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peasant

 
Dictionary: peas·ant   (pĕz'ənt) pronunciation
 
n.
  1. A member of the class constituted by small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the land where they form the main labor force in agriculture.
  2. A country person; a rustic.
  3. An uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; a boor.

[Middle English paissaunt, from Old French paisant, from pais, country, from Late Latin pāgēnsis, inhabitant of a district, from Latin pāgus, district.]


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A farmer whose activities are dominated by the family group. The family provides all the labour and the produce is for the family as a whole. Landholdings are small, sometimes owned by the family, but often leased from a landlord. Most of the produce is consumed by the family, but occasional surpluses are sold in the open market. Although peasants have been characterized as backward and resistant to change, peasant strategies can be highly rational in a society where there is little margin for error.

 

Any member of a class that tills the soil as small landowners or agricultural labourers. The peasant economy generally has a simple technology and a division of labour by age and sex. The basic unit of production is the family or household. Peasant families traditionally consume what they produce, though a portion of their output may be sold in the market or paid to a landlord. Productivity per worker and yields per unit of land are usually low. Peasants as a class tend to disappear as a society industrializes, though peasantlike social structures may persist under new economic regimens. See also ejido; feudalism; hacienda; serfdom.

For more information on peasant, visit Britannica.com.

 
Science Dictionary: peasant
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A farmer or agricultural worker of low status. The word is applied chiefly to agricultural workers in Asia, Europe, and South America, who generally adhere to traditional agricultural practices and have little social mobility or freedom.

 
Word Tutor: peasant
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pronunciation

IN BRIEF: A person who makes a living from working the soil.

pronunciation He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German philosopher, scientist & writer.

 
Wikipedia: 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.

Contents

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

Other terms for peasant

Notes and references

  1. ^ Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary p. 846, 866
  2. ^ Richard Southern: The Making of the Middle Ages (1952)
  3. ^ Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
  4. ^ Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York,: Harper & Row, 1969).
  5. ^ Myron Cohen, "Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese 'Peasant'," Daedalus 122.2 (Spring 1993): 151-170.
  • 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

 
Translations: Peasant
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Dansk (Danish)
n. - bonde

Nederlands (Dutch)
boer, lomperd

Français (French)
n. - paysan, plouc (péj)
adj. - paysan, de paysan

Deutsch (German)
n. - Bauer, Landarbeiter
adj. - Bauern-, bäurisch

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - χωρικός, χωριάτης, αγρότης
adj. - χωριάτικος, χωριάτης

Italiano (Italian)
contadino

Português (Portuguese)
n. - camponês (m), lavrador (m)
adj. - rural

Русский (Russian)
крестьянин

Español (Spanish)
n. - campesino, labrador, labriego
adj. - campesino, labrador

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - bonde, jordbrukare, lantis, bondtölp
adj. - allmoge-

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
农夫, 乡下人

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 農夫, 鄉下人

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 농부, 소작농

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 農夫, 小作農, 田舎者

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) قروي, فلاح (صفه) فلاحي, ريفي خلوي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮איכר, בור, גס‬


 
 
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Geography Dictionary. A Dictionary of Geography. Copyright © Susan Mayhew 1992, 1997, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Science Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
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