This article explores the political role of rural and indigenous women in the context of the socio-environmental, health and political crises in Chile, where social movements have pressured the political establishment to decisively move towards a change in Chile’s constitutional foundations. The study analyses the historical political demands and strategies of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI) as a case of the women’s peasant movement with a relevant political role in shaping the social demands in the face (...) of the crises. Following the political ecology of food through the decolonial and ecofeminist perspective and the social movement theory, findings indicate the current relevance of rural and indigenous women as political actors of change, a relevance that has been neglected for most of Chile’s history. With their leadership and socially grounded demands, peasant and indigenous women are influencing the political agenda decisively using strategies that are shared with other peasant movements in Latin America. Rural and indigenous women are fundamental political actors that should undoubtedly be considered when studying struggles for social change in the 21st century. (shrink)

The development of factor markets has opened Chinese agriculture for the penetration of capitalism. This new round of rural transformation—China’s agrarian transition— raises the agrarian question in the Chinese context. This study investigates how capitalist forms and relations of production transform agricultural production and the peasantry class in rural China. The authors identify six forms of nonpeasant agricultural production, compare the labor regimes and direct producers’ socioeconomic statuses across these forms, and evaluate the role of China’s land-rights institution in shaping (...) these forms. The empirical investigation presents three main findings: Peasant differentiation : capitalist forms of agricultural production differentiate peasants into a variety of new class positions. Market-based stratification: producers in capitalist agriculture are primarily stratified by their positions in labor and land markets; their socioeconomic statuses are linked with their varying degrees of proletarianization. Institutional mediation: rural China’s dual-track land system plays a crucial role in shaping the diverse and unique forms of capitalist production. (shrink)

This engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling class. In consequence, popular revolts (...) against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale. (shrink)

Riassunto: La filosofia originale cinese è una sublimazione della coscienza culturale umana di base - la coscienza della vita e della riproduzione - che è l’unificazione del “Concetto di yin e yang” e del “Concetto di ciclo di vita “ in cui “lo yin e lo yang si uniscono per creare tutte le cose, e il ciclio dà una vita senza fine. La cultura originale cinese determina la visione filosofica, la visione artistica, il temperamento emotivo, la benessere psicologica e lo (...) spirito nazionale della nazione cinese. Il sistema filosofico cinese, che rappresenta l’unificazione della cosmologia, dell’epistemologia e della metodologia della nazione cinese, è un sistema filosofico completo e maturo che si è formato nella società tardo primitiva molto prima delle Dinastie Xia, Shang e Zhou. La cultura originale cinese, dalla cultura della ceramica dipinta di 7.000 anni fa fino ai giorni nostri, dalla cultura archeologica sotterranea alla cultura di massa terrestre, è un concetto ampio di belle arti, determinato da una visione filosofica dell’arte plastica di osservare gli oggetti e prendere immmagini. La cultura originale e la filosofia originale della Cina primitiva sono ancora conservate in un’eredità storica estremamente ricca e completa nella vita sociale della cultura di massa. Per questo motivo la Cina è l’unico Paese tra le civiltà antiche che non aver subito una frattura culturale. (shrink)

We investigate the rural resistance of one of the world’s largest social movements, La Via Campesina, as a powerful enactment of radical democracy in practice. More than this, the paper describes how the movement challenges the framework of radical democracy by pointing towards the ethical importance of recognizing the relationship of human dignity with nature and considering ethico-political values inherent in the peasants’ way of living. Their resistance is a rejection of depoliticizing silencing, and their everyday life is a (...) commitment to a “more than human” radical democracy in its most radical sense, as they are always already “in parliament with land”. We conclude by outlining a perspective which is both more than radical and more democratic, considering those who have not yet been heard but also that which, in the light of radical democracy, has never been counted as part of the political body at all: nature. (shrink)

In the article, the social structure of mountain-plant serf population of fief and seasonal plants in the Southern Urals in the first half of the 19th century is studied. It is noted that due to the kind of their activity, all mountain-plant population was in this or that way connected with plant work; according to their social structure they were peasants, bought for the plants, or were the owners’ private serfs. It is shown that because of the variety of (...) industrial work at a plant, the serfs of the plant-owners were categorized and differed according to the working conditions and possibilities of their own management. The Southern Urals is noted to have become the arena of private mining industry activity as compared to other areas of the country. The fact predetermining the social composition of factory population. The sources of formation and growth of the group of factory peasants of the Southern Urals are shown. In the article, the social structure is analyzed and social groups of factory peasants are described for three different mining areas of the region. (shrink)

The author studies with the problems of formation of the tenancy institution, the social composition and land tenure by the tenants. The obligations, share and territorial location of the peasants - tenants in the Southern Urals are analyzed. Complicated land relations between the tenants and Bashkir’s are revealed. The results of the undertakings by the government in land relations rights regulation of Bashkir’s and their tenants are analyzed. The purposes, the main content of the decrees of 1830-1850s on land (...) arrangement of the tenants are distinguished. It is emphasized that the activity of Russian authorities on land tenure had not liquidated the uncertainty of land relations between Bashkir’s and their tenants. (shrink)

At eighty-five, Jacques Maritain, the most distinguished Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, has written what he offers as his last book, and it turns out to be a shocker. The peasant, as Maritain calls himself in the title, is a man who calls a spade a spade; and a storm of controversy descended immediately on the book's publication in France, as both Right and Left reeled from the force of Maritain's criticism.The Peasant of the Garonne is a sharp attack (...) on the new philosophy, hoping to cool off the fever for change that Maritain believes is imperiling the church's traditional spirituality and even the substance of doctrine. There is sardonic humor in his treatment of Teilhardians, phenomenologists, existentialists, new-style biblical critics, and clerical Freudians, but Maritain is deeply serious in warning that their capitulation to fashioniable trends represents a kind of kneeling before the world. (shrink)

A gender revolution allegedly occurred in the British Cape Colony in the nineteenth century. African patriarchs, traditionally pastoralists, took over women's agricultural work, adopted Victorian gender attributes, and became prosperous peasants . Scholars have accepted the plausibility of these seismic shifts in masculinity, postulated in Colin Bundy's classic, The Rise & Fall of the South African Peasantry. I re-examine them, for Bundy's "Case Study" of Herschel, acclaimed as one of the regions that best fits his thesis. This Case Study (...) omits women, who were the typical peasant producers. It marginalizes men failing to conform to bourgeois Victorian gender norms. It misrepresents class formation, causation, periodization, and peasant well-being. It misdates proletarianization by at least three decades. The zenith of commodity production is misdated by at least half a century. A labor reservoir characterized by severe subsistence problems is represented as a prosperous peasantry. Bundy postulates that patriarchs "rose" into women's work and colonial masculine scripts in response to favorable conditions; I argue instead that younger men "fell" into these domains in response to disasters. A silent gender bias-towards black Englishmen, against African women-had a marked impact on Bundy's analysis of class formation. The purpose of this article is to interrogate this silence and to show how it has warped a classic text. (shrink)

Many traditional agroecosystems found in Latin America constitute major in situ repositories of crop genetic diversity. This native germplasm is crucial to developing countries and industrialized nations alike. Native varieties expand and renew the crop genetic resources of developed countries while also performing well under the ecological and economic conditions of the traditional farms where they are grown. With agricultural modernization and environmental degradation, crop genetic diversity is decreasing in peasant agricultural systems. Research is urgently needed to document rates and (...) causes of genetic erosion in these systems and the role that peasants play in maintenance of crop genetic diversity. It is proposed that multi-disciplinary teams that work under the paradigms of ethnoecology and agroecology be assembled to integrate farmers’ knowledge with Western scientific approaches to design meaningful in situ crop genetic conservation strategies. (shrink)

‘Woman questions’ were emphasized in common speech during the time of the party-state in Hungary. In the 1950s this was symbolized by women tractor drivers, Stakhanovites in construction industry, or women who were present in public life and in politics. Mrs Mihály Berki, née Magdolna Szakács was one of the first emblematic female politicians who was appointed the first peasant woman főispán [honorary prefect] from a village at the end of 1948. The central elements of her life story were the (...) social and geographical mobility: how could she adapt to the new roles and environments? What kind of competences did she need? How did she acquire them? Did the image of a peasant woman politician with a kerchief change during her career? I intend to outline a wider social context in connection with the determining features of her career such as her being a female, her peasant background and her institutional socialization. (shrink)

Many authors suggest the need to define ‘sustainable development’in operational terms. This paper looks at the problems ofattempting to ask whether peasant farming systems are sustainable.Any attempt at sustainability assessment needs to consider issuesrelated to the selected indicators or performance criteria, spatialscale or boundaries, and temporal scale. While there is certainlya need for more rigorous analysis of sustainability issues, thereis limited outlook for an approach based on indicators. Even if themany purely technical problems associated with specific indicatorscan be surmounted, will (...) accurate bio-physical data advance ourknowledge about sustainability? Peasant systems arepolitically-guided management systems, whose boundaries are the state,not the field or the farm. Given the dynamic nature of peasant farmingsystems, where do we draw the line in assessing sustainability?Attempts at sustainability assessment 100 years ago or even 20–30years ago would have been completely superseded by events. We drawattention to the system as a whole, to a web of interconnections,causes and effects – of varying significance over both time andspace. (shrink)

In 1981, an extraordinary work, written by Lev Timofeev, was smuggled to the West and immediately printed in Russian. It has now been translated into English for the first time under the title Soviet Peasants (or: The Peasants'; Art of Starving).' The book is a rare exercise in social anthropology in as much as Timofeev manages to bring together an expert's knowledge of Soviet agricultural policy with penetrating observations on the everyday life of peasants based on his (...) own direct experience of the Russian countryside. Most of what Timofeev reveals about the economic, social, and moral quality of life in the USSR are things which have long been hidden (or denied) by Soviet authorities. (shrink)

Infrastructure-making in interwar India was a dynamic, multilayered process involving roads and vehicles in urban and rural sites. One of their strongest playgrounds was Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces in central and western India. Focusing on this region in the interwar period, this paper analyzes the varied relationship between peasant households and town-centred modernizing agents in the making of road transport infrastructures. The central argument of this paper is about the persistence of bullock carts over motor cars in the (...) region. This persistence was grounded in the specific regional environment, the effects of the 1930s economic depression, and the priorities of social classes. Pinpointing these connections, the paper highlights that “modernization” of infrastructure was not a simple, linear process of progressivist change, nor did it mean the survival of apparently “old” technologies in the modern era. Instead, the paper pays attention to conflicting social complexities, implications, and meanings of the connection between infrastructure and modernity that modernization assumptions often overlook. Here, the paper shows how technological change occurred as a result of real, material class interests pulling infrastructural technology in different directions. This was where and why arguments of road-motor lobbyists and cart advocates eventually clashed, and Gandhian social workers resisted motor transport in defense of peasant interests. (shrink)

European writer of Romanian origin, Vintila Horia - Goncourt Prize in 1960 for the novel Dieu est né enexil - was a truly awakened consciousness of his time. Wherever he was - in Bucharest or Florence, Buenos Aires or Paris, Rome or Madrid - this “polyglot nomad” never left the unyielding values of the spirit and of knowledge. His work of literary epistemology, hisnovelistic creation - fed by exile, love and by the divine -, as well as the Journal d’un (...) paysan du Danube, stand as testimony. Focal point of my approach, this text sheds light on the metaphysical realm of a way of thinking in which the undivided man and the man to come are one and the same. Since for the exiled VintilaHoria,”the peasant from the Danube” is “celui dans lequel ce qui fut rencontre celui qui sera, dans un espace-temps non-euclidien”, and his journal emphasizes this “rediscovery”, in spite of the dark times of history; an encounter in, through and beyond the broken grounds of science, art and philosophy, but nevertheless, deeply anchored in philosophy, art and science. Apparently, rediscovery and isolation of the same proportion; in fact, we are talking about an anagnorisis: the inner man and the outer man have never separated, despite the “microbial fauna of Kali Yuga”. “Nomade polyglotte” through his evolution, a result of flawless reflexive stability, Vintila Horia proves himself to be, at the same time, animmobile nomad; “the peasant from the Danube” is the plenary expression of this unusual simultaneity. (shrink)

Although the social and economic structure of peasant households exhibited much continuity before and after the rise of capitalism, those households were not rigid or inflexible in the face of economic change. A study of peasants in a Dutch region shows that households, motivated and bound by both cultural and economic factors, made careful choices in how to react to capitalist pressures. By responding actively and deliberately, peasants were able to exert significant control over their lives and their (...) future and did not become mere victims of capitalist development. Indeed, instead they actually helped shape the local economy. (shrink)

The agricultural sector of production is a unique sphere of the national economy, which determines the level and quality of life of the country's population, but largely depends on the level of development and regional characteristics of economic entities, especially small forms of agricultural production – peasant farms. The article presents the features of the development of peasant farms in the regions of Russia. Based on the analysis of features of development of peasant farms of constituent entities of the Russian (...) Federation grouping the number and share of production data of the farmers identified areas that require a differentiated approach in the implementation of state support. (shrink)

In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance of (...) petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology. (shrink)