Peasant Labor Research Articles

Wildfires as legacies of agropastoral abandonment: Gendered litter raking and managed burning as historic fire prevention practices in the Monte Pisano of Italy

Agropastoral practices that historically reduced the flammability of Mediterranean landscapes are poorly understood due to state prohibitions and lack of scientific interest. Oral histories, analysis of agronomical writings, transect walks, and ethnographic study of fire managers and community members in the Monte Pisano of Italy, find legacies of traditional agropastoral practices in present-day landscapes. Forest leaf litter raking, largely carried out by women, combined with fire wood cutting and burning to greatly reduce fire risk. Historic stigmatization of traditional burning and ignoring gendered peasant labor have reduced contemporary scientists’ and fire managers’ understandings of ecological processes and of options for reducing fire risk. Fire managers in the Mediterranean, and in areas around the world affected by rural depopulation, would benefit from a better understanding of traditional agropastoral and fire management practices. Litter raking has been understudied outside Central Europe, is often gendered, and may have important ecological consequences around the world.

Formation of patriotic values of students of agricultural institutions of professional higher education

The article actualizes the necessity of purposeful formation of patriotic values of students of agricultural institutions of professional higher education. The author presents an author's understanding of the essence of the concept of "patriotic values" as significant ideas about the Motherland, national interests and ideals formed by the public consciousness and recognized by a person, which are embodied in all spheres of the state's life and are expressed in a positive emotional attitude to the culture of the native land at the level of manifestation of a sense of involvement and love for it, devotion to it, pride and responsibility for it. Based on this and taking into account the context of the specifics of the professional activity of agrarians, it is determined that the core of their patriotic values is love for their native land. It is stated that in the context of the total immersion of modern students of agricultural specialties in the virtual world, there is an underestimation of the beauty and value of the native land, the importance of agricultural labor. In this regard, the essence of the category "native land" and its conceptual significance in the axiology of agrarian patriotism in terms of naturalistic, synergistic, anthropological, figurative and symbolic, mythological and esoteric semantics are revealed. Attention is focused on the opposition of the concepts of "own land" and "foreign land", which helps to clarify the axiological predicates of the attitude of farmers to their native land as an important factor in the formation of their patriotic feelings based on reverence for it. The content and expediency of using historiographical, artistic and aesthetic, folklore and other axiological and patriotic means of educating the value attitude and love for the native land in the process of professional training and in the extracurricular activities of agricultural students are substantiated. It is proved that involvement in local history work, realization of the educational potential of native language training, holding traditional folk festivals, collective creative activities related to the native land, peasant labor, economic customs and rituals, allows to form patriotic values of students of agricultural institutions of professional higher education in a comprehensive and effective manner

Mining Extractivism, Commodification of Nature and Indigenous Peasantry in the Atacama Desert: The Political Economy of Yareta (Azorella Compacta) in Historical Perspective (1915-1960)

Studies on the agrarian question in Latin America have dealt with the role of capital in the area of agriculture and forestry while paying scant attention to its role in other areas, such as mining. Research on mining extractivism, for its part, has privileged recent socio-environmental conflicts without delving into the configurations of social classes and labor relations as it relates to agriculture. This article integrates these topics, analyzing the connections between copper extractivism, the commodification of the yareta plant, and indigenous peasant labor. We studied the medium-upper basin of the Loa River, in northern Chile, where one of the most important copper mines in the world (Chuquicamata) has been operating since 1915. Using ethnography and bibliographic analysis, we provide an account of how the expansion of extractivism requires a mixture of properly capitalist labor relations mixed with customary Andean practices. The latter are subsumed by capital and have played a key structural role during certain periods.

Conservation, peasants and class: critical reflections on the political economy of climate change strategies in West Senegal

ABSTRACT Environmental conservation has become a key climate mitigation strategy in the last two decades. Through the multiplication of ‘conservation’ projects, Africa is one of the main centres of this kind of intervention. While scholars have shown conservation to be a vehicle for the advancement of capitalist interests, scarce attention has been paid to agrarian labour and class dynamics in the African countryside sustaining this development. Drawing on the authors’ research in West Senegal, this article develops a conceptual framework for integrating class and peasant labour in the study of capitalist conservation. It shows how conservation-related climate mitigation strategies in Africa nurture and are nurtured by neoliberal and imperialist processes of agrarian change, reinforcing the economic and political vulnerability of African peasants. Alternative, anti-imperial climate change mitigation strategies need to be centred around peasant environmentalisms and their liberation from labour oppression.

ВЗГЛЯДЫ А.В. ЧАЯНОВА И Н.Д. КОНДРАТЬЕВА НА АГРАРНЫЙ ВОПРОС В 1917 ГОДУ И ИХ АКТУАЛЬНОСТЬ В СОВРЕМЕННЫХ УСЛОВИЯХ

The article presents a comparative analysis of the approaches of A.V. Chayanov and N.D. Kondratiev to the implementation of land and agrarian reform, which was being prepared in Russia after the February Revolution of 1917. The views of economists on the purpose and objectives of the reform, methods of its implementation and socio-economic consequences are considered. Special attention is paid to the methodological principles of reforming agrarian relations, the correlation of land and agrarian reform, the role of peasant labor economy as the main beneficiaries of transformations, as well as methods of socialization of land and the principles of its transfer into the hands of the peasantry. The importance of the scientific heritage of A.V. Chayanov and N.D. Kondratiev for modern agrarian policy is shown.

Ancestral Voices, Highland Homecomings and High Society: The Lochbuie Family of Mull, c. 1855–1920

No history of the Scottish diaspora in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be complete without taking account of the provenance and disposal of repatriated wealth. A case study is the family saga of the Maclaines of Lochbuie, whose estates lay on the island of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. Our account begins with Donald Maclaine (1816–1863), the twenty-second laird, who, as a partner in the Batavia (Jakarta) mercantile business of Maclaine Watson, made his fortune from the trade in sugar cultivated by forced peasant labour in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). It was the profits from this trade that he used to repurchase the family’s ancestral lands that had been forfeited to their creditors a decade earlier. Donald Maclaine’s enthusiasm for the Highlands was inherited by his Indies-born son, Murdoch Gillian Maclaine (1845–1909), the twenty-third laird, whose life and times, together with those of his wife, Marianne Schwabe-Maclaine (1850–1934), form the main focus of this paper. That enthusiasm extended to the patronage of Gaelic culture and to Highland revivalism in general, but it was also under his stewardship that his family’s cosmopolitan lifestyle revived the less welcome tradition of the ‘luxury trap’, wherein expenditures incurred in London high society also had to contend with declining rentals during a prolonged agricultural depression. Financial pressures of this kind appear to have compelled the twenty-third laird to redevelop Lochbuie in accordance with a late Victorian reimagining of the Highlands as a sporting estate. This was not a gamble that paid off, however, and a once-off infusion of colonial wealth proved inadequate to sustain Lochbuie, which was irretrievably lost to the family during the (brief) tenure of Kenneth Maclaine (1880–1935), the twenty-fourth laird, despite his somewhat unconventional efforts to bolster the family fortunes by taking to the boards in New York and the UK.

Socio-Economic Development Village Novie Verkhissy in the 1920s–1930s

Introduction. Socio-economic development of one of the villages of Mordovia in the 1920s–1930s emerges the scientific interest, since the development of rural areas remains one of the priorities of the regional policy. The New Economic Policy created conditions for the development of the peasant economy by introducing a tax in kind, allowing free trade and leasing land. The study of collectivization raises questions about the effectiveness of collective forms of management, which does not lose relevance in modern conditions of a variety of forms of ownership and the search for effective ways to develop agriculture. Materials and Methods. Materials used: archival documents, periodical publications and memoirs of the inhabitants of the village Novye Verkhissy. The methods that have been applied are narrative; the method of deduction combined with the method of induction; idiographic method. Results. During the famine in 1921–1922 in Novye Verkhissy, as a result of drought and devastation during the Civil War and “military communism”, sown areas decreased, crop yields decreased, and livestock breeding suffered. Famine of 1924–1925 after a drought and crop failure, was overcome by issuing irrevocable grain loans to the population and creating a public plowing and seed fund. In the early 1930s the collective farm “Red Mordovia” was created in the village. Advances in hemp production in the second half of the 1930s brought the collective farm to a leading position in the Insar district. A school, a library, a kindergarten, a People’s House worked in Novye Verkhissy, mail was delivered to the village, local self-government solved the social and cultural problems of the village. Discussion and Conclusion. Among the problems discussed in the literature of the socio-economic development of the countryside in the 1920s–1930s: the problem of the extent of the famine of 1921–1922 and the famine of 1924–1925; the problem of the effectiveness of the NEP for the development of the countryside; the problem of the damage caused by mass collectivization. Socio-economic development of village Novye Verkhissy in the 1920s–1930s corresponded to the patterns prevailing in Mordovia and in the country during this period. The New Economic Policy allowed the village of Mordovia to recover by 1928. During the years of collectivization, on the one hand, there was a partial mechanization of peasant labor, its productivity increased, the infrastructure of the village developed, and the market for agricultural products expanded. On the other hand, dispossession took place, hard work prevailed in the village, famine in the early 1930s claimed many lives. In the socio-cultural sphere of the village in the 1920s–1930s progress was observed: schools and libraries were built, public self-government was developed.

Extending the conceptualisation of class across field and city: Transgressing servitude towards an emancipatory praxis

This article advocates the transgression of incumbent theoretical divisions between rural and urban abodes of production and draws on new analyses of contemporary spaces of capital and labour antagonisms in Brazil. It does so to articulate a broadening of the definition of class and class struggle towards an emancipatory praxis that does not necessarily prioritise industrialised workers. The study has a particular focus on the reconfiguration of socio-spatial arrangements linked to 21st century commodity cultivation, extraction and trade and subsequent class tensions on the material and epistemological frontier between (hydro, agro and mineral) mega projects and the autonomous territories of rural subjects. The renewed degradation of conditions for a labour force that has always been precarious, the dissolving dichotomy between proletarianised and peasant labour, and the ongoing resistance to corporate capture by communities is evoked to contrast distinct metabolic relations within rural territories with the objectification of labour and nature under capitalism. The analysis reveals new configurations of class domination, tension and counter movements. Many critical scholars, particularly those in the Global South, have been attentive to alternate readings of the world by indigenous, African descendent, peasant and agro-extractivist communities that may be unfamiliar yet underpin vociferous, and often fatal, resistance to capital accumulation. The task to effectively situate these struggles within a theory of broader, heterogeneous class struggle and integrate this ‘wealth’ of collective struggle and knowledge towards societal transformation remains important work in progress. In this spirit, the paper offers some possibilities for making new conceptual and material connections between rural and urban productive spaces and across currently fragmented class formations and identities.

K voprosu o pravovom statuse sovetskogo krest'yanina v 1945— 1953 gg.

This article examines the legal status of the Soviet peasant within the collective farm-state farm system and the agrarian policy of the state in the period after the end of the Great Patriotic War and before the beginning of the “Khrushchev thaw”. Attention is paid to the close relationship of the situation of the Soviet peasantry with the collective economy - the collective farm. The general characteristics of the socio-economic situation of peasants, the influence of legal status on the standard of living and the main elements of everyday life are given. The main indicators of incomes of peasant families and the level of food consumption in the first post-war years are analyzed. The role of personal subsidiary farming as a system of stimulating peasant labor is shown. The main measures of legal and social responsibility of peasants in the system of agricultural production and collective farm life are given.

The Polish Village in the Face of Political, Social and Economic Changes From 1772-1815: A Study of Western Lesser Poland (Małopolska)

The article examines the impact of social, economic and political changes of the second half of 18th century and the beginning of 19th century on the functioning of rural society of Lesser Poland province. The study considers the situation of peasants, nobles and the clergy. The first part of the article presents the state of research on the problem and the available sources. The second part is devoted to the presentation of selected examples of social relations observed in contemporary Lesser Poland rural society. Conflicts between landowners and lease owners over abused peasant labour, debates over tithes, abuses of state officials and peasant resistance (i.e. peasant desertions, court cases) are discussed.

The Quest for Israeli Identity: the Rise and Decline of the Sabra Myth

This article analyzes an attempt to construct a new identity for Jews born on the territory of the Mandatory Palestine, the so-called Sabras, between the First and Second World Wars. The characteristic features of this identity included the deliberate brutality, the combination of peasant labor with the skills of armed self-defense, collectivism and a conscious break with the diaspora past. The external attributes of the sabras were the wearing of simple but comfortable clothes of the inhabitants of the kibbutzim and the cultivation of Hebrew. Sabras become a role model for Jewish youth who arrived in Israel and those who were already born here. The attractiveness of the sabra’s image was enhanced through advertising posters, cinematography, and literature. This model of identity is of interest as an attempt to return to the origins of Hebrew history, as well as to raise a generation of “new Jews” devoid of any shortcomings that complicated the life of Jews in exile. The artificiality of this model and its isolation from Israeli realities were among the main reasons that led to the collapse of the myth of the super-sabra. At the same time, this myth laid the foundations for a different perception of the Jews both by themselves and by the world community, contributing to the victory of Israel in the war of independence.

Disappearing nature. History, problems and prospects of representation of peasant labor in the paintings of Russian and soviet artists

This article is an analysis of the reasons for the loss of interest of easel painters to the theme of rural labor and modern rural workers. The authors made proposals for solving this problem.

Synthesis of traditional and new in the works of Chinese poet Hai Zi based on the image of grain

For a long period, the development of Chinese literature is characterized by the continuity of artistic tradition. Chinese poetry of the reform and opening-up era draws profound interest, as it reflects the transformations of modern age and worldview in the Chinese society. This article is dedicated to examination of the traditional images of Chinese literature in the lyrics of prominent Chinese poet of the late XX century Hai Zi (1964–1989). Since old days, the image of grain resembles the world of nature, fertility, cyclicity of life, symbol of ethno-poetic traditions associated with the motif of hard peasant labor. A remarkable representative of the Chinese poetry of “new generation”, whose works embody the spiritual pursuits of the era, is the poet Hai Zi. Along with the traditional motifs and images, he integrates the elements of the original concept. This article is first within the Russian Sinology to analyze the system of artistic images in the lyrics of Hai Zi. The conclusion is made that the artistic uniqueness of the works of Chinese poet, this image acquires the individual authorial content – the bearer of creative energy and active principle, the link between the world of nature and a human.

The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England, by Rosamond Faith

Historians are accustomed to treat popular appeals to ‘good old laws’ with scepticism. The concept of a moral economy was first developed by E.P. Thompson in opposition to such instincts, maintaining not only that society was shaped by historically embedded norms and obligations, but that ordinary people were capable of articulating them with precision. Rosamond Faith sets out to uncover the ideas which structured social relations in the centuries between 600 and 1200. Her point of departure is a society in which land was plentiful and could be owned by peasants as well as aristocrats. How did an elite manage to appropriate peasant labour under these circumstances? Lordship, of the kind originating in bonds of military leadership and protection, supplies part of the answer, and it helped that both noble and non-noble freemen looked back to a past conceived in terms of invasion and conquest. Among non-nobles, people distinguished one...

„Uz Tita i Partiju“. Djelatnost Antifašističkog fronta žena Bosne i Hercegovine i njihove reakcije na propagandu Informbiroa tokom 1948. i 1949. godine

During the Second World War, the Anti-Fascist Women's Front (AFŽ) was formed in 1942 in Bosanski Petrovac. The outcome of the formation is an attempt at long-term mobilization and organization of women within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The women's anti-fascist front was organizationally on the path of anti-fascism and sacrifice in achieving the military, political and other goals of the revolution. At the First Congress of the AFŽ of Yugoslavia, which was held in 1945 in Belgrade, Josip Broz Tito stated the tasks of women, which were crucial for the new state. These were the preservation of brotherhood and unity, the continuation of the fight against the enemies of the new state, preparations for the constitution elections, work on rebuilding the country, enlightening women, humanitarian work with soldiers killed in the war, parents of children killed orphaned and raising children in in the spirit of the People's Liberation Struggle. Also, after the Second World War, the International Democratic Federation of Women was established, which was founded on the initiative of women from the Federation of French Women, and which dealt exclusively with women's issues and issues of interest to women. The women of Yugoslavia, who participated in the congresses in Paris and Budapest, also played a significant role in the establishment and operation of the International Democratic Federation of Women. With the outbreak of open conflict between the countries of Informbiro and Yugoslavia in 1948, and the action of Informbiro's propaganda, it also affected the Bureau of the French Women's Union, which prevented women from Yugoslavia / Bosnia and Herzegovina from attending the 1949 plenary session of the International Democratic Federation of Women in Moscow. This attitude led to women's organizations in cities, villages, peasant labor cooperatives, labor collectives and institutions throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina holding meetings, rallies and conferences, where they openly criticized and protested through letters against the decision and the revocation of calls for women's presence. Of Yugoslavia / Bosnia and Herzegovina at the meeting of the International Democratic Federation of Women in Moscow. The women of Yugoslavia / Bosnia and Herzegovina also had their position after the publication of the Informbiro Resolution on the situation in the CPY in 1948, where they rejected the resolution and sent and expressed their commitment to the CPY and Tito. In this regard, the paper, based on first-rate sources and relevant literature, seeks to present the activities of the Anti-Fascist Women's Front of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the years after World War II, both domestically and internationally (preparation of the International Women's Exhibition, signature collection, with the support of the proposal of the Soviet Alliance on Arms Reduction, etc.), as well as the views on the Informbiro Resolution of 1948 and the reactions of women's organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Informbiro's propaganda during 1949, due to the impossibility of women's attendance at the International Democratic Federation of Women in Moscow.

An Intellectual and a Peasant in Gleb Uspensky’s Cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor”: Dynamics of Interaction in Context of Idea of “Merging with People”

The cycle of essays by G. I. Uspensky “The Peasant and the Peasant Labor” in the aspect of the actual for Russian literature of the second half of the XIX — early XX centuries problems of relations between the people and the intellectuals are analyzed in the article. The crisis in the study of the “peasant” cycles of Uspensky, caused by the predominance of ideological interpretation, is stated. It is argued that Uspensky finds the key to understanding the peasantry not in the socio-economic conditions of his life, but in the field of aesthetics. The point of convergence, in which the peasant and the intellectual appear as equal subjects of communication, is, according to Uspensky, the aesthetic attitude to work. An implicit correspondence is established between peasant labor and the creative effort of the artist. Therefore, the intellectual turns out to be a necessary mediator in the process of the peasantry acquiring its own “voice”. It is proved that the aesthetic utopia in the cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor” was crushed by the ethical maximalism of the writer. The peasant economy is represented by the Uspensky reasonably organized order, the anthroposphere, in which the working peasant was likened to the monarch and the Creator. In turn, the intellectual was declared an impostor, marked by the “antichrist” seal. In Uspensky’s creative consciousness, the aesthetic and ethical found themselves in a tragic and hopeless contradiction, and the prospect of “merging with the people” was illusory.

Resounding Participatory Ethnography: Ethnographic Dialogue in Dialogue

This dialogue explores issues in contemporary sonic, sensory, and visual ethnography, including dialogic editing and collaborative projects between anthropology and art. It focuses on how the multimedia ethnography When the Trees Resound: Collaborative Media Research on an Italian Festival (2019) breaks the silence of earlier studies of an Italian community festival by emphasizing listening to multiple sounds and voices through field sound recordings and dialogic photographic imaging, writing, and editing. In doing so, a ritual of communal effort with roots in peasant labor, performative masculinity, and social opposition and protest becomes a site of experimental scholarship on participatory and performative ethnography.

DESTERRITORIALIZAÇÃO E RETERRITORILIZAÇÃO DAS RELAÇÕES DE TRABALHO NO CAMPO NO SUDOESTE PAULISTA: A QUESTÃO ENTRE OS TRABALHADORES DA CITRICULTURA E OS CAMPONESES PRODUTORES DE LEITE

Este artigo é fruto de uma série de pesquisas realizadas pelo autor e neste momento apresentamos uma síntese relacionando os processos contraditórios e intrínsecos ao capital nas quais promovem dialeticamente a desterritorialização camponesa e ao mesmo tempo, mas em outro fenômeno, a sua reterritorialização. Demonstrando a relação entre capital e campesinato, como modos de produção distintos, mas vinculados em uma dialética de destruição e recriação. Certamente este estudo não tem a prerrogativa de responder a todas questões pertinentes a relação entre capital e campesinato. Mas sim, focar nos fenômenos presenciados na região Sudoeste Paulista, mais especificamente na Região Geográfica Imediata de Avaré (IBGE, 2017). Tendo como justificativa a presença marcante de atividades citricultoras e camponeses pecuaristas de gado leiteiro. Assim, iremos relacionar os processos de territorialização do capital e monopolização do território pelo capital e suas expressões na configuração da fração do território a partir das relações de trabalho. Essa categoria foi escolhida, uma vez que iremos demonstrar como que as relações de exploração do trabalho assalariado na citricultura e a subordinação do trabalho camponês com a sujeição de sua produção a indústria, mesmo que se aparentem como expressões do capital no campo, contraditoriamente agem para a recriação camponesa.

The Agrarian Question and Coffee in Costa Rica

This article traces the agrarian transition to capitalism in Costa Rica to identify the factors and dynamics that have contributed to the current persistence of the coffee producing peasantry. The case study reveals that the agrarian transition to capitalism and the persistence of the coffee commodity producing peasantry are both products of certain historical and political circumstances. The pro-smallholder politics of the post-revolution Costa Rican state and its emphasis on a particular form of agro-input-substituting industrialization, combined with the unique and historically contingent relations that have developed between landed agrarian and industrial capitalist classes and the peasantry, have led to an agrarian class structure which lacks a substantial landed capitalist coffee producing class. Instead agrarian capital has relegated itself to the processing and input spheres where the ‘real’ subsumption of nature and the ‘formal’ subsumption of peasant labour to agrarian capital occurred.

Current Form of Reciprocity Between Land Owners Peasant and Peasant Laborer

The main focus of this research is aimed to discover the current form of reciprocity between landowners and farm laborers in the rural areas of Purbalingga and Banyumas, Central Java Province, Indonesia. This research is also aimed to find how the patront can maintain their work relation to client. This study uses a qualitative descriptive. All peasant who were working as peasant laborers in the research location included as the research subject. The determination of informant is done by purposive sampling, while the number of informants is not determined rigidly but is adjusted to the needs and completeness of the data. The result of the study shows that the forms of reciprocal relations is general and some are special. In reciprocal relationships which are general, it inclined to be symmetrical and fair. However in some other cases that were special, there is symmetrical or asymmetrical reciprocal relationship. Suggestion to be given is that symmetrical reciprocal relationships are better be maintained so the quality of relationship will improved, while for relationships that are asymmetrical and unfair can also be improved by providing sufficient space for peasant workers through integrated and sustainable empowerment.