peasant

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In a detail of Brueghel's Land of Cockaigne (1567) a soft-boiled egg has little feet to rush to the luxuriating peasant who catches drops of honey on his tongue, while roast pigs roam wild: in fact, hunger and harsh winters were realities for the average European in the 16th century.

A peasant is an agricultural worker who subsists by working a small plot of ground. The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district (when the Roman Empire became Christian, these outlying districts were "pagan," that is, not Christian). ^[1] The term peasant today is sometimes used in a pejorative sense for impoverished farmers.

Peasants typically make up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a Pre-industrial society, dependent on the cultivation of their land: without stockpiles of provisions they thrive or starve according to the most recent harvest. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants. Pre-industrial societies have diminished with the advent of globalization and as such there are considerably fewer peasants to be found in rural areas throughout the world (as a proportion of the total world population).

Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy has taken root the term peasant proprietors is frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where the land is chiefly held by smallholders. It is sometimes used by people who consider themselves of higher class as slang to refer pejoratively to those of poorer education who come from a lower income background.

Mixed Media Portrait Sculpture of 18th century French peasants by artist George S. Stuart, Ojai, CA in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ventura County, Ventura, CA. Photo by Peter d'Aprix

In the great majority of pre-industrial societies, peasants constitute the bulk of the population. Peasant societies generally have very well developed social support networks. Especially in harder climates, members of the community who have a poor harvest or suffer some form of hardship will be taken care of by the rest of the community.

Peasant societies can often have very stratified social hierarchies within them. Rural people often have very different values and economic behavior from urbanites, and tend to be more conservative. Peasants are often very loyal to inherited power structures that define their rights and privileges and protect them from interlopers, despite their low status within those power structures.

Fernand Braudel devoted the first volume–called The Structures of Everyday Life–of his major work, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century to the largely silent and invisible world that existed below the market economy.

Since it was the literate classes who left the most records, and these tended to dismiss peasants as figures of coarse appetite and rustic comedy, the term "peasant" may have a pejorative rather than descriptive connotation in historical memory. Society was theorized as being organized into three "estates": those who work, those who pray, and those who fight.^[2]

In a barter economy, peasants characteristically have a different attitude to work from people in a money economy.

Medieval European peasants

The relative position of Western European peasants was greatly improved after the Black Death unsettled medieval Europe.

In the wake of this disruption to the established hierarchy, later centuries saw the invention of the printing press, the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment.

This evolution of ideas in an environment of relatively widespread literacy laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution, which enabled mechanically and chemically augmented agricultural production while simultaneously increasing the demand for factory workers in cities. These factory workers with their low skill and large numbers quickly came to occupy the same socio-economic stratum as the original medieval peasants.

This was especially pronounced in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries. The Tsars then began to notice that the West had made enormous strides they had not, responding by forcing the largely illiterate peasant populations under their control to embark upon a Westernization and industrialization campaign.

Peter the Great initiated a half-successful attempt to force more than 500 years' worth of social change in the space of a few generations. Modernization of agriculture in Eastern Europe and Russia was not achieved until after the October Revolution.

Peasant Revolution and Peasant Studies

The field of peasant studies as such was rooted in the early work of scholars such as Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong, and post-war studies of the Great Tradition and Little Tradition in work of Robert Redfield. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and their own disciplines. This rethinking was partly in response to American involvement in the Vietnam War, which critics on the left regarded as an attempt to repress a peasant revolution. Peasant Revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism. ^[3]

The anthropologist Eric Wolf, for instance, drew on the work of earlier scholars in the Marxist tradition, such as Daniel Thorner, who saw the rural population as a key element in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Wolf and a group of scholars criticized both Marx and the field of modernization theorists for treating peasants as lacking the ability to take action. ^[4] James C. Scott’s field observation in Malaysia convinced him that villagers were active participants in their local politics even though they were forced to use indirect methods. Many of these activist scholars looked back the Peasant Movement in India and the theories of revolution in China led by Mao Zedong starting in the 1920s. The anthropologist Myron Cohen, however, asked why the rural population in China were called "peasants" rather than "farmers," a distinction he called political rather than scientific.^[5] One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was the Journal of Peasant Studies.

See also

"Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich

• Family economy
• Feudalism
• Petty nobility
• Folk culture
• Lower class
• Peasant revolt
• Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
• Serfdom
• Slavery

Other terms for peasant

• Aloer
• Boor/Boer
• Campesino
• Churl
• Cotter

The Peasant Wedding, by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567 or 1568

• Fellah
• Free tenant
• Hari
• Honbyakushō
• Kulak
• Muzhik
• Nóngmín
• Pagesos de remença
• Peon
• Serf
• Villein
• Smerd

Notes and references

• E. J. Hobsbawm, Peasants and politics, Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 October 1973 , pages 3 - 22 - article discusses the definition of "peasant" as used in social sciences