The Revolutionary Potential Of Peasants In Latin America

The essays in this collection examine agrarian transformation in Latin America and the role in this of peasants, with particular reference to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Central America. Among the issues covered are the impact of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.

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Study of the political behaviour of rural workers and tenant farmers in Latin America, with particular reference to the evolution of peasant movements and their prospects for effecting social change - includes a bibliography pp. 163 to 173.

During the last quarter century, peasant participation in politics has increased markedly in parts of Latin America and Asia. Why the poor and vulnerable peasant population has chosen to leave the confines of the village for political activity and at times for sustained revolution is the question this book explores. The author draws on informal interviews and observation of peasants in Mexico and India and on fifty-one community studies of peasants in Asia and Latin America compiled by ethnographers in the last forty years. He suggests that severe economic crises have driven peasants to roles in the larger economy outside the village, where they are initially attracted to politics by material incentives. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Essays presented during a seminar on Latin American peasant movements, held at Cornell University, December 8-10, 1966. "Bibliography on Latin American peasant organization [by] Gerrit Huizer and Cynthia N. Hewitt": pages 451-467. Bibliographical footnotes.

Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach. The seven case studies are preceded by an Introduction in which the editors assess the continuing relevance of Wolf’s political economy. The book concludes with Gavin Smith’s reflection on reading Eric Wolf as a public intellectual today.

"Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century provides a good short course in the major popular revolutions of our century--in Russia, Mexico, China, Algeria, Cuba, and Viet Nam--not from the perspective of governments or parties or leaders, but from the perspective of the peasant peoples whose lives and ways of living were destroyed by the depredations of the imperial powers, including American imperial power."-New York Times Book Review "Eric Wolf's study of the six great peasant-based revolutions of the century demonstrates a mastery of his field and the methods required to negotiate it that evokes respect and admiration. In six crisp essays, and a brilliant conclusion, he extends our understanding of the nature of peasant reactions to social change appreciably by his skill in isolating and analyzing those factors, which, by a magnification of the anthropologist's techniques, can be shown to be crucial in linking local grievances and protest to larger movements of political transformation."--American Political Science Review "An intellectual tour de force."--Comparative Politics