Peasant Responses Research Articles

Living through crises due to successive commodity booms and busts: Investigating the changing peasants farming style in rural Indonesia

This study aims to explain how a peasant community makes decisions in response to recurring crises in order to maintain their farms, and the extent to which vulnerability contexts and (external) institutions influence peasants’ decision-making regarding their livelihoods. In doing so, we present a case study of the Village of Ranga, in the South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, where data collected through semi-structured interviews, observation, and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Data regarding farmers' livelihood strategies in responding to the crises, in the form of commodity booms and busts, is analyzed by employing a sustainable rural livelihoods framework, while a Chayanovian “balance” approach is used to understand peasants’ decision making and the extent to which they retain operations as ‘peasant farms’. We found that the most critical vulnerability that directly contributes to changes in the peasants' livelihood trajectories is successive shocks in the form of physical disturbances to plants and land. In making decisions regarding changes in livelihood strategies when facing crises, farmers seem to be pushed to abandon various balances they previously upheld, except to some extent the labor-consumption balance. This change potentially deepens the vulnerability of the Ranga Village peasants by adding more exposure to volatile markets and environmental pressure (such climate-induced hazards, pests, disease, and water crisis). This research can help us to understand the nature of the peasant responses in times of crises, and therefore help to inform the scanning of potential strategic measures for rural agricultural development in order to increase agricultural resilience.

Climate perplexity: Rural changemakers facing the anthropocene

Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenges that human civilization now faces. To a large extent, attempts at mitigating or addressing climate change are performed by Changemaker ventures: small scale, entrepreneurial ventures that attempt to combine market orientation with social or ecological value-creation. The Changemaker phenomenon is particularly prevalent in the new food economy, where it is driving a fundamental restructuring of rural economies in Europe as well as in Asia and the Americas. But how do market oriented entrepreneurial ventures respond to climate change? Based on six years of interviews and participant observation with Italian rural Changemakers this article suggests that in the absence of collective organization, the Changemaker response to climate change is market by a paralysing perplexity, similar to that of resource-poorer peasants in the South. Without a strong forms of collective solidarity and deliberation the experience of climate change cannot be incorporated within a coherent view of the future. The results can be understood as a ‘weak signal’ that has implications for the study of peasant responses to climate change as well as for theoretical reflexions on the viability of changemaker-style social enterprises in promoting coherent strategies for survival in the Anthropocene.

Beyond Agency: The African Peasantry, the State, and Tobacco in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–80

AbstractThis paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

AN ASSESSMENT OF FACTORS DETERMINING LAND USE COMPETITION BETWEEN ENSET (PERENNIAL) AND CEREAL (ANNUAL) CROPS IN HADIYA ZONE THE CASE OF LEMO WOREADA (SNNPR)

This study is about assessment of factors determining land use competition between cereals and enset crops in Hadiya zone, Lemo woreda. The main objective of the study was to assess changes in land use and cropping pat-tern, farmers’ perception on land use and cropping pattern as well as factors that determine land use competition between cereals and enset crops. A substantial section of this paper discussed the trends of land use and cropping pattern changes since 2000 and the determinant factors of the changes. Attempts are also made to explore the responses of peasants on causes of land competition between cereals and enset. The findings indicated that there are changes in land use and cropping pattern in the study area. It revealed that land use changes in the study area in the last 20 years, 2000 to 2019, specifically cultivated land and residential area expanded by 0.34% and 0.019% annually respectively. On the other hand, grazing and wood lands has decreased by 0.143% and 0.11% annually respectively. There were changes in the cropping pattern. The land use competition in dega area was among barely, wheat, enset and bean, whereas, in woinadega area the competition was amongst wheat, teff, chats and enset. These crops were dominant crops in dega as well as woinadega areas. The major determinant factors of the changes in land use and cropping pattern were population pressure, farm size, profit maximization, access to market, access to extension services, damages caused by wild animals, distance of plots from home, pests and diseases, land ragmentations, physical infrastructure and crop specific input requirements.

«¿16 céntimos a cambio de aguas ácidas?». Respuestas políticas a la expansión minera en Cajamarca

For decades, Cajamarca has housed one of the most productive gold mines in the world. Between 1992, when the operations of the Yanacocha deposits began, until 2011, when the most important expansion project of the operating company was suspended, extractive activities have been a source of controversy. Only between 2004 and 2011 three conflicts reached national relevance in Cajamarca: Quilish (2004), Combayo (2006) and Minas Conga (2011). This continuum allows analyzing different types of «responses» —especially from rural areas— to mining. The article proposes that the peasant responses have been oriented to the negotiation of benefits that compensate the affectation of natural resources and allow the localities to accede, albeit in an indirect and limited way, to the profits produced by the industry. However, when the agreements reached with the company are not met or the population perceives that the impact on the means of subsistence is greater than the benefits received, incentives are generated for political mobilization. In this context, different coalitions had emerged between rural villages and urban organizations that, though ephemeral in organizational terms, promoted mobilizations against Yanacocha’s expansion projects with remarkable effectiveness.

Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Responses in Central China, 1736–1949, by Jiayan Zhang. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. xii+276 pp. C$95.00/US$99.00 (cloth), C$32.95/US$35.95 (paper).

<i>Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Responses in Central China, 1736–1949</i>, by Jiayan Zhang. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. xii+276 pp. C$95.00/US$99.00 (cloth), C$32.95/US$35.95 (paper).

Jiayan Zhang.Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949.

Jiayan Zhang.<i>Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949</i>.

Peasant balances, neoliberalism, and the stunted growth of non- traditional agro-exports in Haiti

This paper examines divergent peasant responses to models of export-oriented mango production that have been promoted in post-earthquake Haiti. While critical agrarian studies tends to focus more on the ways that capital shapes conditions facing peasant producers, there has been much less attention to the ways that peasant decision-making can restrict how capital operates. This paper argues that Haitian peasants strive to pursue their livelihoods in ways that are at odds with the ambitions of the country’s political and economic elites, and highlights some of the ways that peasants are pushing back against exploitative arrangements to maintain a degree of autonomy over their cropping systems. The field research that forms the empirical basis of this paper was conducted between November 2010 and July 2013 and included: qualitative interviews with leaders of peasant and other rural community organizations, Haitian government officials, and representatives of multilateral institutions; focus groups with peasant farmers; and participant observation.

Imperial Russia's Muslims: Islam, empire, and European modernity, 1788-1914

Acknowledgements Notes on transliteration and dates Introduction 1. A world of Muslims 2. Connecting Volga-Ural muslims to the Russian State 3. Russification: unmediated governance and the Empire's quest for ideal subjects 4. Peasant responses: protecting the inviolability of the Muslim domain 5. Russia's great transformation in the second half of the long nineteenth century (1860-1914) 6. The wealthy: prospering with the sea-change and giving back 7. The cult of progress 8. Alienation of the Muslim intelligentsia 9. Imperial paranoia 10. Flexibility of the Imperial domain and the limits of integration Conclusion Bibliography.

Coping With Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949. By Jiayan Zhang (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press) 276 pp. $95.00 cloth $32.95 paper

<i>Coping With Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949</i>. By Jiayan Zhang (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press) 276 pp. $95.00 cloth $32.95 paper

Coping with calamity: environmental change and peasant response in central China, 1736-1949

Coping with calamity: environmental change and peasant response in central China, 1736-1949

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: conversion, apostasy, and literacy

Becoming Muslim in imperial Russia: conversion, apostasy, and literacy, by Agnes Nilufer Kefeli, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2014, 289 pp., US$52.50 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-801-45231-4Agnes Nilufer Kefeli's fresh, original, and comprehensively researched examination of baptized Tatar (Krashen) apostasy in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tsarist state represents a major advance for scholarship on the social and religious history of imperial Russia. Relying on a diverse array of archival sources, family histories, biographies of the Prophet, Sufi texts, and other genres of popular religious literature, this book treats the great Krashen apostasies, or movements to gain the state's permission to return to Islam spanning the period from roughly 1802-1905, as a site of communal identity formation and negotiation. This negotiation, Kefeli argues, took place in a realm of religious practice embracing Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and animist practices common among semi-nomadic steppe peoples.One of Kefeli's chief stated tasks is to dispense with certain historiographical straitjackets that have been assigned to the Krashens by Russian, Soviet, Tatar nationalist, and Jadidist historians over the past century. These narratives have too often characterized the apostasies as a footnote to other broader narratives: Krashens returned to Islam as part of a larger pattern of Tatar nationalist mobilization in the late Russian empire, or formed but one marginal component of a societal legal challenge to the Russian state's stifling authoritarianism. Kefeli departs from this approach by treating the Krashen apostasies as a formative catalyst for the emergence of Islamic modernism among Russian Muslims, and as a pivotal model for peasant responses to changing notions of citizenship promoted by the state and the Russian Orthodox Church in the decades after the Great Reforms. Kefeli restores the Krashen apostasies to their rightful place as a significant milestone in Russia's social, political, and religious history.The bulk of the book is devoted to recalibrating the scholarly analysis of conversion itself. Kefeli's great achievement is to reimagine conversion as a communal rather than individual decision. Through an intensive examination of socioeconomic groups (merchants, tailors), wedding customs, festivals, and a pathbreaking, refreshingly novel look at the sphere of underground female religious education and knowledge, the author demonstrates that debates about the falsity or genuineness of the Krashen communities' stated desire to return to Islam or remain Christian miss the point. The act of petitioning the state for recognition as Muslim or Christian marked a fundamental transformation in the constitution of Krashen communities, their relationship with the state, and their engagement with Muslim and Christian neighbours. Official responses were often a moot point. Instead of privileging the state's reaction to apostate petitions in her analysis of the Krashens, Kefeli focuses on the dramatic communal cohesion and reconfiguration of religious knowledge and authority that was required in order for Krashen villages to take the radical step of returning to Islam in the first place. …

Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949. By Jiayan Zhang. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015. 292 pp. Map, tables, appendix, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $35.95.

<i> Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736–1949. </i> By Jiayan Zhang. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015. 292 pp. Map, tables, appendix, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. Paper $35.95.

Resistance and the City

The mass demonstrations that took place in 2011 in major cities worldwide, dubbed here Contemporary Metropolitan Protest (CMP), varied in terms of the issues tackled and the political efficacy attained, but featured similarities in style, mobilization patterns and the use of traditional and social media. The similarities explain the tendency among commentators and researchers to treat CMP as a coherent category. The variation, on the other hand, raises questions about conceptual and theoretical idioms used so far in the analysis of CMP. The article begins by scrutinizing “resistance”—an idiom introduced to anthropology in the 1980s to theorize peasant response to metropolitan policies—and its recent emergence in the depiction and analysis of CMP. Highlighting the strengths and limitations of the term, I use the rise and fall of CMP in Tel Aviv in 2011 and 2012 as an example of how the implicit logic of aggression and response, so central to earlier employment of the notion of resistance, can be hijacked by defensive regimes that seek to delegitimize and criminalize critique, thus forcing CMP to decline and implode.

Economic Transformation and the Utilization of Tradition: Achieving Covert Benefits through the use of Reciprocity in Rites of Passage in Serbian Villages

The paper, which is part of a larger whole, offers an attempt to interpret new forms of behavior, especially the complex interplay between different forms of gift giving and consumption in contemporary marital rites. These forms of behavior, which tend to mimic traditional patterns, but are far from them, represent the symbolic responses of peasants to the economic pressures of the outside environment. The concept of the use of tradition is offered as a framework through which it is possible to link the entirety of socio-economic conditions with deliberate actions by individuals or groups in a rural environment. Playing with the multiple meanings which can be ascribed to the forms of behavior that mimic traditional patterns, especially the reciprocity of different forms of exchange of gifts and wedding feasts, enables the transformation of interests which it isn’t advisable to endorse into actions which are acceptable to everyone. To use Bourdieu’s terms, consciously resorting to traditional forms of behavior enables the “euphemization” of their original meaning and the real reasons behind their use, and constitutes the first step in the use of tradition. The second step in this process is linked to choice between different behavioral patterns (the flows of reciprocity on the one hand, and conspicuous, prestigious consumption on the other) and playing with the social consequences of such choices. The possibility of using elements of the traditional cultural pattern of the wedding in order to maintain or elevate one’s social status was present before, especially due to the multifaceted practice of gift giving, or rather, the possibility of giving a gift which is larger than the expected return gift. The only difference between the traditional and the contemporary model of wedding practices is that today it’s possible to elevate one’s status through consumption which completely sidesteps the established channels of reciprocity and mutuality. Namely, while the former patterns of behavior made it possible to elevate one’s status only to the extent to which other members of the community received gifts, or the extent to which other members of the community profited from “excessive” gift giving, today it is necessary to build one’s social standing through consumption which completely sidesteps the channels of mutuality (like spending money on ordering songs, on orchestras, large tents, limos etc.) In a system like that, the practice of utilizing tradition, the public focus on gift giving and other forms of mutual exchange, serves primarily (but not only) to diminish the intrusiveness of new forms of behavior, especially “pure status consumption”, and to make their social consequences more acceptable. &#x0D;

The corner of the living: Ayacucho on the eve of the Shining Path insurgency

Peru's indigenous peoples played a key role in the tortured tale of Shining Path guerrillas from the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. villagers of Chuschi and Huaychao, high in the mountains of the department of Ayacucho, have an iconic place in this violent history. Emphasizing the years leading up to the peak period of violence from 1980 to 2000, when 69,000 people lost their lives, Miguel La Serna asks why some Andean peasants chose to embrace Shining Path ideology and others did not.Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic field work, La Serna argues that historically rooted and locally specific power relations, social conflicts, and cultural understandings shaped the responses of indigenous peasants to the insurgency. In Chuschi, the guerrillas found indigenous support for the movement and dreamed of sparking a worldwide Maoist revolution. In Huaychao, by contrast, villagers rose up against Shining Path forces, precipitating more violence and feeding an international uproar that took on political significance for Peru during the Cold War. The Corner of the Living illuminates both the stark realities of life for the rural poor everywhere and why they may or may not choose to mobilize around a revolutionary cause.

A Case Study on Responses of Peasants, Landlords and Korea Government to Land Reform in South Korea

A Case Study on Responses of Peasants, Landlords and Korea Government to Land Reform in South Korea

How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land

The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet bloc caused millions of peasants to sign away their rights to land and join collective farms. How did Party cadres accomplish this extraordinary change? In this article, drawn from a large collaborative project, the authors present examples from Romania to describe one of the central techniques used: “persuasion work.” The authors focus on how the persuaders sought to create their authority with villagers, peasants’ and cadres’ reciprocal manipulations of kinship and gender, cadres’ disruptions of the accustomed spatial and temporal organization of village life and peasant responses to them, bargaining and negotiations between cadres and villagers, and more overt forms of “persuasive” coercion. Although persuasion was ostensibly about creating an inner state of belief—convincing peasants of the superiority of collective agriculture—the authors argue that it is more appropriately seen as a performative matter, in which peasants learned to perform the consent that was required of them, whether they believed in the virtues of collectivizing or not. Among the reasons was that Romania’s cadres were largely ill prepared for the job and were unable to be very persuasive. Thus, they both relied on force (thereby heightening peasants’ resistance to joining the collectives) and settled for villagers’ pro forma adherence rather than their active conviction.

National Identification in Pre-Industrial Communities: Peasant Participation in the November Uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, 1830‒1831

National identification in pre-industrial communities: peasant participation in the November Uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, 1830-1831 This article aims to discover to what extent the illiterate peasantry could be seen as having national consciousness before the advent of economic and social modernization. Exploring the behaviour and attitudes of the Polish peasants during the November Uprising of the Kingdom of Poland against Russia in 1830-1831, it challenges the prevalent scholarly notion that pre-industrial peasants had little knowledge of and even more limited affection for any community outside their villages, while their participation in wars was generally dependant on coercion by the local elites and impending threats to their immediate neighbourhoods. This article therefore asks how the Polish peasants responded to the war against Russia and what might have motivated their responses. It analyses how far the peasants knew and used the elite vocabulary of fighting for the fatherland and for the nation and to what extent they felt a sense of ownership of such a national cause. In answering these questions, this article draws on a wide variety of sources. Perhaps the most important of them are hitherto neglected archival materials from Warsaw, Cracow and Poznań. They show various forms of peasant self-expression during the conflict of 1831, such as signing the oath of loyalty to the nation, volunteering to fight in the Uprising, donating goods for the war effort and writing petitions to the Polish authorities. Such materials are enriched by investigations into the memoirs of nobles, military reports and newspaper accounts, which contain a wealth of information about peasant responses to the Polish-Russian War. Finally, an invaluable source are the memoirs of former peasants themselves, which present firsthand insights into the perception of the nation by the lowest strata of the population. While this variety of sources poses a range of challenges, such as the exceptional character of the peasant memoirs and the unreliable nature of those written by the elite, they nonetheless present a relatively coherent picture of peasant attitudes. This article argues that many peasants easily identified themselves with the Polish nation, as they willingly contributed to the Uprising by volunteering to the army, conducting reconnaissance duties and providing supplies. They also largely understood that the nation was a community to which they belonged. Many villagers easily adopted the elite rhetoric of a unified national community, which is seen particularly clearly in their enthusiasm for singing the future national anthem “Poland is not dead yet.” Others demonstrated their sense of ownership of the national cause by putting their own interpretations on the Uprising, for example, defining it as an opportunity to demonstrate that it were the peasants, not the lords, who truly loved Poland. While there was obviously a number of cases of resistance of peasants to the burdens imposed by the Uprising, such occurrences usually indicated concerns with everyday livelihood rather than indifference to or lack of knowledge about the nation. This article cannot and does not intend to show that all villagers were committed national patriots. What it discovers, however, is that many illiterate peasants could define themselves as belonging to a community they called the nation and that lack of modernization, with its mass education, industrialization and print capitalism, did not create inherent obstacles for the existence of such national self-identifications among the masses.

Los campesinos y el estado en América Latina: un pasado turbulento, un futuro incierto

En este artículo, se proporciona una revisión retrospectiva de las relaciones entre los campesinos y el Estado en América Latina. En la primera sección, se evalúa la pertinencia de las explicaciones alternativas acerca de la dinámica de dichas relaciones. En la segunda, se revisa la historia actual de las relaciones entre el campesinado y el Estado, y se analizan las fuerzas dinámicas de cambio y de lucha implícitas. En la sección tercera, se explora la relación entre el Estado y los campesinos en términos de la respuesta 'desde abajo' por estos últimos, en contra de los imperativos 'desde arriba' del primero. En la cuarta, se lleva a cabo el análisis de la dinámica de las respuestas de los campesinos ante los esfuerzos estatales para cooptarlos y controlarlos; aquí el punto en cuestión es el de las dinámicas de regresión, desplazamiento y revolución. El artículo concluye con un análisis de la estructura de poder al interior de las relaciones entre los campesinos y el Estado; dicha estructura es analizada respecto de la dinámica de las fuerzas sociales movilizadas en el proceso.