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 the last to christianise, and this gave rise to "pagan" as a religious term). 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 many pre-industrial societies, peasants comprised the bulk of the population. Peasant societies often had well developed social support networks. Especially in harder
climates, members of the community who had a poor
harvest or suffered other hardships were taken care of by the rest of the community. Peasants usually only had one set of clothing, two at most. Also, a peasant usually owed their lord 20% of their earnings. They also owed the priest or bishop 10% of their ownings. Of course, knights could, and would usually demand tributes for keeping them alive. Overall, the peasant usually retained only 10-20% of their total work and earnings.
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.
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 though 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.
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.
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.
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. One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was the
Journal of Peasant Studies.
See also
Other terms for peasant
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
Category:Early Middle AgesCategory:High Middle AgesCategory:Farming historyCategory:FeudalismCategory:Industrial RevolutionCategory:Social historyde:Bauernstandeo:Kamparanofr:Paysanhe:איכרnl:Boerpl:Chłopipt:Camponêsro:Ţăranru:Крестьянинsk:Sedliakuk:Селяниzh:鄉民
