TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF PEASANT AGENCY: A THEORETICAL APPROACH (original) (raw)
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Rural sociopolitical complexity in premodern states was quite extensive but variable. However, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have been slow to recognize and study institutional complexity in rural contexts. Much ink has been spilled regarding economic relationships, “centralized” control, and “imagined communities” (e.g., Davis-Salazar, 2003; Earle & Spriggs, 2015; Flannery, 1972; Isbell, 2000; Kirch, 2010; Paris, 2014; Sanders & Price, 1968; Wright, 1977; Yaeger & Canuto, 2000). But the development of infrastructural power, especially collective power, in rural settlements and its relationship with regional or macroregional political structures has received only scant attention. With respect to contemporary cases, which provide important theoretical frameworks, anthropologists have taken a back seat to political scientists (e.g., Ostrom, 2015; see Lansing, 2012 for an important [partial] exception), whose focus has been on the management of common pool resources – a topic generally ignored by archaeologists. Unfortunately, neither political scientists nor anthropologists have invested much in understanding cooperation and public goods provisioning in rural settlements and landscapes. Conversely, we have made some initial forays into the issue of rural institutional complexity in premodern states and civilization (Blanton & Fargher, 2008); and here we expand to some degree on that discussion.
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In western industrial culture, the term 'peasant' has been largely associated with a way of life and frame of mind counter to 'modernization'. The three meanings of the word listed in the Oxford Concise dictionary reflect this: '(colloquial) countrymen and countrywomen, rustics....(historical) a member of an agricultural class dependent on subsistence farming, (derogative), a lout, a boorish person.' Yet in Europe peasant economies and societies have dominated three-quarters of the past millennium. It is only in the last two hundred years, as the industrial revolution took hold and fanned out to other parts of the world that peasant populations started loosing their determining influence over mass culture. And it is only very recently that they have relinquished their demographic majority worldwide (Cipolla 1979). Their numbers are currently concentrated in the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America where they continue to lend economic, political and cultural body to their respective nation-states. Curiously, over the past two decades peasants have been slipping from the political and academic gaze. The objective of this book is to explore the current nature of peasant labour in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The following introductory chapter provides some definitional parameters before outlining the contours of peasant discourse over the past two centuries, asking why western social science enquiry has embraced the topic of peasant transformation in some periods and ignored it at other times. Concentration is placed on the post-World War II literature that bifurcated into a comparative rural sociological ‘peasant’ perspective and an economic development approach focussed on ‘smallholders’.