Peasants

In his seminal book, Peasants, Eric Wolf explains that peasants are “those large segments of mankind which stand midway between the primitive tribe and industrial society.” Wolf's book is a tour-de-force explanation of who peasants are, as well as a 1960s state-of-the-art statement about what had become one of the more important classificatory categories in anthropology.

Peasants are generally considered to be farmers who sell their surplus in the market. How this surplus enters the market, conceived of broadly, can be in the form of hard goods directed at a marketplace, the payment of rent to a landlord, the payment of taxes to the government, or various combinations of these. Peasants are semi-self-sufficient, meaning they reproduce most but not all of their subsistence needs. In order to fulfill their basic needs they enter the marketplace, where they sell their surplus agricultural products and other crafts produced by members of the household. Peasants are members of states that, through various forms of coercion, also draw them into capitalist markets. However, as Wolf notes, peasants tend to be conservative and resist proletarianization.

From the beginning, anthropological studies of peasants have been concerned with the description of peasants—their life-ways and economic practices—and with the utility of the category itself. Since Redfield's description of peasant life in Tepoztlán,Mexico, the concept has undergone numerous changes and continues to prompt new theoretical debates. Redfield's ethnographic work in central Mexico and later in Yucatan awkwardly identifies his subjects not as peasants but as tribal people. He locates them on a primitive-civilized continuum that often overlooks their relationship to the state and to the capitalist economy. His student, Sol Tax, was one of the first anthropologists to correct this perception of indigenous people in Mexico and Guatemala by making the argument that they were not tribal people but farmers and members of states. Moreover, he recognized that the basic unit of production is at the level of household, not individual. Such observations anticipated the later theoretical and analytical work of anthropologists, such as Enrique Mayer, June Nash,James Scott, and Eric Wolf.

Peasants did not become a major focus of anthropological study until after World War II, when it was apparent that “primitive” and “tribal” were inadequate classificatory terms for many peoples around the globe. The interest in peasants related to the emerging crisis that the primary object of anthropological study, the primitive, was disappearing, and to the direction anthropological research had turned in order to explain this cultural change and the relationship of the state to “traditional” peoples. After the war, there was greater awareness on the part of anthropologists to conceive of all people as part of states and global economic systems, not as isolated groups.

[Page 1834]As long as states have existed, so have peasants. Most anthropological research on peasant economics and on peasants as members of states has been influenced by Marxist theoretical perspectives, namely, that of Lenin and Chayanov. For Marx and his later followers, peasants are problematic. Because of their conservative tendencies to preserve their lifestyle, it was not clear with whom they would ally themselves—the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Marx believed that eventually capitalism would destroy the peasant lifestyle, since it is incompatible with industrialization, and that most peasants would become proletarians.

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