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The World 1957-1977: Hidden Answers

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The World 1957-1977: Hidden Answers 1978INo. 20 by Richard Critchfield Lookto Suffering, Lookto Joy South America [RC-2-'781 Part II: The World 1957-1977: Hidden Answers What exactly is a peasant? The truest peasant is to be found in Fishermen, however, I would include regions of ancient civilizations, such with the peasants. They live in The very word is freighted. Evan as India, China, Indonesia, and settled villages, place virtue upon Thomas, the distinguished book Egypt, those rural people who culti- industry and thrift, and share many editor, once advised this writer to vate their land for subsistence and as of the peasants' traditional tasks and drop the word, peasant, from the title part of an age-old traditional way of values. The only fishing community I of a manuscript as he felt to many life. As far as we can tell, most rural have studied,on the southern Indian people it sounded insulting. Chinese remain peasantry despite Ocean island of Mauritius, fits closely the Maoist revolution. My own most into the peasant cultural pattern. Yet peasant is a precise word with- rewarding village studies have been out any real equivalent. "Farmer," in Egypt, India, and Indonesia, coun- Sub-Saharan Africans are in various "villager," or "folk," convey other tries whose peasants have had stages of moving out of tribalism, a shades of meaning. The word is constant contact for thousands of great many existing on cattle raising probably inescapably laden with years with their urban centers of in- and primitive slash-and-burn culti- other connotations because all over tellectual thought and development. vation, such as the Ngimang tribe I the world, at all periods of history, Such peasants possess a sense of studied in the Nuba Mountains of the terms applied to rural people by assured cultural identity that makes southwestern Sudan. The Ngimangs urban people have tended to imply it easier to live among them and write now live in a settled village and like contempt or condescension, as in about them than partially Western- other African tribes I have read about "hick" and "hayseed," though often ized people such as, for example, would seem to be moving into the mixed with a certain admiration for those with Latin culture, with their global peasant pattern. the virtues of the simple, the primi- imitator's complex of admiration and tive, and the hardy, as in "folksy" or contempt. Latin America poses special prob- the earlier "noble savage." Both lems. Its rural people, very generally Redfield and Lewis used "folk" in speaking, are one of two kinds. The their first books, later dropping it for Hunters, herders, and fishermen first, found in rural Northeast Brazil, "peasant." pose a problem. Although I have in- where I recently spent six months, cluded Arab Bedouins in my own are transplanted European peasantry We can perhaps define peasants as studies, these nomadic sheep-raising or descendants of Africans brought those who make a living and have a pastoralists clearly stand outside the as slaves to work the sugar planta- way of life through cultivation of the peasant culture. Alone they have tions in the sixteenth to nineteenth land, producing food largely for their preserved much of the tradition of centuries, or a mixture of the two. own family's subsistence. This sepa- man the hunter: a system of patri- Rural Brazilians still possess too rates them from those who carry on lineal families, unity of kinship many of the characteristics of fron- agriculture for reinvestment and as a groups under the authority of a tiersmen to be classified as true business for profit, looking upon the chieftain responsible for daily de- peasants and like fishermen or black land as capital and commodity. Such cisions as to where to seek pasture Africans can be included, but only on people are farmers, not peasants. In and pitch tents, with great impor- the fringe. northern India and Pakistan today tance attached to the courage and we can witness the transformation of male prowess of the warrior. The Here in Mexico we find the other kind large numbers of the latter, subsis- morality they accord certain kinds of of rural Latin American: Indian tence peasants, into modern com- violence and predatory behavior is peoples influenced by pre-Colum- mercial farmers. enough to exempt them. bian civilization and later Spanish culture but still in an incompletely nialism and, more recently, comrnu- gration to North America, wrote that developed relationship to their cen- nism. Hindu India fell under Moghul "from the westernmost reaches of ters of intellectual thought and urban rule and then the British raj. Egypt's Europe, in Ireland, in Russia to the elites. Yet rural Mexican villages, pharaonic culture is deeply buried east, the peasant masses had with their mestizo-Indian popula- today after 6 centuries of Christianity attained an imperturbable same- tions and traditions going back many and 13 centuries of Islam, plus influ- nessM4 centuries are much closer to being ences from conquests by the Greeks, peasantry than the rural Brazilians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Cru- He then listed the qualities con- and certainly much closer than the saders, French, and English. Java's tributing to this "imperturbable Indians of the western highlands of village culture is extremely syncretic, sameness:" a personal bond with the Guatemala. with almost equal elements of Islam, land, an attachment to an integrated Hinduism, and animism. Mexico's village or local community, central Still, as formative as Latin America's village culture is a still unintegrated importance of the family, marriage a village culture remains, it has pro- mixture of the great pre-Columbia provision of economic welfare, vided us with our first and broadest Indian tradition, Spanish influences, patrilocal residence and descent in views of peasant culture. As Robert and latter-day "Americanization." the male line, a strain between the Redfield observed of the 1930s and Much the same is true of the Philip- attachment to the land and village '40s, "It was by moving out of abo- pines, with American and Spanish and the necessity to support a family, riginal North America into the study culture overlaying a Malay tradition. and so on. In the dozen or so villages of contemporary village life in Middle I havestudied in India, Africa, the Far and South America that American But by and large one can say that East, Latin America, and the Muslim World, this "imperturbable same- anthropologists came first and in peasants in India, Indonesia, and ness" can also be found.5 large numbers to undertake the Egypt remain fairly closely con- study of peasants.. In Latin nected with their own ancient civili- Malcolm Darling in his study of America anthropology has moved zations and hence are the world's northern India's Punjabis in the from tribe to peasantry."'The truest peasantry. Perhaps China can 1930sfound their way of life had "an Indian subcontinent was the next be included, or perhaps it belongs in underlying unity which makes region to get attention, with anthro- some new magical, mystery cate- peasants everywhere a kin."6 pologists moving on to China, gory of its own. Japan, Sudan, Malaya, Persia, and elsewhere. Yet in Indonesia, apart Anthropology in the early twentieth Rene Porak, after studying a French from the works of Clifford Geertz and century, dealing as it has almost village in the 1940s, concluded Willard Hanna, remarkably little has entirely with primitive tribes, stressed peasants everywhere were a been studied about peasant life in the differences among people rather "psycho-physiological race."' Java, Bali, and Sumatra, as com- than the resemblances. But as soon Porak speculated that peasants in pared with the primitive tribes of the as anthropologists began studying different countries had more in outer islands. I was surprised in 1971 peasants it became evident that their common than peasant and city men to find how much in demand was a basic culture was much the same in the same country. There is a good study I had written about Husen, a over very wide regions, even the bit of truth in this. The world's city Jakarta pedicab driver who migrated world over. In my own work I have men, the educated elites, today also seasonally from his west-central never ceased to be surprised at just tend to share a common cosmopoli- Javanese village.2 Little had been how much village cultures are alike. tan culture far removed from that of written about Jakarta's urban The cultural shock of moving from the rural peasantry around them. migrants before. Similarly, a year- country to country always eases National political leaders who have long study of a village on the Upper when one finally arrives in a village to represent both are forced to have Nile I undertook in 1974-1976 is only where enough is familiar to soon feel something of a split personality. For the fifth such study to be done in at home again. This is especially true example, Anwar al-Sadat's wife, Egypt in this century? yet some of of work life. A group of men cutting Jihan, or lndira Gandhi's son, the Nile villages have been continu- wheat with sickles talk and act much Sanjay, are almost wholly products ously inhabited for 10,000 years and the same way in Mexico's central of the cosmopolitan, Westernized preserve much of man's oldest and highlands, Egypt's Nile Valley, or city culture. This has left them so out most durable surviving form of India's Punjab Plain. of tune with the peasantry, Jihan village life. Sadat's liberal reformism has some- Peasant Cultural Universality times been a political embarrassment Any attempt to define peasant cul- Anthropologists have long com- to her husband and Sanjay Gandhi's ture is further complicated by the mented on the apparent phenome- zeal for sterilization helped to insure imposition of outside cultures on the non of peasant cultural universality.
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