Reconceptualizing The Peasantry

The concept of ?peasant? has been constructed from residual images of pre-industrial European and colonial rural society. Spurred by Romantic sensibilities and modern nationalist imaginations, the images the word peasant brings to mind are anachronisms that do not reflect the ways in which rural people live today. In this path-breaking book, Michael Kearney shows how the concept has been outdistanced by contemporary history. He situates the peasantry within the current social context of the transnational and post?Cold War nation-state and clears the way for alternative theoretical views.Reconceptualizing the Peasantry looks at rural society in general and considers the problematic distinction between rural and urban. Most definitions of and debates about peasants have focused on their presumed social, economic, cultural, and political characteristics, but Kearney articulates the way in which peasants define themselves in a rapidly changing world. In the process, he develops ethnographic and political forms of representation that correspond to contemporary postpeasant identities. Moving beyond a reconsideration of peasantry, the book situates anthropology in global context, showing how the discipline reconstructs itself and its subjects according to changing circumstances.

This book explores major shifts and reorientations in the recent history of American Anthropology, reflecting the author's vision of what anthropology is and what it has the potential to become. The title phrase 'changing fields' can be read in two ways: One meaning refers to how, since the mid-1960s, the larger national and global social, intellectual, and political fields within which American anthropology is situated have profoundly changed. The second meaning refers to how, in response to these changing fields, the author, like many other anthropologists, changed the locations of his fieldwork along with his research problems and theoretical perspectives. The book engages three fundamental intellectual-political challenges that American anthropology is destined to confront (or at its peril, avoid): becoming more self-reflexive, achieving theoretical and methodological holism, and defense of universal human rights.

Farewell to the Peasantry? questions class-reductionist assumptions in certain Marxist and populist approaches to political movements in twentieth-century rural Mexico, highlighting the interpretation of the process of political class formation.

This thoughtful book explores the history and ongoing dilemmas of land use and land reform in South Africa. Including both theoretical and applied examples of the evolution of South Africa’s current geography of land use, the authors provide a succinct overview of land reform and evaluate the range of policies conceived over time to redress the country’s stark racial land imbalance. Drawing on compelling case studies from across South Africa, they illustrate not only the progress of land reform, but also how reforms fit within the larger historical context of racialized land use. This is the first book of its kind to fully apply geographical theory to the case of South African land reform. Rather than rely on one-dimensional technicist explanations to discuss the shortcomings of the country’s land reform program, this rich study places it in the context of bitter battles between groups seeking to exploit land policies for their own benefit.

In 2007, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population lived in cities. However, on a global scale, poverty overwhelmingly retains a rural face. This book assembles an unparalleled group of internationally-eminent scholars in the field of rural development and social change in order to explore historical and contemporary processes of agrarian change and transformation and their consequent impact upon the livelihoods, poverty and well-being of those who live in the countryside. The book provides a critical analysis of the extent to which rural development trajectories have in the past and are now promoting a change in rural production processes, the accumulation of rural resources, and shifts in rural politics, and the implications of such trajectories for peasant livelihoods and rural workers in an era of globalization. Peasants and Globalization thus explores continuity and change in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, from its early formulation in the late 19th century to the continuing relevance it has in our times, including chapters from Terence Byres, Amiya Bagchi, Ellen Wood, Farshad Araghi, Henry Bernstein, Saturnino M Borras, Ray Kiely, Michael Watts and Philip McMichael. Collectively, the contributors argue that neoliberal social and economic policies have, in deepening the market imperative governing the contemporary world food system, not only failed to tackle to underlying causes of rural poverty but have indeed deepened the agrarian crisis currently confronting the livelihoods of peasant farmers and rural workers. This crisis does not go unchallenged, as rural social movements have emerged, for the first time, on a transnational scale. Confronting development policies that are unable to reduce, let alone eliminate, rural poverty, transnational rural social movements are attempting to construct a more just future for the world’s farmers and rural workers.

The story behind the international trade in Oaxacan textiles