Peasants and Peasantry

Peasants are small agricultural producers, especially in less industrialized countries, who possess their own land and who use relatively simple equipment and family labor to produce mostly for their own consumption. All peasants are involved in markets, some much more than others. They live in small rural communities, although they often interact with towns, where they sell their products and buy what they need to farm and live.

Known collectively as the peasantry, peasants have existed for millennia as the majority of humankind until very recently. Peasants have lived in a large variety of historical and geographical contexts. Originally possessing land on which they supported themselves, peasants have frequently lost their land, water, and forests and have been forced to work as wage laborers. This process has been intensified with the evolution of neoliberal capitalism. Their status within capitalist economies varies, and they can be differentiated into rich, middle, and poor peasants, respectively, depending in part on whether they retain property, hire labor, or work as wage laborers themselves.

The study of peasants has been institutionalized through the establishment of interdisciplinary journals such as Journal of Peasant Studies in the early 1970s. The 1970s marked a resurrection of peasant studies following a quarter of a century in which the field had been relegated to relative obscurity. Peasant impoverishment and insurrection in the Third World became important academic topics. Peasant studies occupy an interdisciplinary intellectual space. In scholarly discourses in general, and within human geography in particular, peasants have appeared in discussions of uneven economic development, including the transition to capitalism in Europe and in the Third World; of environmental change and political ecology; and of social protest, identity/agency, and the state. In terms of social theory, peasants have often been at the center of debates between Marxism and postmodernism/poststructuralism. Many of these themes are mentioned in this entry, which focuses on three areas: (1) whether peasants constitute a separate society/culture/economy; (2) the impacts of capitalism on peasants; and (3) peasant identity/agency and political action.