Peasant Politics Research Articles

Muyu Raymi, the Seeds Festival: Indigenous Women’s Means to Sustain, Resist, and Rebuild

ABSTRACT Among the Raymis, the Indigenous celebrations of the Andes, the seeds festival Muyu Raymi has a unique path. It is a colorful one-day event that most explicitly exemplifies interculturalidad and the achievements of Indigenous Peasant politics at a local level in Ecuador. Nevertheless, Indigenous women’s active and committed involvement in the event is not sufficiently understood from the intersection of culture and politics. This work aims to identify the ways in which Indigenous women have managed to link themselves to Muyu Raymi and what Muyu Raymi shows about our understanding of interculturalidad. This work argues Muyu Raymi has its origins in the dawn of neoliberalism and remains connected to a long process of resistance led by Indigenous women. The findings are discussed through a lens of interculturalidad that highlights people’s ability to sustain, resist, and rebuild their ways of living. The analysis considers the existence of a relationship between human and non-human actants as explainer of social life; in this case, Indigenous women and the seeds. This work highlights the transformative potential of the women-seeds connections and their mixed strategies to resist and support systems of power, through a history that correctly attributes credit to women as history makers.

Transforming Peasant Politics into Ecological Politics: The CSUTCB in Bolivia, 1979-1990

Transforming Peasant Politics into Ecological Politics: The CSUTCB in Bolivia, 1979-1990

The Rise of Communal Politics: Representing “Peasants” in Non‐electoral and Electoral Politics, Bengal 1920–1930s

AbstractThis article explores the representation of peasants in colonial India, during the 1920s‐1930s undivided Bengal. It examines how the historically marginalized and underrepresented rural population came to be constructed as objects of representation. It traces the development of representative claims made by various political parties and groups, both within and outside formal institutions of power, on behalf of rural society. The article discusses the challenges of categorizing the diverse rural population using the term "peasant" as an analytical category in the context of colonial Bengal. It highlights the dominance of the urban intelligentsia in provincial politics until the 1920s‐1930s, which neglected rural issues. It then explores the emergence of different claims to represent peasants in electoral politics, with a particular focus on the political debates surrounding the Tenancy Reform in Bengal. Drawing on secondary sources and colonial archives, it raises questions about how substantive representation of peasants occurred, who championed their representation, and how they formulated their demands. Overall, the article sheds light on the complex dynamics of peasant representation. By examining the rise communal peasant politics in 1920‐1930s Bengal, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of rural mobilization and the interplay between class and communal identities.

The evolving force of community: peasant uprisings and post-agrarian aspirations in Ecuador

ABSTRACT Studies often suggest that the thrust of peasant politics is the advancement of autonomous family farming. Such studies seem remote in rural places where migration, pluriactivity, and non-agrarian jobs and aspirations are the norm. We examine peasant politics in rural Ecuador, where peasant communities have driven nationwide uprisings in recent years. We find that many peasant community organizations cultivate political legitimacy among their members by advancing diverse, non-agrarian objectives, rather than autonomous farming. We argue that researchers stand to learn much about peasant politics by attending to precisely how agrarian livelihoods and post-agrarian aspirations weave together to (re)produce rural institutions.

Drugs, frontier capitalism and illicit peasantries: towards a comparative research agenda

ABSTRACT A defining character of drugs-affected frontier regions is their dynamic instability and their boom-and-bust cycles. These are violent and disturbed landscapes, in which illicit drug economies play a transformative role. But not all frontiers are the same, and nor are the ‘illicit peasantries’ who inhabit the ‘narco-frontier’. In this article we explore the complex dialectical relations between frontiers, drug economies, illicit peasantries and peasant politics. In doing so we develop a new comparative framework, that provides a heuristic for studying the commonalities and differences across narco-frontiers and the mechanisms behind these differences.

The lure of land: Peasant politics, frontier colonization and the cunning state in Sri Lanka

AbstractThis paper studies the contradictions of peasant politics in Sri Lanka’s dry zone frontier in a highly militarized colonization scheme (‘System L’ of the Mahaweli Development Programme in Weli Oya in northern Sri Lanka). Through a detailed ethnographic study of the life histories of settlers who came in two waves to this scheme (1980s and post-2009), we show the workings of what we call the ‘lure of land’: first, as the (al)lure that attracts landless families to live out the mythical dream of becoming a paddy farmer; second, this lure of land is intimately tied to a nationalist territorial aspiration that transforms the settler into a patriotic colonizer of the land: due to its strategic location in the frontier zone between Sinhalese and Tamil inhabited territories, settlers became ‘home guards’ who live on and protect the frontier. But the lure of land is not without contradictions: Life in the frontier is dangerous (for the early settlers) and economically precarious (for the early and late settlers), because the state is unable to deliver the promise of land and water. Government officials deploy various tactics of repeatedly deferred promises and subtle threats to discourage settlers to abandon the colonization scheme despite the settlers’ precarious life conditions, disappointments, and frustrations. A ‘cunning state’ thereby betrays its own ‘frontiersmen’, while safeguarding its nationalist territorial agenda.

Plant use and peasant politics under Inka and Spanish rule at Ollantaytambo, Peru

In the Andes, successive waves of Inka and Spanish imperialism reshaped local ecologies and transformed agricultural practices between the 14th and 17th centuries. As the Inka (ca. 1450–1532CE) consolidated control over the region they co-opted existing resources, directed the development of new farmland, and imposed new labor obligations on Andean people. In turn, Spanish colonizers (1533-1824CE) introduced foreign flora and fauna, created new tributary regimes, and reorganized agricultural production around forcibly resettled communities and Spanish-owned haciendas (agrarian estates). In this paper, we explore how agricultural workers managed this extended period of upheaval through analysis of botanical data from recent excavations at the site of Simapuqio-Muyupata, in Peru’s Cusco region. We track how agriculturalists living at the site altered patterns of plant use—and, by extension agricultural practice—across the period of Inka and Spanish Colonial governance. These farmers remained reliant on a similar suite of cultivated plants under both political regimes, but shifted practices of land management to conserve labor when confronted with the structural conditions of servitude to Spanish landlords. By altering agricultural practices, these agriculturalists re-shaped the agroecological context in which they lived and worked to ensure survival in the face of political upheaval.

Social differentiation of the peasantry (Marxist)

ABSTRACT Marxist understandings of the peasantry focus largely on class relations and seek to locate rural households within wider sets of class structures and dynamics. This article reviews debates and controversies amongst Marxists on the classic agrarian question, class differentiation within processes of transition from pre-capitalist to fully capitalist societies, land reform and class relations, whether or not to characterize peasants as petty commodity producers, the relationship between class and other forms of social differentiation such as gender, race, ethnicity and caste, and the role of class differentiation in peasant politics.

Land acquisition through Bricolage? Politics of smallholder acacia plantation expansion in upland Central Vietnam

ABSTRACT Commodity booms can lead to intense pressure to access land. We document a case where villagers, far from being passive victims of land grabs, acquire land themselves by navigating between customary institutions and state policies. The mechanisms by which villagers re-territorialize forest to their advantage include enclosure, encroachment, theft, and re-claiming. These mechanisms evolve over time, notably in response to a closing of the forest frontier, thus challenging locals seeking livelihoods and state officials managing forests. The paper questions assumptions about local villagers' positionality in the global land rush and calls for rethinking the nature of peasant politics worldwide.

Peasant Oaths, Furious Icons and the Quest for Agency: Tracing Subaltern Politics in Tsarist Georgia on the Eve of the 1905 Revolution. Part II: Agents and Items of (Counter)Insurgent Political Theology on the Imperial Borderland

This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The second part of the article delves into Uratadze’s account of the aftermath of the inaugural oath and the conflicts it triggered between peasants, intelligentsia and the Tsarist administration.

Peasant Oaths, Furious Icons and the Quest for Agency: Tracing Subaltern Politics in Tsarist Georgia on the Eve of the 1905 Revolution. Part I: The Prose of the Intelligentsia and Its Peasant Symptoms

This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The first part of the article starts with a reading of Uratadze’s narration of the 1902 inaugural oath “against the grain”.

Back to Her Sheep: The Commune and Peasant Politics in George Sand's Nanon

This article examines Sand's response to the Paris Commune through a rereading of her novel Nanon, which she started writing just two months after the Commune's collapse, in July 1871. Sand's work of fiction refracts the recent traumas of this urban uprising through a retelling of the French Revolution, and the period of the nation's first Commune (1792–95)—this, from the perspective of the provinces. The article thinks through this double "displacement" of 1871 in Nanon—in particular, the distance that the novel cultivates from the capital of revolution. It situates Sand's pastoral narrative in relation to contemporaneous discourses on the Commune that recognised in the peasant class an impediment to its radical Republican politics. However unfashionable the pragmatic version of Sand's Republicanism might be, this article sets out to take seriously the writer's political thought as it was transposed in fiction. In redescribing, from the periphery, the peasants' alienation from the political centre, Sand interrogates the blind spots in the Commune's theorisation of "people" and "nation."

Book review: Arupjyoti Saikia, A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam Since 1900

Arupjyoti Saikia, A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam Since 1900, Routledge, New Delhi, 2014, 480 pp., ₹1495 (Hardback).

Mapping violent land orders: armed conflict, moral economies, and the trajectories of land occupation and dispossession in the Colombian Caribbean

ABSTRACT In Colombia, armed conflict intersected with land politics in complex ways. Throughout conjunctures of guerrilla and paramilitary domination, the moral economies that sustained hierarchical land orders became a terrain of tensions and negotiations. Through an ethnographic approach to participatory mapping in the agrarian region of Montes de María in Colombia's Caribbean, this article analyzes the links between armed conflict, shifting land orders, and the moral economies that informed peasant politics. It exposes the incomplete and complex processes of space-making produced by armed conflict, as well as the ambivalent and shifting character of peasant political strategies in the context of violence.

The politics of rurbanization and The Egyptian society of the Muslim Brothers

The essay explores what a new peasant politics could look like in the 21st century through the lens of the category of the "rurban"—a category encompassing both migrants from saturated and unlivable metropolises, and peasants displaced by mechanization and industrialization from their lands, turning towards small towns. The rise to and fall of the Muslim Brothers from the reins of government in post-revolutionary Egypt is analyzed from the lens of urban-rural migration dynamics, and provides a clear example of the nature, scope and importance of the politics of rurbanization. Through a mixture of political biography, analysis of migration and urbanization data, as well as social network structure and data on voting patterns, the primary role of “rurbanization” comes to the fore both as a category of interest decentering the primarily urban-biased accounts of recent Egyptian history, but also in emphasizing the role of such provincial and marginalized actors in writing contemporary global history. In particular, their capacity to formulate a viable and pragmatic political alternative to market society, and to birth political subjects capable of mutuality and collective action from within market society, makes them vitally appealing to these rurban spaces across the world, whether in Egypt or in the USA.

Linking the defence of territory to food sovereignty: Peasant environmentalisms and extractive neoliberalism in Guatemala

AbstractFood sovereignty and the defence of territory are increasingly influential environmental paradigms for rural social movements in opposition to free market hegemony in the global south. These paradigms propose radical alternatives to growth based economies, unequal property regimes, and the absolute territorial sovereignty of nation states. Drawing on fieldwork in rural Guatemala with progressive NGOs and social movements, this essay describes these tendencies' origins and characteristic discourses and demands, examines their links to traditional peasant politics and indigenous rights movements, and assesses their divergences, limitations, and possibilities for synergy. Building on Joan Martínez‐Alier' conception of the “environmentalism of the poor”, I show how these “peasant environmentalisms” converge and reinforce one another while responding to different aspects of neoliberalism's threat to lives, livelihoods, and territories during Guatemala's conflict‐ridden transition to neoliberal democracy. I also discuss how their convergence has expanded thinking about territorial alternatives and suggest that holding these paradigms in tension is vital to build broad coalitions among a fragmented peasantry. I propose food sovereignty as the economic model of the plurinational state.

La política plebeya en las parroquias rurales de Cuenca, 1995-2005

This article examines the emergence of rural leaders in the parishes of the canton of Cuenca, called “cholos políticos” [indigenous peasant politicians] in the context of peasant politics. The testimonies of rural parish leaders are the key sources for the research. The article first provides a baseline situation of the subject in the literature on racial constructs and politics; afterwards, it reviews what has been called the process of establishing a “peasant citizenry”. To this end, it examines the demands made by parish leaders of the canton of Cuenca, a territory marked by rationalization and social discrimination because of its peasant origins.

On Becoming a Student of Vietnamese History

Research Article| August 01 2017 On Becoming a Student of Vietnamese History Hue-Tam Ho Tai Hue-Tam Ho Tai Hue-Tam Ho Tai is Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History, Emerita at Harvard University, where she began teaching in 1980. Her areas of interest include social and cultural history. She is the author of Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Harvard University Press, 1983), Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1992), and Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon (University of California Press, 2010). A complete list of her publications is provided at the end of this special collection. Her current research is on popular religion in Vietnam, specifically the cult of Hồ Chí Minh and the Guan Gong procession in Sam Mountain. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2017) 12 (3): 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2017.12.3.52 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hue-Tam Ho Tai; On Becoming a Student of Vietnamese History. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 August 2017; 12 (3): 52–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2017.12.3.52 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Vietnamese Studies Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam

Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam

Prismatic Village: The Margin at the Center in the Nepali Maoist Revolution

While the influence of peasant politics and agrarian struggles is growing extraordinarily in Nepal’s political landscape, their historical centrality and leadership in social transformation are undermined. This article demonstrates how the subaltern peasant politics of the 1970s and the subsequent Nepali Maoist revolution of the 1990s inversed the orthodox political imagination of peasants as primitive and pre-political, and argues that villages have always been a locus of political change in Nepal. By exploring the political history of Thabang Village in western Nepal, this article argues for a prismatic approach of studying peasant politics to understand how the structural changes of a particular village can instigate national political transformation. The main argument is that the internal dynamics of a village can enter into an articulated relationship with national political processes, which can swiftly transform the structural importance of the village and its nature of connections to other wider socio-political processes, allowing for unexpected political possibilities such as the Maoist revolution to emerge.