Peasant

For other uses, see Peasant (disambiguation).
Young women offer berries to visitors to their izba home, 1909. Those who had been serfs among the Russian peasantry were officially emancipated in 1861. Photograph by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms, especially in the Middle Ages under feudalism, or more generally, in any pre-industrial society.[1][2] In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their personal status: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.[3]

The word "peasant" is—and long has been—often used pejoratively to refer to poor or landless farmers and agricultural workers, especially in the poorer countries of the world in which the agricultural labor force makes up a large percentage of the population. The implication of the term is that the "peasant" is uneducated, ignorant, and unfamiliar with the more sophisticated mannerisms of the urban population.

The word "peasant" is also commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world.

Etymology

A farm in 1794

The word "peasant" is derived from the 15th century French word païsant (compare Italian paesano), meaning one from the pays, or countryside; ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.[4]

Social position

Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants.

Though "peasant" is a word of loose application, once a market economy had taken root, the term peasant proprietors was frequently used to describe the traditional rural population in countries where smallholders farmed much of the land. More generally, the word "peasant" is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be "lower class", perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income.

Medieval European peasants

The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times and endured until the nineteenth century in many areas. Under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land. Fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor.[5] It was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land.

The relative position of peasants in Western Europe improved greatly when the Black Death reduced the population of medieval Europe in the mid-14th century, resulting in more land for the survivors and making labor more scarce. In the wake of this disruption to the established order, later centuries saw the invention of the printing press, the development of widespread literacy and the enormous social and intellectual changes of the Enlightenment.

The 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 who became what Karl Marx called the proletariat. The trend toward individual ownership of land, typified in England by Enclosure, displaced many peasants from the land and compelled them, often unwillingly, to become urban factory-workers, who came to occupy the socio-economic stratum formerly the preserve of the medieval peasants.

This process happened in an especially pronounced and truncated way 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. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861, and while many peasants would remain in areas where their family had farmed for generations, the changes did allow for the buying and selling of lands traditionally held by peasants, and for landless ex-peasants to move to the cities.[6] Even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had gradually decreased "from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century, to 37.7 percent in 1858."[7]

Early modern Germany

"Feiernde Bauern" ("Celebrating Peasants"), artist unknown, 18th or 19th century

In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the village well into the 19th century. They belonged to a corporate body and helped to manage the community resources and to monitor community life.[8] In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land. A peasant is called a "Bauer" in German and "Bur" in Low German (pronounced in English like boor).

In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord—typically a nobleman.[9] Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered around church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions.[10]

19th century France

In his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1880–1914 (1976), historian Eugen Weber traced the modernization of French villages and argued that rural France went from backward and isolated to modern and possessing a sense of French nationhood during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[11] He emphasized the roles of railroads, republican schools, and universal military conscription. He based his findings on school records, migration patterns, military-service documents and economic trends. Weber argued that until 1900 or so a sense of French nationhood was weak in the provinces. Weber then looked at how the policies of the Third Republic created a sense of French nationality in rural areas.[12] The book was widely praised, but some[13] argued that a sense of Frenchness existed in the provinces before 1870.

Use of the term for Chinese farmers

Farmers in China have been sometimes referred to as "peasants" in English-language sources. However, the traditional term for farmer, nongfu (农夫), simply refers to "farmer" or "agricultural worker". In the 19th century, Japanese intellectuals reinvented the Chinese terms fengjian (封建) for "feudalism" and nongmin (农民), or "farming people," terms used in the description of feudal Japanese society.[14] These terms created a negative image of Chinese farmers by making a class distinction where one had not previously existed.[14] Anthropologist Myron Cohen considers these terms to be neologisms that represented a cultural and political invention. He writes:[15]

This divide represented a radical departure from tradition: F.W. Mote and others have shown how especially during the later imperial era (Ming and Qing dynasties), China was notable for the cultural, social, political, and economic interpenetration of city and countryside. But the term nongmin did enter China in association with Marxist and non-Marxist Western perceptions of the "peasant," thereby putting the full weight of the Western heritage to use in a new and sometimes harshly negative representation of China's rural population. Likewise, with this development Westerners found it all the more "natural" to apply their own historically derived images of the peasant to what they observed or were told in China. The idea of the peasant remains powerfully entrenched in the Western perception of China to this very day.

Modern Western writers often continue to use the term peasant for Chinese farmers, typically without ever defining what the term means.[16] This Western use of the term suggests that China is stagnant, "medieval", underdeveloped, and held back by its rural population.[17] Cohen writes that the "imposition of the historically burdened Western contrasts of town and country, shopkeeper and peasant, or merchant and landlord, serves only to distort the realities of the Chinese economic tradition".[18]

Bur in Jewish scripture

“ He (R. Hillel) used to say: A boor cannot be sin-fearing and an ignoramus cannot be pious; a bashful person cannot learn and a quick tempered person cannot teach. Not everyone who increases belongings is wise and in a place where there are no [Royal] men, try to be a [Royal] man. ”
— Pirke Abot II:4

A bur is presented by the Rambam (Maimonides) as a person having neither (ethical) torah education nor virtues of manners nor the ability to acquire them. Maimonides gives five definitions of Hebrew terms found in Jewish scripture, that discuss foolishness and wisdom, they are, in ascending order: bur, am ha'aretz, golem, chacham, and chasid. The definition of the Hebrew term bur is extracted by Maimonides from the phrase sedeh bur,[19][20] which translates as an "uncultivated field". The Talmud and Mishnah (Pirke Avot II:4) also have this term.

Commonly, bur would be translated into English as "boor".[21]

Historiography

See also: Agrarianism
Portrait sculpture of 18th-century French peasants by artist George S. Stuart, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Ventura County, Ventura, California

Since the literate classes have 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.[22] The Annales School of French historians emphasized the importance of peasants. Its leader 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.

Other research in the field of peasant studies was promoted by Florian Znaniecki and Fei Xiaotong, and in the post-1945 studies of the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" in the work of Robert Redfield. In the 1960s, anthropologists and historians began to rethink the role of peasant revolt in world history and in their own disciplines. Peasant revolution was seen as a Third World response to capitalism and imperialism.[23]

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.[24] James C. Scott's field observations 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 to the peasant movement in India and to the theories of the 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.[25] One important outlet for their scholarly work and theory was the Journal of Peasant Studies.

See also

The Peasant Wedding, by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567 or 1568
"Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Related terms

Notes and references

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  1. ↑ peasant, def. A.1.a. n. OED Online. March 2012. Oxford University Press. 28 May 2012
  2. ↑ Merrian-Webster online "peasant"
  3. ↑ Webster, Hutton (1 June 2004). Early European History. Kessinger Publishing. p. 440. ISBN 978-1-4191-1711-4. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
  4. ↑ Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary p. 846, 866.
  5. ↑ Gies, Frances and Joseph. Life in a Medieval Village New York: Harper, 1989, pp 12-18
  6. ↑ David Moon, The abolition of serfdom in Russia, 1762-1907 (2001) pp. 98–114
  7. ↑ Pipes, Richard (1995) [1974]. Russia Under the Old Regime: Second edition. p. 163. ISBN 978-0140247688.
  8. ↑ Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany: 1648-1914 (1977) pp. 140-54
  9. ↑ The monasteries of Bavaria, which controlled 56% of the land, were broken up by the government, and sold off around 1803. Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck: 1800-1866 (1996), p. 59
  10. ↑ For details on the life of a representative peasant farmer, who migrated in 1710 to Pennsylvania, see Bernd Kratz, he was a farmer, "Hans Stauffer: A Farmer in Germany before his Emigration to Pennsylvania," Genealogist, Fall 2008, Vol. 22 Issue 2, pp. 131-169
  11. ↑ Joseph A. Amato, "Eugen Weber's France", Journal of Social History, Vol. 25, 1992 pp 879–882.
  12. ↑ Eugen Weber, "The Second Republic, Politics, and the Peasant", French Historical Studies Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 521-550 in JSTOR
  13. ↑ Ted W. Margadant, "French Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Review Essay", Agricultural History, Summer 1979, Vol. 53 No. 3, pp. 644-651
  14. 1 2 Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 64
  15. ↑ Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 65
  16. ↑ Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 68
  17. ↑ Mei, Yi-tsi. Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant 'Other' in Modern Chinese Literature. 1998. p. 26
  18. ↑ Myron Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. 2005. p. 73
  19. ↑ "Shabbat Nahamu VI - Torah commentary - Pirke Abot: II:4". Esnoga Bet Emunah 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  20. ↑ Chill, Abraham; Chill, translated by Abraham (1991). Abrabanel on Pirke Avot = [Pirḳe avot, Naḥalat avot] : a digest of Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel's "Nahalat avot" with selections from other classical commentaries on Pirkei avot. New York: Sepher-Hermon Press. pp. 109–113. ISBN 0-87203-135-7.
  21. ↑ Kravitz and Olitzky, eds. "Pirkei Avot". Ethical Teachings - Selections from Pirkei Avot. Union for Reform Judaism and URJ Press. Retrieved 19 May 2014.
  22. ↑ Richard Southern: The Making of the Middle Ages (1952)
  23. ↑ Wolf, Eric R. (1965). Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0136554561.
  24. ↑ Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York,: Harper & Row, 1969).
  25. ↑ Myron Cohen, "Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese 'Peasant'", Daedalus 122.2 (Spring 1993): 151-170.

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