Peasents

From KstructIB

Peasants

Peasants: Typically agricultural people who share the same general cultural tradition as members of the larger and more technologically complex societies in which they live. Found in India, China, Latin America, etc.

Perceptions of peasants:

• Poor
• Little education (formal)
• Manual labour jobs
• Under-developed
• Live in country ‘slums’
• Limited access to healthcare (poor health)
• Closed group
• Low skills
• Untrustworthy
• Hindrance- development barriers
• Family orientated
• Nomadic
• Incestuous
• Backward

Peasants as an open and closed system

Open and Closed system: the level of integration into industrialised society.

Closed System:

• Own peasant society provides solidarity
• There exists a them/us dichotomy (division)- fear of prejudice, racism etc.
• Sense of affinity (they feel attached to their own group)
• They all live together
• Separated from wider society
• They trade with each other
• They have their own peasant/tribal dialect; this creates a sense of solidarity
• Geographically- they are a sub-group in a city and live in isolated areas and are thus geographically distant from ‘normal society’.
• They are ‘closed’ due to exploitation (social and economic)
• Peasants are often exploited and dominated by middle men who work between them and the larger organisations.

Open System:

• They trade with outside communities, such as larger communities and organisations
• They are bi/tri lingual
• They migrate to the city due to a lack of money and skills

The nature of peasant communities

Peasants produce much of the subsistence and are self-contained. They produce foodstuffs and other goods which flow into urban centres. They thus participate economically as producers and consumers into wider economic systems (ties with international markets).

The peasant community:

• Kulaks: Own land and exploit the farm wage labour of others
• Middle Class: Independent small holders of land
• Serfs: Landless tenants

Peasant Studies- Broadened Perspectives

Peasants were wary of other cultures, they were suspicious and have resisted many attempts to incorporate them into ‘normal’ society. Families competed with each other for everything; even friendship and love. They are preoccupied with health and fitness.

They are also traditional and value morality.

Machismo, honour and prestige are key aspects of the culture. All the peasant characteristics are assumed to be the outcome of them having to cope with centuries of exploration (by anthropologists). There are multi-community peasant communities.

Social Organisation of Peasantry

Patrilineage- group of descent deriving from males.

• Fictive Kinship
• Distrust
• Struggle for status

Dyadic contracts: exchanges of goods and services between two individuals bound into relationships in different spheres of life (similar to contracts). The peasant household head and his  wife lead a two-sided existence economically:

• subsistence cultivators
• contribute to an outside economy in the form of agricultural surpluses.

Case Studies:

Pg 402- Zincantan Social Organisation (Vogt 1969)

Pg 405- Campadrazgo in Mexico (Davila 1971)

Pg 406- Pottery Production in Amantenango (Nash 1961)

Pg 414- Myan-Ladino Economic Relationships in Chiapas (Stavenhagen

1975)

Characteristics of Peasant Societies:

1. Non-mechanised agriculture
2. Small scale of production. Firth said “many a peasant farmer is also a fisherman or craftsman by turns, as his seasonal cycle or his cash needs influence him”. Redfield, who is more agreed with, rejects this idea and restricts the term ‘peasant’ to agricultural people.
3. Economic and social relationship with a general / larger and more powerful culture and tradition (The ‘Great Tradition’).
4. Grow most of own food etc (i.e. meet most of subsistence needs but are NOT independent). They also grow a surplus to sell etc.
5. Often isolated from the mainstream
6. Worldview conservative. Peasant tend to identify strongly with their land, their families and the ethic of hard work. Some tend to view the world as a place in which there are not enough good things- wealth, happiness, good health etc to go around. This is known as ‘the image of the limited good’ (Foster). Inherent in this view is the idea that if one person accumulates more than his/her share of goods, another will have less than a full share. This notion can make peasants jealously protective of what they have, suspicious in their relationships with others etc.
7. Often a history of domination by other groups.

Eric Woolf divided them into:

• Closed peasant societies: more likely to incorporate the characteristics of peasant communities. Outsiders are unwelcome and the membership of the community is closely defined. They live in poverty and what Woolf calls ‘defensive ignorance’; they remain uneducated in order to protect their traditional way of life. Their culture discourages the accumulation and display of wealth; those who manage to accumulate some wealth are pressured to return to the economic level of everyone else by sharing with relatives or by spending their accumulations on community events. Examples: Mexico, Spain.
• Open peasant societies: arose in response to the increasing demand around the world for crops that could be readily sold for cash- a product of the rise of Capitalism. An open peasant society is therefore geared to a national / international economy and the peasants may sell half or more of what they produce rather than use it themselves. They own their land and sometimes borrow money, although on a small scale. They are much more integrated into the larger society, and welcome changes from the outside.

Social structure:

Women's Status:Status of women is usually low, perhaps because peasant women typically work in the  domestic sphere rather than outside it. WARD GAILEY suggests that economics based on money may encourage status differences based on sex. Women’s value devalued cause they don’t make the money.

Sometimes lineal descent groupings remain important (e.g. Zincantan Mayan Indians).

Sometimes fictive ties have become important (e.g. Compadrazgo in Mexico).

Social structure: usually independence of household groups is most common. Economically, family households characteristically act as separate corporations, as units of production, and as competitors for scarce resources and income. In many peasant communities, these households stand relatively isolated and are not organised into lineages or other kin groups. The fragmentation into nuclear families, and their economic competition, are very often reflected in the texture of social relations, There is competition and hostile distrust between families.

There is an emphasis on dyadic relations (Foster). Dyadic: the way pairs of individuals are, in many different spheres of life, bound into relationships almost similar to contracts, though they are not enforced in law. Ties outside the family are, at least in the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan, primarily between individuals rather than groups. They persist partly because they are never precisely balanced, and hence call for continuing reciprocity. Some dyadic ties are between persons of equal status; others are with patrons of superior status (including deities as well as people) who exploit and are ‘exploited’ by the lower-status clients for mutual benefit. Ties to powerful patrons outside the community help to link its resistance into wider social networks. Modernisation of the broader society often pulls peasant societies toward increasing openness and secularisation.

Gender as an organising concept

There is a distinction made between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’:

• Sex: the biological category into which a person is born, male or female, as determined by chromosomal and anatomical characteristics.
• Gender- Learned maleness or femaleness, as reflected in sexual orientation and sex roles.

Gender identity: an individual’s self-identification as male or female.

Gender hierarchy: a ranking of cultural notions of maleness and femaleness, as opposed to a ranking of individual males and females.

Patriarchy: A society politically and economically dominated by males.

What is the cause of this patriarchy? Why is the status of activities in the public domain ore than that in the domestic domain?

It is undisputed that men have greater physical strength then women, but not so widely agreed upon are the differences in behaviour which result from these physiological and skeletal differences. Quinn states that one obvious consequence of the male advantage in strength and energy is the ability of men to carry out more arduous physical tasks. The physical advantage of males has been construed by some as an explanation of the universal dominance of men over women.

Property inheritance and post-marital residence is a good indication of a women’s relatively high status.