Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective

Description

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. Re-conceptualizing 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 post-peasant 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. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures Preface Introduction The Death of Dualism The Context of This Book Notes Chapter 1. San Jerónimo: A Peasant Community? Lencho Martínez, a Peasant Man? Rufina Vásquez, a Peasant Woman? Eliseo and Lucrecia Mendoza, Peasant Youth? Notes Chapter 2. Kinds of Others in the History of Anthropology Formative Anthropology and the Primitive Classical Anthropology and the Primitive Modern Anthropology and the Invention of the Peasant Global Anthropology: From Cold War to Peasant Wars Notes Chapter 3. Peasants and the Antinomies of the Modern Nation-State The Deep Structure of the Modern Nation-State and Its Anthropology Right-Wing Modernism Left-Wing Modernism Right and Left Modernization of the Peasantry Reconsidered Problems with Peasant Essentialism Beyond Stated Definitions Notes Chapter 4. Romantic Reactions to Modernist Peasant Studies Right-Wing Romanticism Left-Wing Romanticism From Dependency to Articulation From Articulation to Disarticulated Economies The Legacy of Romantic Reactions Sustainability or Stagnation? Beyond Dualist Theory Notes Chapter 5. Beyond Peasant Studies: Changing Social Fields of Identity and Theory Postdevelopment From Articulation to Networks to Reticula Globalization and Differentiation From Modern Structures to Global Complexity Notes Chapter 6. Differentiation and Identity From Individual to Person Internal Versus External Differentiation Decline of Class Identity and Increase in Class Difference Value, Differentiation, Community, and Autonomy Notes Chapter 7. From Modes of Production to Consumption of Modes: Class, Value, Power, and Resistance Class Resistance Value Value- Power and Class Summary Notes Chapter 8. 'Peasants' and the New Politics of Representation Postpeasant Futures: Class Again The Mixtec Case: Fragmentation of Identity and Politics The Reintegration of Mixtec Identity: From Peasant to Postpeasant Politics Globalization of Human Rights and Ecopolitics Notes Bibliography About the Book and Author Index