Peasants In Anthropology Research Paper

1. Peasants In The History Of Anthropology

From its modern beginnings in the 1800s until the early to mid-twentieth century, anthropology focused largely on foraging, tribal, and chiefdom societies. It was not until after World War II that peasant communities became a major object of anthropological research. This shift of interest by anthropologists toward peasant communities was due to changing global conditions. Foraging and tribal societies were disappearing at ever increasing rates, and in addition to this, following the War, peasants emerged on the world stage as major political actors in the context of the Cold War. Within this global struggle between the so-called ‘First World’ of capitalist societies and the ‘Second World’ dominated by the communist Soviet Union and China, many underdeveloped ‘Third World’ countries were inhabited mainly by rapidly growing peasant populations. The political significance of these nations grew as concern mounted as to whether their peasant populations would veer toward communism or capitalism. Since the poverty of peasant communities was seen as a major inducement for them to turn to communism, promotion of economic development in rural areas of the ‘Third World’ became a priority of US foreign policy. In this geopolitical context, the anthropology of peasant communities flourished from the 1950s until approaching the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s (Kearney 1996). Much of this work was applied anthropology concerned with the improvement of agriculture, health, and education in peasant communities.

2. Anthropological Approaches To Peasants

A distinctive feature of anthropology is that it seeks to study and comprehend all of the major components of a community and how they are integrated. Ideally, this comprehensive method begins with examination of the physical environment of the community and how its inhabitants adapt to that environment with technology and a distinctive division of labor with which they produce food, shelter, and amenities. These features of the environment—technology, labor, and the material products of labor—are parts of a community’s infrastructure, upon which are based an immaterial superstructure that comprises a corresponding patterning of social organization, politics, class positions and relations, gender identities, religion, world view, etc. Ideally, a robust anthropological treatment of a peasant community examines all of these material and immaterial components of a community and how they are interrelated. Furthermore, since peasants, by definition, typically exist within and are shaped by relations of unequal economic exchange with non-peasant communities, a complete anthropological study of a peasant community would also examine this dimension. In practice, however, few anthropologists attain such comprehensiveness. Instead, most anthropologists who study peasant societies tend to concentrate on either superstructural or infrastructural features of a local community, or seek a more comprehensive treatment by focusing on selected features of each. Similarly, anthropological studies vary considerably in the degrees to which and the ways in which they consider how peasant communities are related to nonpeasants. These differing approaches and foci can be illustrated in the work of four contrasting anthropologists.

2.1 Redfield And The ‘Folk–Urban Continuum’

According to Robert Redfield (1941), peasant communities are a kind of folk society that exists on a ‘folk–urban continuum,’ which has both geographic and historic dimensions. Cities represent the modern urban end of the continuum and small, isolated nonagrarian indigenous societies are the extreme traditional folk end, with peasant communities near the traditional end. Redfield saw the history of traditional societies as shaped mainly by the spread of modern features of technology, social organization, family, kinship, values, and world view outward from cities at the urban end of the continuum toward the folk end, in a process of modernization or development. This diffusion of the traits of modernity, especially modern values and world view, would proceed faster were it not for barriers to their acceptance in the traditional culture. This model became important in programs of applied anthropology that sought to identify and overcome cultural barriers to modernization in peasant communities, which were defined as underdeveloped, that is, as waiting to shed their traditional cultures by becoming fully incorporated into the modern national culture, economy, and political system of their nation. This approach to economic, social, and political development in peasant communities became important in American applied anthropology during the Cold War as an alternative to socialist and communist paths of development.

2.2 Foster And The ‘Image Of Limited Good’

Based on long-term intensive fieldwork on the economics, social organization, and culture of a Mexican peasant community, George Foster (1979) developed a model of world view to explain peasant economic and social behavior. This model, ‘The Image of Limited Good’, in the superstructure of peasant society, is based on economic realities in the infrastructure. Foster notes that land, markets, employment, and other sources of income exist in limited amounts in local peasant economies and therefore there is great competition for such scarce resources and economic opportunities. There are rarely enough of the basic material resources to satisfy everyone’s needs and wants. In this situation, peasant ethics and morality are based on the idea that the best accommodation to this situation of Limited Good is for all members of the community to have an equal share of different forms of Good, e.g., food, wealth, affection. Therefore, if someone gets more than their fair share of some form of Good, then, according to the logic of Limited Good thinking, someone else must get less than their fair share. Foster says that this realistic perception of material realities shapes peasant world view in general, which is expressed as envy, fatalism, individualism, fear of witchcraft, and also principles of folk medicine, proverbs, and basic features of social organization and economic behavior, all of which are barriers to development.

2.3 Wolf And The ‘Closed Corporate Peasant Community’

Whereas anthropologists working with a modernization perspective, such as Redfield and Foster, focused on barriers in traditional peasant society to the acceptance of modern cultural traits coming from developed urban areas, other anthropologists working with Marxist concepts examined the opposite process, that is, how unequal market relations, cheaply remunerated labor, interest payments, taxes, and tribute tend to drain economic value from peasant communities. Working with this perspective, Eric Wolf (1966) developed the structural model of the ‘closed corporate peasant community’ to demonstrate how, contrary to Redfield, peasants were not isolated from urban society, but instead formed much of its economic base. He explored mechanisms of value extraction and how peasants attempted to minimize it by seeking to ‘close themselves off’ and defend themselves from exploitive outsiders. Wolf notes that the household organization of production, and the culture of envy and suspicion that Foster and others describe, tend to promote individualism and a lack of community solidarity. These traits led Karl Marx to characterize peasants as like ‘potatoes in a sack,’ that is, unable to organize in their own self interests. But anthropologists like Wolf who were working with a political economy orientation have also been interested in the revolutionary potential of peasants. Indeed, in the twentieth century, some of the major armed conflicts such as the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, and the Vietnam War, have been characterized as peasant wars (Wolf 1969) in which peasant communities sought to gain political and economic independence from non-peasant exploiters.

2.4 Meillassoux And ‘The Articulation Of Modes Of Production’

Since the 1960s anthropologists have become increasingly concerned with migration from peasant communities. Claude Meillassoux (1981), who, like Wolf, also worked in the Marxist tradition, examined how, through circular migration, rural people who were unable to make a complete living as peasants could supplement their income by migrating to seek temporary work as proletarians, thus articulating the peasant and the capitalist modes of production. This situation is seen as a benefit to the modern sector because it shifts costs for the biological and social reproduction of workers to peasant communities. Also, because such peasant workers produce part of their own food and other necessities on their own land, they can accept lower wages than fully proletarianized workers, who need more cash to buy their basic necessities. Thus, whereas the modernization approach of Redfield, Foster, and others predicted that migration would hasten the development of peasant communities, the articulation perspective revealed how such partial proletarianization in some ways perpetuates peasant ways of life in the countryside. Nagengast (1991) shows how this was true even in a socialist country, such as communist Poland, that had strong national policies for full proletarianization and modernization of the countryside. Such conditions of partial proletarianization raise questions about the basic class nature of such peasant workers and worker peasants, and what are the most appropriate political projects to defend their class interests.

3. Economic Development, Global Change, And The Future Of Peasants

Applied anthropology in the Redfield and Foster tradition sees peasant social organization, conservative culture, and world view as barriers to the acceptance of the social and cultural traits of modernity that are essential to economic development. Foster argues that the economic realities that peasants face dispose them to be skeptical and fatalistic about possibilities for personal and especially cooperative efforts to overcome their poverty. According to this analysis, the role of applied anthropology is to understand these social and cultural dynamics of peasant communities and demonstrate alternatives to them. In contrast, applied anthropology in the Marxist tradition, as exemplified by the work of Wolf and Meillassoux, and also by dependency theory and world system theory, pays more attention to structural conditions that keep peasants in politically and economically subordinate positions so that surplus can be extracted from them and transferred to other sectors of the national and world economy, thus maintaining peasants in conditions of de-development. Accordingly, applied anthropology for peasant communities in this tradition is concerned with ending such unequal exchange so that de-developed nations and their peasant communities can retain more of their wealth for their own development.

Currently, increased migration between rural communities and cities and across national borders, and the social networks and complex livelihoods that result from it, have largely obliterated the cultural, social, and economic distinctions between rural and urban areas upon which the persistence of peasants depend. Also, as the rates increase at which supposed peasants migrate in and out of a variety of economic niches— ranging from subsistence farming, to wage labor, to the informal economy, etc.—so do the volume, velocity, and diversity of commodities and information that they consume also increase. These demographic, occupational, and cultural trends towards increased mobility and differentiation thus call into question the geographic, economic, social, and cultural basis of contemporary peasant society and culture (see Kearney 1996). Indeed, peasant societies that, until recently, were the most populous type in world history seem to be rapidly disappearing.

Bibliography:

1. Foster G M. 1979 Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World, rev. edn. Elsevier, New York
2. Kearney M 1996 Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
3. Meillassoux C 1981 Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
4. Nagengast C 1991 Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs: Class, Culture, and the Polish State. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
5. Redfield R 1941 The Folk Culture of Yucatan. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
6. Wolf E 1966 Peasants. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
7. Wolf E 1969 Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. Harper and Row, New York