Rural Peasants Research Articles

Happiness and Unhappiness in the Developing World: Life Satisfaction Among Sex Workers, Dump-Dwellers, Urban Poor, and Rural Peasants in Nicaragua

Little in-depth research exists on subjective well-being (SWB) in the developing world, especially among the poor and extremely poor. Biswas-Diener and Diener (Soc Indic Res 55:329–352, 2001) employed a study design in the slums of Calcutta, India to address this gap in SWB research. They found slightly negative global SWB but slightly positive domain specific satisfaction in their sample. The current study employs the same paradigm and investigates the SWB of female sex workers, city dump dwellers, and urban and rural poor in Nicaragua, Central America. The current study was able to replicate the Biswas-Diener and Diener (Soc Indic Res 55:329–352, 2001) finding of slightly negative SWB for marginalized urban groups. In addition, an overall model for predicting SWB was constructed using personality dispositions, objective income, social support, and social rootedness as predictors. Social support and objective income were the only significant predictors in the model but more zero order relations existed. Additionally, this study contrasted urban poor versus rural poor and found no significant SWB differences.

Special Economic Zones as New Forms of Corporate Land Grab: Experiences from India

Chigurupati Ramachandraiah and Ramasamy Srinivasan argue that special economic zones in India are not pro-poor people centred development but rather are a form of land grab that dispossess rural peasants to the benefit of big capital and the elite. After 60 years of independence, India is experiencing ‘social justice in reverse gear’ with a failure to uphold the land rights to the poor.

Body size and obesity patterns in Caboclo populations from Pará, Amazonia, Brazil

Background: In many developing countries overweight, obesity and obesity-related morbidity are becoming a problem of increasing public health importance. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in body size and body composition with age in adults of the Caboclo populations from the Brazilian Amazon as well as to examine the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adults aged 20–75 years, taking into account recent trends for the whole country. Caboclo are genetically and culturally admixed rural peasant groups that live along the Amazon River and its tributaries in Brazil, and there are few previous studies of their health and lifestyle.Subjects and methods: A total of 304 subjects (149 males and 155 females) from two socioecologically different areas were studied. Height, weight and skinfolds (tricipital, subscapular and suprailiac) were measured; international intervals (WHO) for overweight and obesity were used.Results: Women showed significantly lower values than men for height, weight, upper arm circumference and fat-free mass and higher values for triceps, subscapular and suprailiac skinfolds and body fat (%). In the overall sample combined overweight and obesity was 47.8% in men and 50.8% in women. When compared to recent values published for the Northern region and for the whole of Brazil, 20.5% of Caboclo women aged 20–75 years were obese, which is higher than all other populations, including other rural samples. Caboclo men showed the highest rates of obesity (9.1%) and overweight (39.1%) of any rural population from the country, including Northern Brazil.Conclusion: The results suggest an effect of increased Western lifestyle influence on the body composition of these Caboclo populations. Considering that these are rural populations with limited access to education and health care, the high prevalence of overweight and obesity associated with low socio-economic status makes them a vulnerable group that deserves a higher level of attention by the country's public health authorities.

The misbehaving jeks: the evolving regime of Thainess and Sino-Thai challenges

This paper traces the evolving cultural-political regime based on the ethno-ideology of Thainess with which the Thai state controlled and contained the immigrant Chinese and their Thai-born descendants politically, and assimilated them culturally, while making use of their labour and entrepreneurship to develop Thai capitalism economically, through its absolutist, militarist and electocratic phases. It also sketches the challenges successively mounted to that regime by immigrant communists, radical democratic nationalists, and globalised capitalists, whose ethnic Chinese descent has yielded gradually over time to class and political identity in the context of successful cultural assimilation, changing international politics, growing wealth and economic crisis, coups, and political polarisation. Meanwhile, lurking in the background are the rural peasants and urban poor/marginalised population, whose majority vote and changing political loyalty may prove decisive in the outcome of the latest political contest.

Questioning the Self

After accession to the World Trade Organization in 1999, China has been further incorporated into the global track. The national policy of economic development requires a continuing exploitation of natural resources and intensive labor from the rural sector, and over the last few decades there has been a ceaseless wave of rural women going to the cities and working mainly as assembly-line workers, domestic helpers, and sex workers. Developing a subaltern and feminist perspective, this paper attempts to invoke a spectral figure of the subaltern as the rural woman demonstrably haunting dominant regimes of representations of modernization. Through a textual analysis of the television series Girls from Outside (1991), this paper examines how a rural woman peasant worker is represented as a model of the imperative to “develop the self” as a marker of social upward mobility, in the dominant discourse of development. Yet, this paper also reads against the grain of the texts, in which there are contradictions and ambivalences in portraying a rural woman as an actor of modernization. The self here is haunted by the other, as exemplified by rural kinship, a strike, and the women “left-over” in the job market.

Land expropriation, protest, and impunity in rural China

Conflicts over rural land expropriation, which have intensified over the past decade in China, pose a significant threat to the country's social stability and the sustainability of its economic development. This article argues that such conflicts are inevitable under China's current political and legal system. After a brief introduction of the present situation in China and an overview of China's land regime, the article first analyzes reasons for the escalation of land conflicts, including the vague definition of public interest, the inadequate compensation, and the ambiguous nature of collective land ownership. It then argues that even the few existing rights of rural peasants under the present land regime are not adequately protected due to China's poor law enforcement. The article further elucidates that impunity with regard to illegal land grabbing is common in China for a variety of reasons that all have roots in the Communist Party's monopoly over Chinese society. With no fundamental reform to China's party politics, the article concludes, there will be no effective measure to prevent further conflicts over land in the near future.

Notes on the Connecticut Yankee

Imagine a political cartoon threatening to spark an international incident. It is the mid-1950s, in Sarkhan, a fictional Southeast Asian coun try whose rural peasants farm with pre-industrial methods. While the Cold War threatens to go hot, American ambassador Louis Sears?Lucky Lou?awaits a federal judgeship back in the States. He can't speak Sarkhanese, neither can his staff, but he recog nizes communist propaganda, at least when it is aimed at his van ity: the cartoon depicts a man, Lucky, whose sweaty round face has a mule's braying mouth. He has a leash on a gracefully built Sarkhanese man; a Coca-Cola sign is their destination. When word of the ambassador's anger emerges, local power brokers intervene, cajoling the newspaper's editor to print something that will prevent a diplomatic rift. The next day the Honorable Louis Sears reads an op-ed piece extolling the progress brought by the Americans, and is pacified. The Ugly American (1958) is growing dusty even on the shelves of the Peace Corps library, but a stereotype lives on, and a caricature by donkey emblemizes it. Here is the insensitive loudmouth, the jackass who is not merely culturally obtuse, but willful in his igno rance, the sacred workhorse in the coca-colanization of the world: the ugly American. In their introduction and non-fiction epilogue, authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick bend the fictional genre and insist repeatedly that the book's interlinked short stories are at root fac tual, every element drawn from interviews with members of the diplomatic corps and armed forces, and distilled into a series of tales principally for didactic reasons?to alert the American public to the dos and don'ts of international diplomacy; to galvanize a divided government into refocusing its recruitment and training; and so on. So heavy is the didacticism that no critique could begin elsewhere than with the transparent morals: learning the native language is good, ignoring indigenous ways and beliefs is bad,

The legacy of unhygienic plasma collection in China

The legacy of unhygienic plasma collection in China

Embedded institutionalization: sustaining rural tax reform in China

Sustaining early achievements in rural tax reforms and peasants' burden reduction is a major challenge facing Chinese leaders. Theoretical discussions over institutional change have noted the propensity of new-found changes to relapse, short of processes institutionalizing the changed, new order. Drawing from the experience of a Hubei county, the paper explores how the Chinese rural tax reform may be sustained, and its achievements protected, through innovative changes in another institutional field: the personnel. Against conventional wisdom on the role of downsizing in government reforms, the paper argues that the crux lies with the performance of government officials, not their numbers or payroll size per se, and thus the importance of reforms targeting the former.

Voices from Within and Without: Sources, Methods, and Problematics in the Recovery of the Agrarian History of the Igbo (Southeastern Nigeria)

Over the past few decades, social history has variously and successfully explored the lives of neglected groups in society. Nevertheless, the question of capturing these “silent voices” in history, including those of women, remains at the heart of social history. Although few sources are available that allow historians to hear these voices, new methodological insights offer opportunities. A multidisciplinary framework and a broad range of methodologies can shed new light on the lives of peasants, who have been often neglected in history and provide opportunities to “hear” their voices and concerns as historical subjects. The object of this paper is to present sortie critical perspective on the use of oral and archival sources for the study of the agricultural history of rural Africa. What I present here is my approach to the collection and use of various sources for the study of Igbo agricultural history in the twentieth century. It suggests that oral sources, in particular, offer an important opportunity in the writing of an inclusive history of agricultural change—a history that for the most part has been created by rural peasants. Another objective is to outline my personal experiences in the field and to suggest important ways of situating the researcher not only in the analysis of the evidence, but most importantly, in the context or the fieldwork environment. Both, as has been clearly shown, can affect the historian's analysis and perspective and the resulting history.Igboland is situated in Southeastern Nigeria and lies between longitude 7°E and latitude 6°10' N. The region borders the middle belt region of Nigeria to the north, the river Niger to the west, the Ibibio people to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea and Bight of Biafra to the south. Most of the region lies on a plain less than 600 feet (about 183 meters) above sea level. Most of Igboland lies within the Guinean and Sub-Guinean physical environment and is characterized by an annual rainfall of between forty and sixty inches per annum, with a dry season lasting between three and four months in northern Igboland and a mean monthly humidity of about 90% throughout the year. The pattern of rainfall produces two distinct patterns of vegetation. The southern part of the region is characterized by heavy rainfall that produces a dense rainforest that thinned out northwards into a savanna. However, many centuries of human habitation and activities have turned the whole region into secondary forest, with only pockets of forest oasis remaining.

The sustainability of subsistence hunting of peccaries in the Argentine Chaco

Subsistence hunting practiced by poor rural and indigenous people in Latin America differentially affects the three species of peccaries (Artiodactyla: Tayassuidae). Sustainability of subsistence hunting of peccaries in the Argentine semi-arid Chaco, where the three species coexist, was unknown. My objectives were to determine the importance of peccaries for the local people, describe the current pattern of hunting and its impact on the three species of peccary and identify the factors that affect hunting sustainability. I found that many rural (70%) and village people (40%) consumed peccaries. White-lipped and chacoan peccaries were more susceptible to overharvesting than collared peccary. Current rates of hunting of white-lipped and chacoan peccaries are likely not sustainable because: (a) density of both species was between two to three times higher inside a protected area than outside; (b) populations have declined near larger villages and in older settlements; (c) herds sizes were small in comparison with other regions; (d) large number of juveniles less than one year old were harvested; (e) hunting did not discriminate based on sex or reproductive status and (f) The unified harvest model indicated unsustainable harvest because more than 40% of the reproductive production was taken and populations densities were less than 60% carrying capacities. In contrast, harvest of collared peccary seems sustainable at the current rates of hunting by rural peasants. Other threats such as forest exploitation, however, are accelerating, and are likely to reduce sustainability.

Pride, prejudice and politics: performing Portuguese folklore amid Newark’s urban renaissance

This essay examines the role of expressive culture in the renovation of stigmatized people and places. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, this study places revivalist folklore performance center stage within Newark, New Jersey’s dramatic narrative of multicultural conciliation and post-riot transformation. Imbricated in processes of urban restoration, social healing, immigrant adaptation and political empowerment, ranchos folclóricos cannot simply be read as the nostalgic hankering for an originary homeland. Ranchos folclóricos perform double duty to both sending and receiving contexts, proactive in demonstrating to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic that Portuguese immigrants, sometimes maligned for having “ditched their country,” have harnessed the nineteenth-century traditions of rural peasants to contemporary agendas of incorporation, community building and urban renewal.

Recent Trends of Emigration from China: 1982–2000

ABSTRACTUsing data from several Chinese censuses and surveys, we provide a new perspective for the study of international migration. Focusing on the trends of international migration from China and Fujian province between 1982 and 2000, several findings emerge. First, Fujian and Yunnan provinces became the leading immigrant‐sending provinces in China by 2000. Second, changes in socio‐economic selectivity among emigrants from Fujian province from 1990 to 1995 are also clearly revealed in our analysis. The shift from urbanites to rural peasants among the emigrant population is particularly noteworthy. Third, in the context of Fujian province, factors such as age, education, rural/urban status, and occupation (especially the service sector) are the most important predictors of emigration. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects of assimilation of Fujianese immigrants in destination societies.

Gramsci, culture and anthropology

Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology. By Kate Crehan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. x, 220. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper. Since the middle 1980s the notion of has come under attack in the field of anthropology. Critics of argue that it has become as essentializing as the genetic explanations for human variation that it replaced in the late nineteenth century. From their perspective, has come to be seen as an immutable trait of human beings, while some cultures are deemed to be superior to others. These critics advocate for a new problematic, which focuses on the ways in which ideologies of difference simultaneously create and conceal inequality. As a result, the concept of has challenged culture as the unifying concept of anthropology.1 Not surprisingly, theories of power quickly came to center stage within the discipline, and a generation of anthropologists scrambled to read and understand the works of theorists like Althusser, Bourdieu, Debord, Foucault, and Gramsci. These scholars discovered what others before them already knew: the works of these theorists were for the most part dauntingly obtuse. Knowing (or at least appearing to know) these theories became valuable symbolic capital not only within anthropology but more generally throughout the social sciences and humanities-and the multidisciplinary field of African studies is certainly no exception. Of all these difficult theorists, none perhaps is more difficult than Antonio Gramsci. The central difficulty with Gramsci is that his writings are highly fragmented. Most of his early writings are political essays addressing issues like trade unionism, education, and relationships between urban workers and rural peasants. For the most part, these works do not attempt to develop larger theoretical arguments. Gramsci's later writings, which do attempt this, were produced during his imprisonment by the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. They are largely working notes from Gramsci to himself, rendered obscure by his use of code to mystify those who might interfere with his work. Unfortunately, Gramsci died before developing these notes into a comprehensive theory of and power. Kate Crehan's Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology grapples with the difficulties of Gramsci's corpus and seeks to highlight their relevance to cultural anthropology. This book is an excellent introduction to Gramsci's ideas and their relevance to the study of power within the social sciences and humanities. The early chapters give the reader useful background on Gramsci's life and work, and accessible overviews of some of his ideas. Crehan's comparisons of anthropological ideas of to Gramsci's ideas of are also accessible and useful. In other places, however, Crehan's discussions are nearly as inaccessible as Gramsci's most opaque prison notes. In part, this is because she is highly critical of what she sees as facile interpretations of Gramsci's ideas. She is especially critical of Jean and John Comaroff, whom she sees as the main purveyors of Hegemony Lite. By seeking a tightly specified theoretical argument, Crehan argues, the Comaroff s and others have destroyed the essentially protean nature of the most celebrated of Gramscian concepts: hegemony. This crime is committed, according to Crehan, by reducing hegemony to ideologies that obscure power relationships by presenting them as a sort of natural order. …

Development projects and involuntary population displacement: The World Bank's attempt to correct past failures

In the past, poor rural peasants have been the unintended victims of large-scale development projects in the world's developing countries. Development projects such as dam and road construction have triggered large streams of population movements within poor countries. Policy makers such as those at the World Bank have made several attempts to tackle the problems of development-based involuntary population displacements. This paper examines some of the consequences and dynamics of development induced forced migration. It discusses the World Bank's past failure to provide adequate policies that sufficiently tackle the displacement problems that were the consequences of its past projects in Africa. The Bank's new Operational Policy on Involuntary Displacement is then evaluated in a retrospect- ive analysis of how it could have solved the population displacement problems in one of its projects, the Nangbeto Dam in Togo, West Africa. The analysis concludes that the Operational Policy could be an effective tool to tackle development induced population displacement but that it still needs a few more adjustments as a policy instrument.

The Faith-healers of the Assemblies of God in Burkina Faso: Taking Responsibility for Diseases Related to “Living Together”

The author shows that curing and healing services which are offered by the Assemblies of God Church (Pentecostal church) in Burkina Faso—a church which recruits mostly low-income urban dwellers and rural peasants—are based primarily on a therapeutic procedure that has two parts, which together are able to treat various ailments that are in turn connected to transformations occurring in the nature of the relations between people and their families, friends and neighbours, or between individuals and the various groups they belong to. The problem is to show that prayers for deliverance from demons, far from being reducible to a miraculous event, actually form part of a long conversion process. Through collaboration between pastors and certain faith-healers, a new therapeutic attitude arises, which is coherent, effective and well adapted to the current transformations of everyday life—and more doctrinally mixed in its representations than the official Pentecostal position could admit.

Demography of Illicit Emigration from China: A Sending Country's Perspective

This paper examines the demographic trends of international migration from China, particularly from Fujian Province in the 1980s and 1990s, comparing the characteristics of emigrants with nonemigrants. This research yields two major findings. First, Fujian Province became a leading immigrant-sending province in the mid-1990s. Second, there have also been changes in socioeconomic status (SES) selectivity of emigration from Fujian from 1990 to 1995. In particular, this change in emigration selectivity is characterized by a significant shift from urbanites to rural peasants. The future prospects of emigration from Fujian and China are explored.

Terror's talk: Fieldwork and war

My purpose in this essay is to raise some questions about what isinvolved in research on political violence. Since 1995 I haveconducted ethnographic research in rural villages throughoutAyacucho, the region of Peru most heavily affected by the warbetween the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso, the rondascampesinas (armed peasant patrols) and the Peruvian armed forces.A key factor motivating my research was a desire to write againstthe culture of violence arguments that were used to ``explain''the war. The concept of a ``culture of violence'' or ``endemicviolence'' has frequently been attributed to the Andean region,particularly to the rural peasants who inhabit the highlands.I wanted to understand how people make and unmake lethal violencein a particular social and historical context, and to explore thepositioning and responsibilities of an anthropologist who conductsresearch in the context of war.

URBANIZATION IN TRANSITIONAL SOCIETIES: AN OVERVIEW OF VIETNAM AND HANOI

The rush of foreign investment that drives industrialization has disrupted the socialist ways of Vietnam. This unprecedented about-face in Vietnam's political economy, a process called doi moi, unfolds unevenly in what was formerly called North and South Vietnam. In particular, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon) accommodate this industrialization differently, owing to history, politics, infrastructure, and the allure these places hold for displaced rural peasants. This paper highlights the widening contradictions that doi moi has brought to Vietnam. It focuses on the nation's largest cities and assesses the impact doi moi has had on housing, infrastructure, and the basic provision of urban services. Postsocialist urbanization in Vietnam witnesses a new and diminished role for the state, despite a wide array of urban problems and petty enterprise in the wake of the doi moi process. [Key words: urbanization, Vietnam, doi moi, social services.]

The Paradoxes of Environmental Policy and Resource Management in Reform-Era China

Over the last 5,000 years serious environmental problems—deforestation, desertification, erosion, and widespread pollution of air, land, and water—have prevailed throughout most of China, brought about by a diverse set of social and political contexts. In this paper I focus on an enduring contradiction associated with the post-1978 reforms, namely accelerated environmental resource degradation in rural areas amid unprecedented national economic growth. Declining entitlements to assets and social capital in China’s rural village populations are a crucial aspect of altered state-peasant relations, as these are increasingly mediated by the market during China’s transition to a hybrid economy. This has resulted in changing patterns of resource use, impacting both the environment and peasant livelihoods. A brief assessment of China’s postrevolutionary environmental policy and management practices provides the context for detailed case studies in Henan Province. These examples highlight the relationship between political-economic changes and environmental policy and management. Contrary to reform rhetoric, rural peasants’ embracing of reform policies does not necessarily optimize their welfare or promote sustainable use of resources. The case studies reveal alternative pathways for villages, ones that ought to be brought into the policy debate spotlight.