards their
own emancipation.
In
such a baseless triangle the subordinate peasants are isolated and atomised. It
is only where the base of the triangle is closed by alliances (when the
subordinate populations become aware of their conditions of subordination and
common class) that they achieve the means to enable them either to challenge the
power of the patron, or to establish links with new , more beneficial patrones.
Sources used:
Sydel
Silverman (1979) The peasant concept in anthropology, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 7:1, 49-69
Marc
Edelman (2013). What is a peasant? What
are peasantries? A briefing paper on
issues of definition. Graduate Centre, City University of New York
Watters,
R.F. (1994). Approaches to the Peasantry. In: Poverty and Peasantry in Peru’s Southern Andes, 1963–90. Palgrave
Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12319-3_2
Barfield,
T. (1997). The Dictionary of
Anthropology. New York: Blackwell.
Further readings
[i] Teodor
Shanin, “The Nature and Logic of the Peasant Economy 1: A Generalisation,”
Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (October 1973): 63–64
[ii] Oxford
English Dictionary, “Peasant, N. and Adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2005,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/139355?result=1&rskey=F232n4&
[iii] Jacques
Le Goff and Edmund King, “The Town as an Agent of Civilisation, C. 1200-c.
1500,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, ed. Carlo M.
Cipolla (London: Collins/Fontana, 1972), 71.
[iv] George
Dalton, “Peasantries in Anthropology and History,” Current Anthropology 13, no.
3–4 (October 1972): 391.
[v] Eric
R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row,
1969)
[vi] Sydel
Silverman, “The Peasant Concept in Anthropology,” Journal of Peasant Studies 7,
no. 1 (1979): 49–69.
[vii] Eric
R. Wolf, “Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion,”
American Anthropologist 57, no. 3 (June 1955): 452–471.
[viii]
David Mosse, “Collective Action, Common Property, and Social Capital in South
India: An Anthropological Commentary,” in The Contested Commons: Conversations
Between Economists and Anthropologists, ed. Pranab K. Bardhan and Isha Ray
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2008), 83.
[ix] Eric
R Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13, no. 1 (Spring 1957): 1–18; Eric R.
Wolf, “The Vicissitudes of the Closed Corporate Peasant Community,” American
Ethnologist 13, no. 2 (May 1986): 325–329.
