Patriarchy in the Transition to Capitalism: Central Peru, 1830-1950

Abstract

In the last twenty-five years, the persistent survival of peasant forms of production and the prominence of peasants in processes of political transformation have, in many parts of the Third World, resuscitated familiar debates about the role of peasantries in the transition to capitalism. At bottom, the main issue is the peasant household economy: how culturally or economically unique is it? What theoretical significance should be attributed to ongoing and seemingly quite viable forms of peasant household production? Some scholars argue that the peasantry is disappearing and that the primary class contradiction in the Latin American countryside is increasingly between an agrarian bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat; these writers tend to consider household production an insignificant percentage of overall agricultural production, marginal at best in reproducing the peasantry, and ultimately subordinate to the logic of capitalist production.' Other analysts believe that peasant economy and culture still constitute a viable alternative to proletarianization in many Third World areas; they tend to view peasant household production as a form that has significantly undercut the process of capitalist transformation in the countryside.2 The more I have become involved in considering the issues surrounding the peasantry and the transition to capitalism in Latin America-particularly in my work on the central highlands of Peru-the more I have become convinced that the debate will never be resolved simply through a class analysis. Because authors on both sides of the debate have focused almost exclusively on class dynamics, they have been completely unable to understand the complex nature of the household economy, something that only emerges once the household is considered from a feminist per