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Traditions of communal co-operation among Portuguese peasants
Bennema, J.W.
Publication date 1978 Document Version Final published version
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Citation for published version (APA): Bennema, J. W. (1978). Traditions of communal co-operation among Portuguese peasants. (Papers on European and Mediterranean societies; No. 11). Universiteit van Amsterdam, Antropologisch-Sociologisch Centrum.
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Download date:07 Oct 2021 TRADITIONS OF COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION AMONG PORTUGUESE PEASANTS (PRELIMINARY REPORT)
JAN WILLEM BENNEMA
NO.TI
PAPERS ON EUROPEAN AND MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETIES ANTROPOLOGISCH-SOCIOLOGISCH CENTRUM UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM 1978 TRADITIONS OF COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION
AMONG- PORTUGUESE PEASANTS
Jgn Willem Bennema
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper is the translated and revised version of my M.A. thesis which was based on fieldwork and literature study. I am responsible for all shortcomings its contents might present; and I am indebted to a number of helpers. The first of them is Anton Blok, who proposed me to forge the initial version into a paper in which attention should be paid to the general discussion on the concept of community and communal rights. He gave me valuable suggestions. During the writing-up of the first version, Nico Kielstra had asked a number of well-chosen and stimulating questions. I am also grateful to Jeremy Boissevain who looked over the first and part of the second version critically. In many ways I am indebted to my wife, Iris Bennema, who assisted me, literally, by word and deed. I also wish to thank Nel Bennema, my mother, for reviewing the translation. Finally, thanks are due to the frank and very hospitable inhabitants of a small village in the Portuguese interior, without whose help the central part of this paper could never have been written.
Druk: Huisdrukkerij Universiteit van Amsterdam T - 6869
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii Part One THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDS. AND RESEARCH PROBLEMS 1 I INTRODUCTION 3 II COMMUNAL CO-CPEiRATION: THE RESEARCH PROBLEMS 11 11.1 Defining the subject 11 11.2 The problem of description 15 11.3 The problem of explanation 18 Part Two . COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION IN THE NORTH OF PORTUGAL AND SPAIN 29 III : THE . NORTH IN GENERAL 33 IV A NORTH-EASTERN PORTUGUESE COMMUNITY AND ITS COUNCIL 43 IV.1 The region and the community 43 IV.2 Communal and higher authorities 47 IV. 3 The members of the council 51 V COMMUNAL ENTERPRISE IN MARRAS . 55 V. 1 The communal handling of church affairs 55 V.2 Assistance 58 V.3 The maintenance of communal capital goods 59 V.4 Communal undertakings in agriculture 62 V.4.1 Crop farming 62 V.4.2 Cattle-breeding , 65 V.4.3 The management and exploitation of the waste lands 69 V.5 Conclusion 74 Part Three THE MEDITERRANEAN PLAIN AND THE COLD LAND 77 VI . THE HISTORY OF COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION ON THE SOUTHERN PORTUGUESE PLAIN 81 . VII PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT, RESOURCES AND COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION . 95 VIII CONCLUSION 105 NOTES 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY 127
PART ONE: THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDS AND RESEARCH PROBLEMS
I INTRODUCTION
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the insight into the ;. varying extent to which members of peasant communities work together in the management or exploitation of collective property and in the provision of public services within their community or neighbourhood. For this type of co-operation the term "communal co-operation" will be used. The paper consists of three parts.. The first part will cope in a general way with the subject of communal co-operation and the processes which explain the course of the history of forms of com• munal co-operation. Attention will be paid to general European processes as well as to processes in specific parts of the continent. The second and central part focusses on the persistence of traditions of communal co-operation in northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula and especially in the village of Marras (north-eastern Portugal) where the writer carried out fieldwork in July, August and September 1973. In the third part a further inquiry will be made into one of the conditions which explain the varying importance of communal co• operation: the smaller or greater possibility of commercialization and the type of commercialization in agriculture. In this context a description, based on literature study, will be given of the former existence and subsequent disappearing of co-operative traditions In southern-Portuguese communities. First of all, however, the theoretical backgrounds of this' paper must be made clear. This introduction is the appropriate place for doing so.
The collective rights and forms of co-operation which have been important in many a peasant community, were a favourite topic of discussion among writers of the nineteenth centrury. In the very period in which the ever-growing dependency of European peasants on the capitalist world economy and their national societies led to the disappearance of many communal rights and forms of co• operation, these "primitive customs" became a matter of interest for a growing number of philosophers, historians and jurists. -it-
Nationalists regarded the communal institutions of the villages in their country as expressions of a feeling of solidarity which was, quite naturally, characteristic of their own nation. Various writers according to their ideology, used terms like "spontaneous democracy", "spontaneous socialism", Urkommunismus or "primitive communism", or 1 even "communism of Christ"! The American ethnologist Lewis H„ Morgan, too, postulated the existence of a stage of primitive communism in the history of mankind. He took the communal institutions of the Iroquois and other Indians as evidence for this assumption (Morgan 1851). The German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies wrote a book about the Gemeinschaft (community), a concept that stood for living, working and praying together in the rural community, in which people still treated one another in a benevolent and respectful way. The organic or natural principle of Gemeinschaft had been developed and differentiated into three definite and meaningful types of relations: kinship, neighbourhood and friendship, Tonnies* work betrays a clearly negative valuation of modern society, which was described by him as the Gesellschaft (society), the mechanical or artificial economic world, based on material interests and formless contracts, (See the sample of Tonnies' writings in Bell and Newby 1974) Such ideas about primitive socialism and harmonious village life have met much criticism. One of the critics was the Dutch anthropol• ogist J.J. Fahrenfort, who in his booklet Socialisme in oude tijden (Socialism in old times) discussed collective rights on arable land* Using examples from the Inca Empire, the Jesuit mission area in Para• guay and the Czar Empire, Fahrenfort argues that collective rights which according to many writers were the outcome of natural solidarity feelings or enlightened policy, had in reality been created by the measures of authorities who were merely after their own endSo The Inca rulers decreed that each man obtained as much land as was required for the maintenance of his family. In addition they insti• tuted certain work obligations for public ends. According to Fahrenfort it would be a mistake to think that they did all this for the good of their subjects. The Inca rulers imposed the system out of their desire to have the disposal of well-fed and therefore capable soldiers. Their "socialist society" possessed all aspects of a totalitarian militarist state. -5-
The Jesuits in Paraguay had brought together Guarani Indians in big settlements and had made them work together on communal fields, As opposed to what has been maintained by many admirers the Jesuit policy was not inspired by treatises of Plato, Thomas More and Campanella on the Ideal State - on the contrary, Fahrenfort ar,gues that the missionaries were led by a very practical consideration. By making the Indians live and work in groups, the Jesuits could easily see to it that the Indians, who in their eyes were children, were zealous in fulfilling their religious and work obligations. The periodic reallotment of collective arable land in the mir or village community of pre-revolutionary Russia has often been considered to be a rest of Slavonic communism dating from primaeval ages; but as clearly appears from historical data the arable land had originally been in possession of individual families, and it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that the periodic reallotments came into existence. They were called into existence by a decree: henceforth, the council of all households of the mir was to control the land as a fund of tax income for' the state. By compelling periodic allotment of land to each family according to its labour capacity, —>, J the Czar wanted to intensify agricultural production to the maximum, so as to obtain as much tribute as possible. The tribute was badly needed by the Czar in view of his expansionist ambitions! (Fahrenfort 1945,) I think these critical considerations are convincing; Fahrenfort's argument is based on good research. However, in spite of the work of authors like Fahrenfort, misconceptions on this matter are still widespread. Even in a new anthropological textbook the Russian system of land reallotment is described as an old institution of the people itself, as an instance of "redistributive exchange / that existed 7 apart from the central taxing authority of the state"! (Gamst 1974:38,) Nor did romantic views on village life, like the picture drawn by Tonnies, loose their attraction. Robert Redfields' anthropological study of the Mexican rural:village of.Tepoztlan is the classical example of a romantically hued description of village life. The discussion raised by this book is well-known, Oscar Lewis studied the same village seventeen years after Redfield, and the results of his investigation were anything but romantic. He sketched an image of -6-
individualism, conflicts, fear, envy and distrust. Moreover - and this must be stressed - there turned out to exist a great gap between land• owning and landless villagers. In Redfield's study the existence of this gap within the community of Tepotzlan had been neglected! (Red- field 193Q; Lewis 1951.) The debate between Lewis and Redfield gave rise to a general dis• cussion. I mention the contributions of the German sociologist Rene
Konig and the American anthropologist George:Foster. Rene Konig made a very pertinent comment on the way Redfield had replied to Lewis' criticism. Briefly, Redfield's reply ( 1955: 135 ) had been that the difference of opinion on the extent to which Tepotzlan was a well- integrated community was only a matter of degree. In the eyes of Rene Konig this is a very naive reply. The question whether this village is or is not an integrated unit simply lacks any validity, the fundamental datum in Tepotzlan being the sharp contrast between owners and have-nots. This contrast, which stems directly from the colonial period, constitutes a negation of any kind of social inte•
gration of the community. As a general ; rule, questions about the extent of social integration of the community, as for instance the question of how far members of a particular community trust one another, become meaningful only after structural problems, such as the division of property and other resources have been treated. Only in those cases where a sharp social contrast like that in Tepotzlan is absent, is it possible to discuss the problem of community inte• gration. (Konig 1968:127-9.)
George Foster, too, made a critical comment on Redfield's inter• pretation. He cited a whole series of village studies, the results of which were in agreement with.Lewis' description of envious.and fearful peasants. Foster's conclusion was that peasants in general, and particularly the peasants of the "European Mediterranean culture type", are prone to sharp mutual competition for land and other scarce resources. As a logical sequel to this conclusion Foster developed his theory of the Image of Limited Goods: in the eyes^of the peasant valued goods like land, wealth, power, honour and frienship are always in scarce supply, so that a villager can only.get ahead at the expense of his fellow-villagers. The existence of this idea of scarcity makes that peasants have great difficulties in attaining co-operation. (Foster. 1965. ) -7-
In my own opinion, the critical remarks of Rene Konig on the Tepoztlan question hit the kernel of the matter, while Foster's critique and theory have a one-sided and unduly generalizing character,, Unlike Konig, Foster lays a one-sided stress on the peasants' competition for land and other resources. By doing so he, in contrast to Konig, pays too little attention to other structural aspects of communities (as for instance the presence or absence of large estate owners) and the variation in such structural aspects: not everywhere, nor under all circumstances is it equally difficult for peasants to work together! For this reason it is pointless to draw a general conclusion about the greater or lesser co-operativeness within the peasant community. In my opinion, research into communal property rights and co• operation in villages must not be undertaken with the intention to draw final conclusions, but "only" for the purpose of increasing the insight into the varying importance of such rights and arrangements. Such research will have to focus on co-operation as well as "non- co-operation" and conflicts between co-operating people: in every separate research case one has to inquire how far the interests of villagers coincide or differ. In addition, it is important to focus on processes and circum• stances in a wider context, which may help to explain the varying extent of communal co-operation. For explaining structural aspects of communities it is necessary to distinguish between the history of the communities under study - or, more exactly, the history of their structural aspects - and the either rapidly or just slowly changing context within which this history takes place. This context transcends the community itself. For example, if one asks oneself by what kind of circumstances villagers are brought to work together in the herding of sheep or in constructing a road, or under which conditions poor peasants can make a stand against rich landowners, the greater part of the answer lies in the wider context, e„g. the regional, tribal or national context,, The emergence, persistence and disappearance of co• operative institutions on the local level is narrowly connected with processes in mores comprehensive contexts. Such processes are manifold. For example, we can think of measures taken by central authorities such as the abolition of a form of communal co-operation,. In addition, central planning may have more indirect con- -8-
sequences for the extent of co-operation in villages. For example, the mentioned taxation measure in Czarist Russia had an interesting side-effect. As has been said, the Czar had instituted the land re- allotments in order to meet their exorbitant military expenses; nevertheless, by this measure they also achieved - and quite inde• pendently of their intentions - that the poorest villagers made a stand against rich villagers in order to be assured of an equal share in the arable land!, (Fahrenfort 1945:92-4.) However, not only such short-term processes are relevant: it will become clear that the nature and pace of changes in the extent of communal co• operation is related with the trend and pace of long-term processes like commercialization, centralization and population growth, and that the local or regional physical environment too plays a role in the explanation.1 Evidently, the processes and conditions which help explain structural characteristics of village life tend to be extremely complex. Therefore they lend themselves only to prudent general• izations. Because of the complexity of processes in wider contexts and of villagers' reactions to them, generalizations are apt to lead to over-simplifications. For example, it would be misleading to discern only two types of communities: traditional and modern communities, respectively fitting into a simple and a complex general social context. General statements on "traditional communities" have rightly been subjected to systematic anthropological criticism. Forty years ago, Margaret Mead, the renowned adversary of any view doing injustice to the enormous variety in cultures, pointed out that primitive cultures differed sharply from each other as to the existence or absence of co-operation in house-building, fishing,
working on the land,; and the significance of individual versus
common property.. Explaining such differences is far from easy. x (Mead 1937)
Likewise, in studying the consequences of national and inter• national modernization processes one must refrain from sweeping generalizations, A global notion of modernization in a vast area such as Europe can lead to erroneous presuppositions about the processes in smaller areas. My own experiences form an example of this problem. -9-
In a comprehensive ethnological monograph on the village of Rio de Onor, near Braganga in north-eastern Portugal, Jorge Dias gave a fine description of communal co-operation within the traditional village council. This co-operation served agricultural and other purposes (Dias 1953) . It was partly out of interest for this form of co-operation (the existence of which was at variance with the image evoked by generalizations about the scanty degree of co-operation in southern Europe) that I chose this part of north• eastern Portugal for my fieldwork in 1973. My chief interest was in the changes that I assumed to have taken place in this region since 1953, the year Dias' book was published. My expectation was that the traditional village councils had lost much of their autonomy owing to the growing influence of the state. I also assumed that the migration to Portuguese and other European cities - which had become very important since the fifties - has lessened the villagers' dependence on the land, so that co-operation for agricultural purposes had become unimportant. These expectations were not confirmed. In the field it soon became evident that those who had stayed behind were still very dependent on agriculture - or, as they expressed it, they continued to be escravos or slaves of their work on the land. It also became evident that certain forms of co-operation between all households are still important and worthy of being studied.
In short, as far as this region was concerned, the national and all-European processes of the last twenty years had not had those radical consequences that I had attributed to them, from all too global presuppositions about the modernization process. (Oddly enough, shortly after concluding fieldwork I read a book suggestively called Modern Europe: An Anthropological Perspective, in which it was stated that communal institutions had disappeared in this part as well as in the whole of Portugal! (Anderson 1973:84) See note 39)
It is clear that complex processes and their varying rates will play a crucial role in the explanatory parts of this paper. Clearly itis only to a smaller extent that central authorities can control these complex processes and conditions. This justifies the viewpoint that a greater insight into the conditions accounting for the extent of communal co-operation may be useful both for scientific and for practical purposes.
II COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION: THE RESEARCH PROBLEMS
The first requisite for penetrating into the "how" and "why" of the varying extent of communal co-operation is that the research problems be explicated. Three kinds of research problems can be discerned: 1) the problem of defining the subject: what is to be understood by "communal co-operation"? 2) the problem of description: is it possible to give good gener• alizing descriptions of the way the importance of communal co• operation varies according to time and area? 3) the problem of explaining the existence or the varying importance of specific forms of communal co-operation. In treating these points I will build on a number of publications in which one or more of these research problems are treated. I will restrict myself to European studies.
II.1 Defining the subject
Communal co-operation may be defined as co-operation between members of a local community or a definite smaller grouping within that community - in the maintenance or, sometimes, the exploitation of common property of that community or grouping, . - and in the provision of public services within that community or grouping. By "definite smaller grouping" I mean a neighbourhood, a group of households having a special right on a patch of land, or an action- set composed of various households. In order to give substance to this definition I will review a 2 number of forms of communal co-operation and make some general observations on this concept. The common properties maintained by communal co-operation usually largely^consisted of natural resources ^ Managing these resources meant keeping up and watching over them,, arranging their use and defending the rights on them. On many places.this meant that the inhabitants'used to undertake communal activities, among,which as- -12-
semblies and collective work. In some regions not only the control, but also the exploitation of a communal natural resource (e.g., a forest) was a communal affair. The communally-owned natural resources mostly consisted of fallow land, uncultivated lands, woodland, water and a part of the meadow land. Significant communal rights on the arable land were seldom found: if we restrict ourselves to Europe, we can say that they were common in only some villages or regions. Nevertheless, the individual rights of owners of grainfields were often curtailed by the existence of a communal right on the fallow land, i.e. the land on which they had harvested grain and which had to be temporarily abandoned to regain its fertility. The communal right on fallow implied that all villagers possessing livestock were permitted to graze their animals, or a number of them, on this land (right of free grazing or vaine pature). It is not far• fetched to consider this arrangement as a form of communal co• operation: "anyone" threw open his fallow land for the animals of "everyone", A special form of communal co-operation for the sake of free ' " grazing is the "open field system". In this system there is the advantage that the animals can graze on the fallow without damaging the crop standing on other parts of the land. Many rural historians have studied this open field arrangement; in this context a simple illustration will do. In the village of Marras, north-eastern Portugal, the growing of cereals on the very small land parcels which most villagers possess in considerable numbers, is arranged in such a way that the parcels lying fallow in a given year, combined with some small interjacent pieces of waste land, form one common pasture land. Thus, the owners follow a collective cropping/fallowing rotation. In the even-numbered years the southern part of the grainland lies fallow, while in the odd-numbered years the parcels lying on the north side come in for their turn to serve as a pasture. These two parts of the grainland, on which every cultivator has properties, are called faceiras in this region. The English term is "courses". With the term open field the combination of courses is designated. Why "open" field? The owners must keep their grainfields Open, i.e. they are not permitted to construct walls, fences and other obstacles which could make grazing difficult. This form of obligatory.co- -13-
operation between all cereal growers of the village makes possible 3 an efficient exploitation of the fallow as a communal resource. (This two-course system is only one example. More northernly in Europe, e.g. in northern France, the open fields consisted of three courses: one- under summer-corn, one under winter-corn and one lying fallow.) In addition to natural resources, also capital goods could form a part of the collective good of peasants. This capital consisted of the local networks of roads and paths, buildings of public utility such as communal mills, the fund for public expenses and, sometimes, machines. The management of these resources, too, could be a question of communal meetings and collective work. People also used to co-operate in providing public services within their community. An example of this is the obligation of mutual aid among neighbours,, In villages as well as in cities it occurred that the inhabitants were obliged, on penalty of a fine, to help their nearest neighbours in case of illness or accidents. As any family had a right to it, this aid can be defined as a public service, and, thus, as a form of communal co-operation. (Of course, mutual aid in case of illness or accidents could also be based on kinship or friendship.) Another instance of co-operation in the provision of public services is the practice of livestock owners belonging to one village or neighbourhood to bring together their animals into one flock; as the herding of this flock could be considered as a public service, this is one more form of communal co-operation. Likewise, the surveillance in a slum, exercised by all, inhabitants in rotation, is an example of the co-operative provision of communal serviceso Now that I have given some examples of what is to be meant by "communal co-operation", it is useful to have a closer look at the term itself, A first observation regards the term "co-operation". Even though it is a practicable term, it can easily conjure up harmonious images of communal life like those sketched by Tonnies and other writers mentioned in chapter I; it should therefore be used with caution. In some cases people may come to co-operation very spontaneously:. this is one of the ways in which some persons and groups have reacted to -14-
wars, revolutions and natural calamities. In many cases, however, co-operation had a more obligatory character. (The obligation to co-operate may be formal and/or moral, and it may or may not be imposed from without.) Villagers often worked together out of pure necessity. As Barrington Moore puts it, "fellow villagers , even if they were often creatures to be treated warily, were 4 people with whom it was necessary to work". However, it goes without saying that the extent to which co-operating was experienced to be a heavy burden varied according to the circumstances, events and persons involved. On itself communal co-operation presupposed a certain capacity to bear burdens, i.e., a measure of self-discipline. As a second point I must make explicit what I mean by "communal". Although most examples are cases of co-operation between all inhabit• ants of a local community, communal co-operation can also take place within smaller groupings. One example is co-operation between all members of a definite small grouping such as a neighbourhood; but one can also think of co-operative activities in which not all members of the neighbourhood or community participate. Such co-operation, too, can be communal - as long as it concerns co-operation for all members. In other words, communal co-operation can also take place in villages where "communal co-operative units", like councils of all households, are absent. In any research case one must ask oneself whether the term "communal" is or is not appropriate as a designation for the village institution or joint activity under'study;-i.e., one must always take notice of the functions the public goods and services fulfill for the various interest groups involved. For example, as was shown above, collective arrangements have existed which served the purposes of outsiders: clearly those arrangements did not deserve the designation of "communal co-operation". In addition to the example given by Fahrenfort, one can also mention the existence, in some places, in Europe, of the obligation to throw the fallow land open for the animals of domain owners who had certain rights on the land. 'This obligation was apt to interfere with the right of free grazing. Moreover, a minority within the community can take an unfair advantage of the existence of collective rights. When all villagers contribute to the maintenance of a "collective" good used in fact by a numeric• ally insignificant minority among them, obviously the term "communal -15-
co-operation" is not appropriate.
Are there other terms that can be used instead of the term "communal co-operation"? Some authors employ designations like 11 communal ism" .' or "agrarian collectivism"; villages where communal traditions like collective discussions on agricultural matters are important, have 5 often been called "corporate communities" by anthropologists. Indeed, such terms are appropriate as a general designation for this community type (at least, as long as they are not associated with the imaginary Gemeinschaft). In more specific research cases, however, it is important to indicate which forms of communal co-operation are concerned. This is a first requisite for gaining insight into the varying degree of "corporateness" of communities.
II.2 The problem- of description
Of necessity, descriptions of the varying extent of communal co• operation are largely based upon material from publications. Data concerning diverse places and times must be mutually compared insofar as they have relevance to the subject. The problem is that data from different publications are not always'easily comparable. This is especially true of the published results of anthropological work in Europe. Trained on literature dealing with comparatively slowly changing, isolated, undifferentiated non- Western societies, anthropologists are often ill- equipped for the complexity of Europe...... New concepts and research methods are called for, yet these are only partly being provided. The high degree of centralization, the interrelation between various levels of integration, the impact of multiple long- term processes, the sweep of change that can be documented across centuries still overwhelm many anthropologists. Consequently, many have sought refuge in villages, which they proceed to treat as isolated entities. They have tribalized Europe. (Boissevain 1975:11 . Cf. also Freeman 1973) Nevertheless, I think the available material makes it possible to increase the insight into structural aspects of communities and the ways they vary. The best approach is to make a limited number of comparisons of a more or less elaborated character, in order td arrive at exploratory generalizations.^ In my view it is important to do full justice to regional differences in the history of communities and -16-
their structural aspects; therefore, I do not think the research should primarily be directed at the making of "a comprehensive ethnological and historical survey of /corporate / community organization" in the whole of Europe, as Susan Tax Freeman has proposed (1973)- Tentative generalizations based on a limited number of cases may shed light upon the circumstances that account for the varying extent of communal co-operation, in particular, or structural aspects of communities, in general. For this research, use can be made of rural historical as well as anthropological publications.
In addition to the problem of the comparability of data from publications, a second problem arises in so far as the description of forms of communal co-operation is based on historical data. Is it possible to obtain a right image from historical documents? As a rule, such documents say much more about the feats and laws of higher authorities than about social life in villages. For this reason, a very real risk exists that the influence of authorities on the activities of villagers is over-estimated, leading to an "under-exposure" of autonomous communal activities. Thus, the noble domain-holders of the middle ages are frequently credited with a more powerful role than they really had. As Marc Bloch notes, the lack of references to village communes in the ar• chives of the nobility of mediaeval France does not at all legitimate the conclusion - which in fact has been drawn more than once - that there has been a time in which the seigneurie had reduced the autono• mous group life of villagers to zero. This idea is made improbable by the simple fact that most domains consisted of a number of smaller parts, so that in most cases the village belonged to more than one domain. Bloch'gives the example of a village in which the inhabitants appointed their own communal authorities who decided on agricultural affairs, even though they were divided into eight or nine groupings, each belonging to a different lord. In many communities, "the inhabit• ants spontaneously formed their own church councils and confrater• nities: local affairs were treated in communal meetings, and for this end.the church building was an appropriate room.-Officially, the upkeep of local church buildings was under the responsibility, of the seigneurie; in practice, the church was often kept in repair by the villagers themselves, for the lords were not so very particular about their responsibility! (Bloch 1966:168, 170-1) -17-
Likewise, documents on offical decretes granting communal rights (e.g., rights to self-government) should not give rise to wrong conclusions. One must always take into account the possibility that such "grants" meant no more than a recognition - perhaps even a recognition compelled by necessity - of the existing situation.
II.3 The problem of explanation
The central problem is the explanation of the varying extent of communal co-operation. Is it possible to make statements on the origins of specific forms of communal co-operation? How must one explain the great spread forms of communal co-operation have had in the past? And how can one account for regional differences in the period, rate and way of disappearance of forms of communal co• operation?
It is of no great use to dwell for long on the numerous and controversial statements that have been made on the "origins" of such institutions as open fields or councils of all households. Ideas about primaeval collectivism, like those about Celtic,- Germanic or Slavonic origins, besides having a very speculative character, do not do justice to the far-reaching changes which, in the course of the centuries, have taken place in literally all communities. However, theories on more recent origins, too, may have a speculative character. For example, one must put a questionmark after Slicher van Bath's view that communal rights and duties in western-European villages came into existence in the feudal period (Slicher van Bath 1963:158). Communal administration of justice, at least, was an older phenomenon. In documents from the Carlovingian period mention is made of the administration of justice by "neighbours", that is to say, local community members. Indeed, it was in this pre- mediaeval period that the gradual disappearance of this communal institution began (Blok 1968:72-3). As Susan Tax Freeman notes, communal institutions in Europe have mainly been analyzed within the framework of mediaeval history: a more comprehensive perspective might prove fruitful (Freeman 1973:7^6-7).
'As. long as data "are lacking one will have to content oneself with hypotheses of a very general character. One such hypothesis could be -18-
that the existence of communal councils, made up of families who are not necessarily related by kinship, was preceded by a stage in which local descent groups, perhaps ruled by councils of elders, were general. Or, to give another example, one may start from a general hypothesis on the origin of open fields, as indeed many rural historians have done. In spite of their disputes on the period of origin and the ways of diffusion of open fields, many rural historians agree that the emergence of open fields must have been narrowly 7 connected with a growing pressure of population. One can imagine a dialectical process by which conflict gave way to co-operation: population growth led to more and more quarrels over scarce arable land and pastures; in response, the population changed over to the open field system. Thanks to this transition, the frequency of conflicts over land decreased (at least temporarily). So much for'the question of origins. The next question is why forms of communal co-operation have had a much greater spread than they have nowadays. I will answer this question in general terms, without specifications as to dates and regions. The answer lies in several aspects of the wider social context as it was in earlier stages. One of those aspects was the comparatively low degree of centralization. Up to the nineteenth century, many public concerns were still internal community affairs. Surely, the use of physical coercion was to a great extent the monopoly of authorities at higher levels, such as regional groupings of noblemen and central state authorities; in many other aspects, however, villages have been autonomous decision-making units for a long time. In the words of Norbert Elias: in earlier stages the chains of interdepehdencies linking communities to groups outside were shorter, less differen• tiated and smaller in number. This meant that village communities had the character of small states performing many functions which would be taken over by higher level authorities in a later stage (Elias 1974), For example, local communities retained important religious and production functions for a long time. However, the small degree of centralization does not explain why it occurred so frequently that public functions were performed 8 by councils of "all households". In many European villages, powerful rulers were absent. To understand this, one must pay attention to -19-
another aspect of-the general•social context:;the•comparatively low degree of commercialization. In a great number of villages, small family farms were predominant and large commercial estates were absent. Of course, the predominance of small farms did not imply that land and power were divided equally among community members. Especially in periods of rapid population increase the differences in access to land and other resources could become increasingly sharper (Slicher van Bath 1963:128-31). Nevertheless, in many parts of the continent such local inequalities were not so great as to make possible the emergence of petty despots who treated their commu• nities as small private kingdoms. Likewise, mediaeval lords were not able to become absolute local rulers as long as they did not change over to commercial farming - i.e., as long as they lived from dues collected from the peasants who worked on their fragmented domains. (Cf. the given example of the French seigneurie, p, 16. )
It is safe to say that, because commerce was feeble, power differences within villages were frequently small enough to make the performance of public functions a matter of co-operation between '9 "all" instead of an exclusive concern of a small village oligarchy. The richer peasants as well as the poor had to exert themselves in behalf of all community members; in exchange, they obtained the right to common goods and services. As Barrington Moore maintains: "Despite considerable variation, the main idea connected with /"communal ar• rangements in the pre-capitalist world 7 stands out very clearly: every member of the community should have access to enough resources to be able to perform obligations for the community carrying on a collective struggle for survival" (Moore 1966:497). This implied a softening of the social contrasts within the community. In sum, the low degree of centralization and. commercialization explains why the tradition of working together communally has been important in so many parts of the European countryside. However, as these conditions were general conditions, it is not surprising that forms of communal co-operation- existed in other places as well. For instance, they occurred in the fishermen's village of Port de la Selva in Catalonia - a community owning collective nets which were kept in the church (Brenan 1971:338); in the potters ' community of Vilar de Nantes in northern Portugal, where many occupational activities were, or still are, arranged communally (Dias 1949:78); and in pre-industrial -20-
cities (Sjoberg 1960:187-96, 269). Even so, one can say that communal co-operation was especially; important in communities of peasants and herdsmen. These were the communities in which the dependency on the use of common resources was greatest: peasants and herdsmen often exploited extensive collective lands, the existence of which necessarily presupposed an additional measure of communal co-operation. To understand the reasons for the existence of common lands and rights on free grazing, one must pay attention to the functions these institutions had for the diverse interest groups among the villagers. The existence of these rights was partially explained by the fact that those villagers who lacked land of their own should have a mini• mum of use rights on land in order to be able to keep some goats, sheep or pigs and to cut some firewood. Moreover, their existence was explained by the interests of the owners of peasant farms. The common lands had essential complementary functions in the economy of the small farm: the owners of peasant farms, too, needed such resources as grazing lands and firewood. It would not be paying for them to have fallow and waste land in their own possession or control. At that level of technological development, vast parts of the land could only be used in a very extensive way for free grazing and for agriculture in long-term fallowing systems; and as extensive forms of land exploitation could best be arranged within a communal con• text, the owners of peasant farms had no interest in claiming indi• vidual rights or extensive pastures and waste lands, (Cf, Kleinpenning 1968:239 ff.; Taborda 1932:155 ff.)
In short, it is possible to speak of an earlier stage in which - as a result of the low degree of centralization and commercialization and of the necessity to maintain vast communal landed properties - forms of communal co-operation were very widespread in the European countryside. However, one should not fail to note the diversity by which Europe has always been characterized. Even if it were to appear that traditions of communal co-operation can be traced back to very ancient times, this would not alter the fact that large-scale units like Roman latifundia date from early ages too. This side of reality does not find expression in Freeman's plea for an all-European survey of forms of community organization (1973:746 ff). Especially in some southern parts of Europe, large-scale agriculture is a very old phenom- -21-
enon. Of course, it is a matter of investigation whether large-scale agriculture and communal co-operation were mutually exclusive in an absolute way. Among areas of small or medium scale agriculture, too, differ• ences existed in the importance of traditions of communal co• operation. From rural history it is apparent that there were signif• icant differences in the importance of communal meadows, forests and waste lands; likewise, in some areas communal arrangements in the exploitation of fallow land and the herding of livestock were absent. Natural conditions can have great relevance to the explanation of such differences. E.g., in the Vendee and other parts of western France the high rainfall made possible a high production of hay, which meant that the animals could stay within their sheds most of the time; this in its turn meant that the animals belonging to different peasants did not have to graze all together on extensive pastures such as fallow lands, so that it was not necessary to throw open the fallow lands for free grazing (i.e., to follow an open field system) or to bring together the animals of different owners 10 into one great flock. As will appear in the chapters on Portugal, such regional differences and their explanation have an important place in research into the varying extent of communal co-operation.
The decrease in the spread of forms of communal co-operation must be considered an all-European process connected with other general processes: the increasing centralization in the various countries, implying a loss of functions of local-level units (Elias 1974) and the growing importance of commercial agriculture and forms of intensive land exploitation, leading to greater social contrasts within rural communities and to the gradual disappearance of communal properties. But at the same time it is important to stress the considerable differences in the way and period in which forms of communal co-operation have disappeared and in the degree to which they have persisted. The process of disappearance of village councils made up of "all" households has not everywhere followed the same course: in some areas this process was primarily a part of the general centralization process, -22-
inother areas it was bound up with commercialization of agriculture. In cases like that of the Dutch province of Drenthe,-. the falling; into disuse of council assemblies of "all" households was an integral part of the process of centralization and the formation of bureaucratic organizations. In Drenthe existed communal councils (markgenootschappen or boerschappen) in which every peasant had a right of say, although the weight of his vote was, of old, in a fixed proportion to the size of his property; These councils lost their legal character in the nineteenth century, when the Dutch state enacted that the municipality, comprising several settlements, became the smallest unit of the state organization,, At the beginning of the twentieth century the peasant and writer Harm Tiesing described how the tasks of the old village councils and haoberschappen (associations of neighbours for mutual aid in case of death) in Drenthe had been or were being taken over by municipalities and other organizations (companies of shareholders in collective land property, undertaker's businesses), (Tiesing 1943: 349-56)
In other cases the disappearance of traditional communal councils was a direct consequence of commercialization of agriculture. One example is the English case. In England, the nobles were able to change over to the commercial exploitation of large estates while they maintained their grip on the central government. In the context of his research into Social origins of dictatorship and democracy Barrington Moore points out how the English nobility put an end to the autonomy of village communities (Moore 1966). Although the English nobles lost their monopoly of private warfare at a comparatively early stage, they retained their function of maintainers of the public order In the countryside for a long time. In this way they remained powerful enough to deprive the peasants of an ever increasing part of their land rights. Initially, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the nobles specialized in the commercial sheep farming for the production of wool which went to the Low Countries and Italy; later on they - or, more exactly, their tenants - specialized in modern commercial agriculture^ This was the end of the old rights on open fields and commons; the fact that commercial sheep farming and modern commercial agriculture demanded less labour, implied an additional weakening of the position of villagers. Small wonder that "the transaction of public business -23-
in the parishes / 7 came to be conducted more and more behind closed doors, losing whatever vestiges of a popular and democratic character it may have had during the Middle Ages" (Moore 1966:21). '
At the end of this process, in the eighteenth century, most English parishes had become a kind of oligarchical small states. On this situation Norbert Elias writes: "in this case as in many others, communities did not have the egalitarian character often implicitly associated with.the concept of a "community"." (Elias 19?4:xxxvii). Nevertheless, one form of communal co-operation, at least, had persisted: poor English villagers kept co-operating in the maintenance of the "village green", a small piece of grass• land to which they^' brought their animals at the end of the day (Nico Kielstra, personal communication.).
In Prussia, too, nobles specialized in commercial farming and there, too, it happened at the expense of village autonomy. At the end of the middle ages, a rise in grain prices made it attractive for the Prussian nobility to organize large commercial estates tilled by the population under a system of forced labour. One of the means to attain this end was to curtail the freedom of peasants by abolishing their rights to sell and bequeath their land and extending their labour duties; another means consisted in putting an end to the rights on self-government and internal administration of justice, which the peasant, communities had possessed up to that period (Moore 1966: 460-3). Incidentally, this commercialization process appears to have gone hand in hand with a weakening of the central authority of Prussia, while commercialization in England was connected with an increasing centralization of the English state.
Now, the question arises whether the falling into disuse of council meetings of "all" households might not also frequently have been a result of a process by which not the position of nobles, but, instead, the position of a minority within the peasant community was strengthened. Such a development may indeed have occurred in many areas. For the major part of eighteenth-century France it holds true that capital goods and tenancy rights on land fell into the hands of an even smaller minority among the villagers as production for the market became more widespread. As a consequence, in many villages there emerged a situation in which "a single leaseholder has the monopoly of all the ploughs within the community , which makes him _2H-
absolute master of the occupants' livelihood.,.." (Bloch 1966:196). It is perfectly conceivable, therefore, that community councils 11 ' obtained a more and more oligarchical character. In my view, this sharpening of power differentials within French communities was a part of the process by which the bourgeoisie gained more and more influence upon national life, including rural life. The central authorities, who grew ever more powerful, frequently granted political privileges to the more prosperous peasants (Bloch 1966:175). It is useful to enlarge somewhat upon the ways in which one particular form of communal co-operation, the open field system, and also other communal land rights, have disappeared. To a certain extent, the abolition of these communal arrangements and rights can be interpreted as a general process connected with the "agricultural revolution", i.e. the introduction of new techniques which made 12 possible intensification of land use. In this manner one can under• stand why open field and other communal land rights have also dis• appeared in certain regions where small-scale farming has persisted. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intensification of land use, which had become urgent in view of the population growth, was made possible by the introduction of new techniques (that is, in so far as possibilities of Intensification were not restricted by specific characteristics of the physical environment.). However, it should not be assumed as a matter of course that more intensive land exploitation always meant an Increase in produc• tivity, as expressions like "agricultural revolution" seem to imply. The introduction of new techniques led to a decrease in labour,demand, which meant that the labour potential became under-utilized unless employment outside agriculture was sufficient. Therefore, if one takes full utilization of the available labour potential as one of the criteria of productivity, the credo that modern capital-intensive agriculture is always the most productive method becomes problematic. Moreover, one should note that the technical aspect is only one side of the question of the disappearance of free grazing. As Marc
Bloch rightly observes in his account of the "technical revolution" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, the fierceness with which agricultural specialists and other liberal reformers turned against the persistence of the "barbaric" communal arrangements was not simply dictated by technical considerations. Many reformers also -25-
were owners of large commercial farms who found themselves impeded in their expansivity by the duty to throw open arable land for free grazing, and by the fact that landless labourers were not fully ' dependent on the employment on large farms, as they possessed rights on collective resources (Bloch 1966:220).
Finally, the abolition of communal rights and arrangements is not wholly explained by the intensification of land use. The dis• appearance of open fields in England was started by the landlords* change-over to a form of land use that was anything but intensive: large-scale sheep farming (Moore 1966:9ff). And in many*villages of France it was the migration of landless peasants to the cities which brought the «nd to the right of free grazing. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the demand for factory workers grew, many landless French villagers turned their back on rural life. As a consequence the resistance to large farmers' attempts to abolish the right on free grazing declined (Nico Kielstra, personal communi• cation.':^. V
• '•) . Now it is clear that regional differences in the way in which ^traditions of communal co-operation disappeared - as well as the recent date of disappearance or the persistence of such traditions in some regions - can be connected with regional differences in -the extent to which effective central governmental and other bureaucratic organizations have appeared - the occurrence or absence of large-scale commercialization processes - the diffusion and effectiveness of new techniques - the dependency of the poorest part of the population on agriculture; and-with regional differences in the pace of such processes. What is less clear, however, is how such processes and conditions can be explained in their turn. For example, how is it to be explained that the nobles of England and Prussia possessed the power to begin commercial farming, putting an end to the autonomy of peasant communi• ties? One can point out the fact that both countries could dispose of
export markets for their products in a period in which noblesiwere still powerful. In England, the decisive commercial impulse was given by the growing demand for wool on the continent (Moore 1966:5); in the Prussian case, the demand for grain from the Scandinavian countries was -26-
deciding (Silbert 1966: 1129). In both cases, the products were exported
overseas by way of the Hanse.
Nevertheless, in this way it remains unexplained why, e.g., the;
French nobility did not change over to commercial farming on large
estates. Which were the conditions that accounted for the relative
weakness of the position of the French nobles, and how can one explain
the fact that small-scale farms remained more widespread in France
than in England and Prussia? Barrington Moore treats this question in
a detailed way without finding a solution (Moore 1966:40ff). The
complexity of such questions is also apparent from Immanuel Waller-
stein's discussion on Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century (Wallerstein 1971*).
Obviously, finding answers to such questions would require more research into differences between countries as well as between smaller
regions. For this, it would be necessary to build upon the impressive
amount of rural historical work done in this part of the world.
Another example of a rather complex problem is the explanation
of the persistence or late disappearance of councils of "all" house•
holds in some areas. Thus, it is not readily explainable why the old
communal councils of Russia did not lose their importance until the
Stalin period, when family farms were abolished (Wolf 1969, chapter 2).
As a consquence of circumstances on which I am not well-informed,
the small-scale farm was still predominant in most (but not all) parts of the country in the Czarist period. The fact that the vast Russian empire was far from easy to govern contributed to the remarkable autonomy most peasant councils had in practice. As a specialist on
Russia wrote at the beginning of this century,'"...In spite of the
systematic and persistent efforts of the centralized bureaucracy to regulate minutely all departments of the national life, the rural
Communes, which contain about five-sixth of the population, remain in many respects entirely beyond its influence, and even beyond its
sphere of vision" (Mackenzie Wallace, quoted by Wolf 1969:60).
The Alpine area, too, has for a long time been characterized by a low degree of centralization and the predominance of- small-scale farmingo In spite of the importance of herding activities on natural grasslands, apparently no possibilities existed for large-scale
•commercialization. In this case one can readily understand why the villages had an autonomous position: centralization was made difficult -27-
by the nature of the terrain. Moreover, the peasants of the western part of the Alps had a special advantage in that their area was traversed by travel routes. The western Alps were continually crossed by merchants who paid well for the performance of a variety of services, such as the maintenance of mountain roads and bridges and the provision of lodging. Thanks to this, the inhabitants of the high mountain valleys could participate in the money economy. This gave them a considerable degree of autonomy, which was reflected in the ability of community representatives to form larger "horizontal councils" or mountain cantons which successfully resisted the rise of feudalism (Slicher van Bath 1963:190-1; Burns 1963:148-9).
In the Alps as well as in the Pyrenees and mountain areas of the Balkans traditions of co-operation within communal councils have per• sisted. The anthropologist Robert Burns groups these areas together under the designation of "Circum-Alpine culture area". In the Alps, the council of all household heads has no place in the official modern state organization but even so it still conducts the more important affairs of the community. Within the context of this village council, co-operation in the agro-pastoral economy;takes place (Burns 1963: 137-9, 144-8).
As will be seen, the persistence of traditions of communal co• operation Is also typical for parts of Portugal and Spain.
> 1 PART TWO: COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION IN THE NORTH OF PORTUGAL AND SPAIN
-31-
In northern Spain and northern Portugal much ethnographic re• search has been done into the collective arrangements here design• ated as "communal co-operation". About the turn of the century a group of jurists who were interested in the theme of common law (led by Joaquin Costa, a jurist coming from the northern Spanish countryside) made up an inventory of communal institutions in parts of northern Spain; these data were used by Julio Caro Baroja, George Foster and, especially, Susan T. Freeman in making general surveys. Likewise, in northern Portugal the ethnographically-oriented
anthropologist Jorge Dias made a research into the persistence of 13 communal co-operative institutions in various regions. Community studies in which specific communal institutions in
the north of Spain and Portugal are treated, were written by Dias, 14 Kenny, Freeman and Brandes.' Like many other monographs, these works are community studies in a twofold sense. First, they cover many aspects of the community in question, e^g., demography, agriculture, kinship, religion. Such aspects tend to be described in a detailed ^manner: a number of valuable descriptions are the result. (Cf., especially, Dias* ethnological work embracing virtually all aspects of a community where communal co-operation is particularly important: .'Dias 1953.) Secondly, the authors use to emphasize the integration,
ite. the Gemeinschaft aspects, of the community under study. This finds clear expression in, e.g., Dias* and Brandes* description of the typical traditional peasant community in terms partly borrowed from Robert Redfield (Dias 1968/69:110, Brandes 1975:7). True, social contrasts within the communities under study do not go un•
recorded; but in the case of Freemanfs and Brandes* publications, especially, it strikes the eye that contrasts and conflicts are described in terms that betray a very positive valuation of community integration - i.e., in excessively negative terms. For example, Freeman and Brandes speak of "separatism" and a "deeply rooted individualism" in cases in which I would speak of merely-human quarrels and rivalries among peasants who are accustomed to co• operating for a number of purposes. In my view the occurrence of conflicts does not automatically imply the absence of co-operativeness. The only way I can explain the fact that Freeman and Brandes use such -32-
negative terms in describing conflicts is to interpret the use of terms as an indirect expression of the authors1 strong emphasis on community integration. (Freeman 1968a:42; Brandes 1975:100. CF., also, Lison-Tolosana 1973.)
In spite of the availability of many data on communal co• operation on the Peninsula and the existence of Brandes1 interesting
account of a connection between demographic conditions and the 15 extent of co-operation between peasants , many questions on relevant processes and conditions remain unanswered. For example, it is worthwhile to find out which general conditions are relevant to the explanation of the previous and, to a certain extent, present-day importance of communal co-operation in certain northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula, In addition, research on the spot can increase the insight into more specific conditions which account for the importance of particular forms of communal co-operation in smaller northern-Iberian regions. These specific explanations may again contribute to general insights into structural characteristics of communities. Likewise, it is worthwhile to take a closer view on the remarkable difference in the extent of commercialization existing between certain northern and southern parts of the Iberian country• side. The study of this regional difference may be instructive in two respects: 1) it may lead to a more elaborated view on the con• sequences of commercialization for communal co-operation; 2) it may shed more light on conditions accounting for the varying extent of commercialization (and so, indirectly, for variations in structural aspects of communities.). These considerations underly this part, which is based on general data on the northern Iberian countryside and on fieldwork data on the village of Marras (north-eastern Portugal), and part three, which is partly based on historical data on communal co-operation in a southern-Portuguese region where commercialization had begun in an early period. -33-
III THE NORTH IN GENERAL
This chapter is a brief review of data on communal co-operation in northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula. To start with, data from the past and the problem of their interpretation will be treated.
In studying historical data on communal co-operation in the Peninsula, one is confronted with the "problem of description" treated in chapter 2: is it possible to obtain a right image from historical documents? Indeed, the discussion on the history of communal institutions in two northern-Spanish regions - Leon and the adjacent Old-Castilian plain - is a very instructive example of the problem of the interpretation of historical data. In Leon and Old-Castile, as well as in other regions such as north-eastern Portugal, the peasant community possessing extensive communal lands and rights on self-government has been a widespread phenomenon. Many Spanish writers,and, also, the social historian Edward Malefakis, have a definite idea as to the origin of this phenomenon: as the flat parts of Leon and Old-Castile had been almost completely depopulated during the war of Christians and Moors, the communal institutions in these regions must have found their origin in the early middle ages.16 Some authors hold the same opinion in reference, to north-eastern Portugal. According to this line of reasoning, the autonomous peasant communities came into existence in the period next to the conquest on the Moors, when the land had to be re-populated. In order to make colonization attractive, the authorities granted favourable rights to the settlers - i.e., rights on the possession or permanent lease of peasant farms and the right on forming autonomous communities having the disposal of common pastures. j On the other hand,.there is a counter current of writers who maintain that Old-Castile, Leon and north-eastern Portugal have been inhabited uninterruptedly. The Moorish-Christian war had resulted in a "disorganization" without leading to depopulation in the literal sense. By these authors, the foundation of new settlements in the early middle ages is regarded to be a reclamation of previously un• cultivated land in the proximity of existing towns and villages. The rapid population growth in the early middle ages was a process which was not at all confined to Leon and Old-Castile: on the contrary, -34-
population grew rapidly everywhere in the Peninsula and Europe. In the continent as a whole "colonization" stood for reorganization and further reclamation of lands that had since long been exploited to a certain extent. Land reclamation and settlement in Leon and Old- Castile were partly the work of people from other regions; for the greater part, however, the colonization was "internal", i.e. 17 undertaken by inhabitants of the area itself. In my view, this last interpretation is the right one. The criticism on the depopulation hypothesis is based on good grounds, such as the fact that archaic place-names and dialect forms as well as other regional culture elements have survived in spite of the Moorish-Christian war, and the existence of some documents on Christian inhabitants of Old-Castile in the war period. The available data on the northern part of the Peninsula point to the conclusion that, in broad outline, the situation such as it existed in the Roman period and the stage next to it, the Visigothic period, subsisted notwithstanding the Moorish conquest and Christian reconquest. In the Roman and Visigothic periods.large domains belong• ing to lords who ruled over a dependent population (villae ? existed alongside free communities (vici). Possibly as a consequence of a population expansion unattended by a commercialization process, part of the villae fell into the hands of a growing number of small land• owners; in the same way, large farms which were founded after the reconquest upon the Moors tended to fragment into smaller units. By this process new settlements arose from old estates (Freund 1970; Oliveira Marques 1972:5). In exactly the same manner as members of old vici did, the inhabitants of new settlements used to co-operate 18 communally for'a number of purposes. I suggest that the situation in the post-reconquest period was far from homogeneous. Old free peasant communities may have coexisted with old and new large estates as well as with new free peasant communities. A part of the.new free peasant villages had originated from old large estates; another part of them had been founded on recently reclaimed lands. In my opinion, this scheme is applicable to the whole northern part of Portugal and Spain, including Leon and Old-Castile* To: under• stand the popularity of the other view - the depopulation hypothesis - one must keep in mind that many of its adherents have not been free from nationalist motives. The depopulation hypothesis fits into the -35-
traditional Spanish historiography, in which uniquely-Spanish elements receive a strong emphasis while the influence of former conquerors i and the Moors in particular is minimized, (see Hottinger 1976 for a critical treatment of this view* Also, Caro Baroja 1946:263^) According to this old official view, rights on communal lands and self-government in Old-Castile and Leon were typical Spanish institutions owing no• thing to the Moorish past. As a piquant detail I remark that up to the present, a number of communal co-operative institutions in Old- 19 Castile are designated with terms coming from the Arabic language. Is it hazardous to suppose that a straight line, not interrupted by the Moorish conquest, can be drawn from the conventus publicus vici- norum of the period of Visigothic rule (see note 18) to forms of communal co-operation in modern Spanish and Portuguese society?
We now turn to the twentieth century. In several northern parts of the Peninsula a number of forms of communal co-operation have persisted. Firstly, in some areas common lands and communal arrange• ments in land use are widespread; secondly, part of the smaller villages and hamlets still have councils made up of representatives )of "all" households who co-operate in the maintenance of common goods and the provision of public services within their community. .1) Especially in the mountainous part of northern Portugal and Spain- waste lands which are or were until recently managed by local communities occupy vast surfaces. Thus, in the mountainous coastal zone of the Bay of Biscay and in the highest mountain areas of the interior there are extensive communal grasslands (Christian 1972:5; Brandes 1975:96-7). Waste lands covered with heather, gorse, broom and other scrubs are important in the higher parts of north-eastern Portugal and the interior of Galicia (north-western Spain). In many Galician communities there exists (existed?) the practice to grow gorse on communal lands.
after a poor crop of cereals on heathy lands, the traditional rotation has followed with eight to twelve years or more of gorse, first: grown as a fodder and bedding for the cattle, then as a source of charcoal fuel* Many communes still cast lots for the communal cutting of the gorse. (Houston 1964:258-60)
Open fields are still very widespread in north-eastern Portugal, Le6"n -36-
and Old-Castile. In north-western Portugal and Gallcia they are absent however. It leaps to the eye that the latter regions have a maritime climate; in this, they resemble another region where open fields were lacking of old - the Vehde*e. As was pointed out in chapter 2, the high rainfall in the Vendee implied the absence of the necessity of free grazing. The absence of open fields in Galicia and north-western Portugal can be explained in a similar manner. Thanks to the rainy climate the lower parts of these regions (which came into use during the Pax Romana, when systematic land reclamation had become possible) could be used as irrigated meadows for the breeding of horned cattle* Likewise., it was due to the climate that the peasants of this corner of the Peninsula could change over to a new system of land exploitation when maize had been introduced from the New World, This system consists in the growing of maize in ro- 21 tation with hay on irrigated land. In it, there is no place for a fallow period of a duration worth mentioning. Moreover, the great importance of hay production means a reduction of the dependence on the use of extensive pastures. The contrast with north-eastern Portugal, Leon and Old-Castile is clear. As these regions are screened from Atlantic climatic influences by mountain chains they have a much less humid climate. This is to say that possibilities for intensive maize and hay pro• duction are lacking and that the peasants of this interior are de• pendent on extensive and unirrlgated grain.farming. After one year of cultivation, most land is left to regenerate for one year; on the poorest soils fallow periods are still longer. In short, hay is scarce and fallow land is plentiful, so that the peasants have an interest in following the open field system. In some smaller parts of this vast open field area the practice of periodical reallotment of the grain fields has been common. Up to the beginning of this century all inhabitants of Folgosinho, a village in the Serra da Estrela in central Portugal, had a share in the communal grain field (Tavares da Silva, quoted by Silbert 1966:335-6). According to the description, the parish council used to call together the family heads in order to cast lots for the assignment of the shares, "in the presence of God and the people". The author does not hesitate to describe this practice as an example of "communism of Christ". In other words, the management of this collective resource was a matter -37-
of "communal" co-operation between the family heads, the parish council and the Lord himself. Two other regions where particular reallotments of the grain land have been common up to the beginning of this century are Sayago (Caro Baroja 19-43:130-1; Foster 1960-65-7) and the Trevejana valley in the southern Sierra de Gata (Hinderink 1963:99). As to the origins of this system and its potential former occurrence in bther regions, nothing certain can be said*
2) The clearest and most systematic data on councils made up of, in principle, all households come from northern-Portuguese highlands and
the following Spanish regions: Leon, Old-Castile, the coastal zone 22 of the Bay of Biscay and Galicia. As this material dates partly from the beginning of the century, it Is not clear to what extent old communal councils have persisted in this area as a whole. What is clear is that these councils are still important in certain parts of this general area: this appears from Freeman's study on an Old- Castilian hamlet (Freeman 1970), from material on a number of inountain villages near the Bay of Biscay (Christian 1972:19) as well as from the material on a northern-Portuguese region to be presented below. On the eastern part of the Peninsula there are some data, too. For example, in Valencia a council gathers every Thursday in front of the cathedral in order to treat conflicts on irrigation water, without making use of written dopuments. "Though tourists watch the proceedings, the farmers scarcely notice them".^ Such local irrigation councils have also persisted in rural villages in Minho, a province of nprth- western Portugal (bias 1949:121). However, in north-western Portugal (as well as in eastern Spain) many traditions of communal co-operation have disappeared. In north-western Portugal, just as in the Douro valley and the region of Estremadura north of Lisbon, communal councils co-operating for many purposes are absent. The smallest administrative units are the freguesias - secular parishes, usually comprising more than one village and ruled by three elected members who belong to the richest local families. As these regions are relatively prosper• ous as a result of good possibilities for the farming of products like wine, it Is conceivable that freguesia councils and/or municipal• ities have of old possessed more means to perform tasks that are per• formed by communal councils in certain other regions. -38-
In the villages of north-western Portugal, Estremadura and, especially, the Douro valley social contrasts tend to be sharp (Cf. Siegel 1961, Soeiro de Brito 1960:35ff.). On this rule there are some exceptions. Thus Joyce Riegelhaupt states that differences in wealth in a rural parish north of Lisbon have not led to any local class differentiation. She gives a description of some religious activities taking place in a communal context outside the official church organization (Riegelhaupt 1973). Also, there are data on co• operation between villagers in the reclamation and drainage of a dune area on the coast of Minho, where property is distributed less unevenly than in the rest of the province (Dias 1949:41-2).
Incidentally, it would be wrong to think that co-operation between peasants cannot occur in places where considerable social contrasts exist. Data on work exchange and mutual aid among poor peasants come from many parts of the country including the north• west and Estremadura. Frequently, these data concern co-operation within small and shifting groupings of relatives, neighbours and friends; however., the old practice of all poor village members to maintain a pool for the insurance of their horned cattle is still alive in the north-west. This form of mutual insurance has never been incor• porated into the official state organization (Soeiro de Brito 1960:38-9).
It is important to know more about the conditions which account for the occurrence of councils of "all" households in the higher parts of north-eastern Portugal and other regions mentioned above. An explanation must be found for a) the absence of extreme power differentials within the communities and b) the fact that villagers in these regions perform such a great number of public functions, a) The fact that extreme power differentials are lacking in these peasant communities is, of course, directly connected with the pre• dominance of small-scale farms and the absence of large landowners among the inhabitants. However, if one asks what accounts for this predominance of small farms the answer is less easy to find. It is useful to pay some attention to the opinion of ."Malefakis, among many other authors, on this question (Cf. Malefakis 1970:50-2). As has been said, many writers on Spain share the disputable view that the small peasant farms in Leon and Old-Castile found their origin in the early middle ages. The remaining part of this theory says that -39-
royal legislation, which continued to be directed at the protection of the peasant population of these regions, has impeded throughout the centuries that^large estates became general in Led"n and Old- Castile.
In my view, this way of thinking implies an overestimation of the influence the laws of the central authority had in practice. Is such large-scale planning - i.e., the formation and maintenance of countless free communities - really conceivable, given the small extent to which centralization processes had advanced in that stage? The fact that large estates did not become general in the area composed of north-eastern Portugal, Leon and Old-Castile cannot primarily be attributed to the policy of kings. As I will argue further on, the predominance of small-scale farming in this area can effec• tively be explained by certain unplanned conditions: the traditional character of agricultural technology and specific traits of the
. physical environment, b) The importance of small farms surely makes understandable why village councils are communal in the sense that "all" households have a say. However, the occurrence of these councils themselves has yet to be explained. It is necessary to understand why the members ''of the communities in question perform such a great number of public functions. In this context the small size of the villages in question is ) certainly relevant. As a.rule, they are composed of some tens to, maximally, some hundreds of households. An obvious assumption is that the small size and great number of villages hamper an effective
centralization. ;
In past times, moreover, the communication networks between principal towns and the huge majority of the villages were very defective. The great number of small and scattered villages and hamlets, the defective communication lines and, also, the lacking of manpower made delegation of a considerable number of public tasks imperative. Thus it ©an be understood that in distant villages like . Rio de Onor, Guadramil and Petisqueira in nprth-feaster^n Portugal the
administration of justice (except the most serious- crimes) fell within the competence of the communal council (Dias 1953:47). The distance, existing between authorities and the population was evident from the fact that state functionaries and villagers were not ac- -40-
quainted with each others' administrative institutions. In the eighteenth century, state functionaries who, in connection with a "centralization campaign", traveled about in the Sayago region in Leon to collect global cadastral data, wondered at the fact that the inhabitants did not know the concept of a town hall and held their meetings in the middle of the street {Cabo Alonso 1956:615).
The fact that even today a significant part of the functions traditionally performed by villagers has not been taken over by higher authorities has mainly to do with the great poverty by which these specific parts of the poor Iberian countryside are characterized. The province of Tras-os-Montes (literally: Over-the^Mountains) in north-eastern Portugal is a case in point, It can be maintained that in this province the quantity of money collected by taxation is too small to make possible the payment of workmen who could take over the tasks - i.e., the work for the main• tenance of collective properties and certain public services - which in the poorest parts of the province are performed by the inhabitants themselves, out of sheer poverty. The poverty of Tras-os-Montes is at once apparent from the fact •that three quarters of the active population are engaged in agri• culture, as against some thirty per cent in the whole of Portugal. Up to the beginning of this century, the principal means of living of the majority of the inhabitants of the highest and poorest part of the province, the terra fria or cold land, were the herding of goats and sheep on extensive waste and fallow lands and the burning of charcoal. Here small, subsistence-oriented farms are predominant,. In the lower parts, forming the terra quente or warm land, agriculture is more prosperous. Indeed, in one part of the terra quente - the Upper Douro Valley - commercialization has taken place on a large
scale: this is the port regiona In the eighteenth century, when the bonds between Portugal and England had been tightened, port pro• duction was made into a part of the world economy by the entrepre• neurial activities of Portuguese and Englishmen and the toil rof peasant workers who came from regions as far as Galicia. Port was
and remains a valuable export product. However, the profits do not accrue primarily to the province itself, as port production is a business of entrepreneurs living in the distant seaport town of Oporto. -41-
Nor do other than agricultural resources yield big sums for the province of Tras-os-Montes. On a very modest scale, mining activities are performed. In the past century this province was still renowned for its silk industry (Taborda 1932:174-8); the disappearance of this industry was an example of the general process of "de-industrial• ization" of the countryside, i.e. the ruin of labour-intensive industries in rural areas as a result of competition by modern, capital- intensive industries in urban centres. At the end of the nineteenth century, migration (to Brazil) became a very important phenomenon; in the years from 1960 to now, it was in the north-eastern part of Portugal that migration (to Lisbon and other European cities) took most alarming forms. The electricity recently produced by water, power from the Douro in Tras-os-Montes is to a remarkably small extent exploited by the province itself.
To these conditions one must add the fact that Portugal, unlike, e.g., Italy and much like the Third World nations, is a country where a massive transference of capital from cities to poor rural areas has not taken place. In view of all these conditions it is not to be wondered that tax income is too small to permit provincial authorities to pay for hired labour that would take the place of work that inhabitants of the poorest parts of Tras-os-Montes perform in communal co• operation. —I, soom 1 km arable Land in the broofc vaLLey
.700—— contour line [vw j vineyard —: —brook grassLar»eJ bordering brooks and , ," " road , Streamlefcs (in outline) \cor\Cir\e of the the open fieLd. Southern course T T T T •!* 1 tfirrt tory. is Faceira da Vtnha. Northern housev 1 L La sj e and barns course consists of scattered parts. 00 O O OOP •fi-re-vood thicket -43-
IV A NORTH-EASTERN PORTUGUESE COMMUNITY AND ITS COUNCIL
IV.1 The region and the community
In some higher parts of northern Portugal, many traditions of communal co-operation have persisted for a long time and in some cases still survive. From ethnographical data collected by Dias it appears that one of these parts is the terra fria or cold iand, the northern frontier zone of the province of Tras-os-Montes (Dias 1953: introduction). As will appear, many forms of communal co-operation still exist in the peasant communities of the eastern part of the terra fria, that belongs to the district of Braganca; the same seems to be. true for the western part, belonging to the district of Vila Real (cf. Ventura 1975:46 on the region of Barroso in the western terra fria.).
The western part of the terra fria is a humid mountain zone forming a transition to north-western Portugal; the eastern part has a dryer climate and borders on the semi-arid northern Spanish plateau made up of Leon and Old-Castile. The terra fria is composed of plateaus intersected by valleys of rivers and brooks, and some mountain ridges. Population density is low; the settlements are small and frequently lie hidden behind small plateaus, hills and mountains «•
On visiting the region for the first time one is easily tempted to describe these picturesque villages or hamlets as "isolated communities". In fact, members of the urban elite often use this expression. However, by using the concept of the isolated community one. would overlook the fact that community life, of which communal co-operation forms a part, is only one aspect ' of the social life of villagers. An equally important part of their social life consists in their bonds with relatives who went to live in other countries or in Lisbon or other urban centres In Portugal. Still another part of the villagers' social life is national political life, which in 1974, with the fall of the Salazar regime and the collapse of the colonial empire, became very important even in the remotest corners of conservative northern Portugal & Villages such as those of the terra fria can only be described as "forgotten communities", i.e., -44-
settlements of people to whom a very marginal status is assigned by townspeople, inclusive factory workers. In Portugal "a social code of behaviour still discriminates against the rural population as if they were an alien subject race" (Figueiredo 1975:14-5).
One of the forgotten communities of the terra fria is Marras, 24 a village of twenty-nine peasant "families". Marras lies in the eastern terra fria not far from the village of Rio de Onor studied by Jorge Dias (1953).. As the following two chapters on Marras centre upon communal co-operation, many aspects of village life dealt with by Dias are not treated here. However, the data on communal co• operation and relevant conditions presented here form a supplement to Dias1 data. I have done my best to give as much new material on this subject as was possible. Marras lies at an altitude of 700 metres above sea level, hidden in a narrow valley between hills that are some 150 metres higher. The hills are covered with scrubs and grainfields. As is typical of all open field communities, the houses, sheds and other buildings are massed tightly together. The number of households has never been larger than twenty-nine. This small size is typical of most peasant communities of this part of the terra fria: only the largest peasant villages exceed fifty households. As subsistence possibilities in local agriculture are restricted, many people of this region have to find employment in other places. In the past, a few inhabitants found employment in local mines. Seasonal migrations - e;g., to the port-wine region - have been common. Many inhabitants, however, had and have to resort to migration to urban centres. In the past, migration to South American and Spanish cities was important; today, France is the main migration centre. Many inhabitants of this part of Portugal, the northern interior, have tried to make a living in Africa, i.e., the colonies. Another important form of migration which started in the fifties is the removal of Portuguese urban centres. Many former inhabitants of Marras now live in Lisbon or Porto, having a modest occupational position in official bodies like the police force, the. postal service or the army,, Since the fifties, the characteristic pattern has been that young adults from Marras married with partners from other villages of Tras-os-Montes and went off to Portuguese or other European urban zones. -45-
Population increased in Tras-os-Montes from 1930-1955. In the sixties an impressive decrease began, and between 1960 and 1970, Marras lost 30% of its population; the district of Braganca: 23%, and Portugal: 2%. This process was advantageous only in the sense that pressure on the land diminished: the great disadvantage was the growing-lack of younger people as well as the reinforcement of the marginal character of the region. Those who stayed behind remain very dependent on the exploitation of meagre agricultural resources» Some data on this local economy are required as a context for the account of communal co-operation in Marras.
The terra fria lies north of the zone where olive trees and other mediterranean crops are common. Typical for this region is the combination of cattle and small livestock breeding and the growing of cereals (in the first place, rye) on open fields. The emphasis is on subsistence production. Formerly, keeping small livestock was the occupation of the majority. The poorest inhabitants were goatherds and charcoal burners. The possession of two cows, by 25 which one acquired the status of lavrador or farmer, was reserved
for the few0- However, in the past hundred years keeping horned cattle has become an increasingly important activity and more in• habitants acquired the status of lavrador. Calves are sold as slaughter cattle, while the cows are kept as draught animals * Cattle andpigs, the other common livestock, used to- be grazed in the fields. Now they are usually stall-fed. As a result of this change, combined with the fact that keeping of goats and sheep has decreased in importance, the accent on herding activities has diminished- Like everywhere in Europe, here too, sheep farming receded. After a drop in wool prices about 1880, the importance of sheep farming in Europe as a whole declined (Nico Kielstra, personal communication.). The same was true for the province of Tras-os-Montes as a whole (Taborda 1.932:152). However, in the border zone where Marras lies this decline was delayed. A treaty of commerce with Spain signed in 1893 implied the emergence of a new market'for sheep on the other side of the border, leading to an increase instead of a decrease in the number of sheep (Taborda 1932:148). My supposition is that the decrease in sheep farming in the border zone began when this treaty was canceled (possibly right after the Spanish civil war. Cf. also -46-
Dias 1953:164)„ Shepherds were so poorly paid, that almost any other occupation gave.a better return. When they could emigrate, they did so, and as a result sheepherding declined..The decline in, goat-herding, formerly a very important activity for the poorest peasants, will be dealt with further on.
As far as crops are concerned, the emphasis is on grain farming. Especially in the first part of this century grain production was intensified in the terra fria as throughout Portugal. Since 1910, in Marras and neighbouring communities land was cleared in order to expand grain farming; (However, vast stretches remained uncultivated: see V.4.3.) In 1960 a decline set in* In my view, this decline - which is still continuing.- is directly connected with the fact that labour scarcity increased sharply as a result of the migration of day- labourers, and children of landowners, while grain prices remained constant and mechanization progressed only to a very small extent. As to land tenure, I will confine myself to a few global remarks on private land property. Communal properties will be dealt with
in the chapter on communal co-operationQ The private natural resources consist of grainfields, strips of grassland, small vineyards, intensively used land bordering the brook of Marras, animals and trees. Both as a result of partitions between heirs and as a result of former divisions of land between all households, individual land holdings are fragmented into small rectangular patches. Significant property differentials do exist in villages like Marras; indeed, as has been noted on p. 19, an unequal division of resources is characteristic of peasant communities in general. Yet it is also clear that the degree of inequality varies. It is safe to say that in the peasant communities of the terra fria landed property is divided less unequally than in the majority of Portuguese communities, including terra quente communities, where absent^eist i large landownership is not uncommon, and regional centres and small market towns in the terra fria. In the region of Marras there are no proprietors who have much land in many villages. The possession of land in.neighbouring communities, acquired by marriage and in• heritance, is restricted to small scattered plots. In Marras, the largest landowner possesses 25 hectares of grain
lande However, land property has to be well distinguished from land -47-
exploitation. Firstly, all grain fields except for the small summercorn fields in the brook valley must lay fallow every other
yearQ Secondly, large parts of the grain land properties were left unused as a result of labour scarcity and the low demand for grain. Yearly, the largest landowner can cultivate half of his 25 hectares of grain land, the other half belonging to the fallow part of the open field« In practice, he uses only some eight hectares. From numbers on the harvest of 1973 one can deduce that half of the "families" exploit between three and eight hectares of grain land. Some of the remaining families are nearly landless.
Among livestock property, cows represent the highest value: they are the peasant's "capital". Some twenty families own a number of
cows ranging from two to eightD These families' sheep property ranges from six to fifteen. The other families (among whom two young families) own less. Practically all have a number of pigs, which, in contrast with calves and sheep, are not being sold. Of course, a complete image of the division of property could only be attained by the presentation of more fieldwork data and the collection of new data on land and livestock property, as well as other resources, such as money remitted by children who work in Portuguese or foreign cities; income from a specialized activity like carpentry or selling essential provisions; houses and barns; and land property in other villages, which occurs in a few cases„ However, it can be said with certitude that there is no extreme inequality in the division of property within the community. None of the families living in Marras is called a rich family: the distinction one does make is that between three families who are well able to keep their heads above water and the rest. We may conclude that, as a result of the low degree of commercialization, opportunities for a great upward social mobility within the com•
munity are absent0 This fact is relevant to the explanation of the existence of the council of all households.
IVo2 Communal and higher authorities
As appears from documents from the early middle ages, after the
Christian reconquest Tras-os-Montes. was a sparsely populated region0 -48-
A number of peasant communities, among them Marras, were designated as villa-res-* One might guess that they were free communities which had been formed around ancient villae. After the reconquest, religious orders from Leon played the main role in the reorganization of peasant communities in eastern Tras-os-Montes. Initially, in the thir• teenth century, the Portuguese central authority was not able to bring under control the friars working in the border zone. Thus, the friars did not pay taxes to the king. A change occurred when the central authority grew stronger: Marras and a great number of other villages around Braganca became demesnes of the Royal House of Braganca. Nevertheless, these demesnes retained a comparatively autonomous position vis-a-vis the state authorities. Villages were entitled to select from among themselves a judge, a village police• man and a representative for the jury which assembled in Braganca when a murder had been committed in the judicial territory.2^ In this part of Portugal all villages and hamlets had the status of povo or community (literally: people). Under the ancien regime the povo was the smallest unit of the state organization. Representatives of tne Povos were selected by the inhabitants from among themselves.
A representative from a community like Marras was clearly an outsider in the eyes of the elite in Braganca; when he came into Braganca he stepped into another world. As.an anecdote handed down from generation to generation villagers still tell how, when nearing Braganca, the representative used to change his wooden shoes for the official leather shoes of the communal council. As leather shoes were very expensive, there was only one pair of them in the whole
community0 As a result, peasant community representatives used to 27 walk rather uneasily through the streets of Braganca. In that ancestral period the gap between urban established and rural out• siders will have been even wider than it is today. Although the villagers had the right to administer their own justice, it is not probable that the inhabitants of small com• munities like Marras have ever made use of this right. The inhabitants of Rio de Onor, which is a larger village, did make use of it (Dias 1953:155-9). In recent years the communal council of Rio de Onor still has treated some minor cases. Communal administration of justice may also have occurred in some other "large" villages of the terra fria; -49-
however, in most communities conflicts were dealt with in a more 28 informal way. On the other hand, selecting a representative for the jury probably was a practice common to all communities. Marras had such a representative (a jurado) until Salazar abolished all juries in Portugal. Up to the present the households use to witness as a collectivity or povo when conflicts within the community give rise to lawsuits. As the position of jurado has been abolished and the number of village policemen in Marras declined from two to one when population decreased in the sixties, the community now has two functionaries. One of them is the village policeman or cabo, who is also responsible for the money affairs. (In practice, the communal money affairs are of small importance.) The other functionary is the vogal, who re• presents the community in the parish and the municipality, takes care of certain bureaucratic affairs and presides the village council. The word vogal, which means "member entitled to vote", refers to this villager's position in the parish council. Officially, both he and 29 the cabo are' parish functionaries. Therefore, the elections for the post of vogal and cabo are kept every four years, on the same date as the elections for the parish chairman and secretary and the regedor, an official responsible for the maintenance of public order in the parish. Actually, the parish or freguesia is a secular unit* With the end of the monarchy In 1910 it has lost its ecclesiastical character. What is the place of the freguesia in the state organization? Portugal has been divided into eighteen districts , which in their turn are made up of municipalities consisting of a highly variable number of freguesias„ In the south, a municipality frequently consists of four or five freguesias (Cf. Cutileiro 1971:162)* In the north, the number of freguesias forming a municipality frequently exceeds twenty. Such regional differences are connected with differences in village size
and in the distance between settlements0 The municipality consists of the Camara or Chamber of mayor and aldermen and the municipal council, composed of fourteen members
maximally0 This council assembles once in two years and has to represent various bodies among which the freguesia councils. The municipality has' to perform.a number of important functions like supplying money for public work, taking care of medical and educational provisions and -50-
the electricity supply, giving permission to build houses etc0 Speaking of Portugal in general, one can say that the freguesia has limited importance as an administrative unit. Administratively, the freguesia is little more than a direct extension of the munici• pality. Nevertheless, in many parts' of the country people are dependent on the freguesia for the fulfillment of, e.g., religious and socia• bility needs (Cutileiro 1971, Siegel 1961, Riegelhaupt 1973). This does not apply to the terra fria, however. The freguesias of the terra fria are very numerous and small and have particularly few functions. The municipality of Braganca consists of 47.rural and 2 urban freguesias, most rural freguesias consisting of some two to four villages. As will appear from the data on Marras, the fulfillment of religious and sociability needs is an internal village affair. In addition, matters which according to national law are freguesia affairs - such as the control of local public properties - are communal affairs in practice All villages have their own communal council. For example, the village of Rio de Onor is the seat of a freguesia council but its households form their own council, presided by two attorneys or mordomos who are elected yearly. These mordomos have many competencies, yet they can be discharged whenever, the majority of households deems it necessary (Dias 1953:146).^° In fact, the freguesias of this region are little more than administrative units serving as links between the communal councils and the municipality. The communal councils may by no means be regarded as direct extensions of the freguesia councils.
The communities' vogal and cabo do not derive a particular measure of power from their official position in the state organization. They only have small competencies; and as long as there is no question of a money flow from higher authorities to freguesias and communities, the possibility that a vogal comes to play the role of broker between villagers and authorities is excluded. (A broker is an intermediary between people who are interested in certain resources - for example, state moneys - and people who dispose of such resources or have
access to them - for example, administrators of state funds0 From his activities as an intermediary the broker derives a measure of power )^1 Although it is an honour to be elected as a vogal, usually the vogal experiences his work as a burden which he willingly hands over 3? to his successor,, ~ For the same reason, the burdensome character of -51-
the work, it occurs more than once that the man who has been elected as a cabo refuses to accept his function, so that the old cabo is forced to continue in office. The existence of a clear separation between the communal council of Marras and the freguesia council which is seated in another village, as well as the weakness of the position of the vogal vis-a-vis his fellow villagers, clearly appeared from a conflict which took place in 1973-74. The man who had been elected as a vogal in January 1973 had asked for some time to consider and the council had -given him this time. However, the leaders of the freguesia council were not prepared to wait. They reported to the municipality that the in• habitants of Marras were without a vogal. Thus they attained that T., a former fellow villager of them vho had gone to live in Marras but had retained many bonds with his birthplace, was appointed to be a vogal by the higher authorities. At the meetings which officially were presided by him., T.fs authority was not recognized however. In the discussion he frequently was cold-shouldered. , From comment on this conflict it became apparent what one expects from a good vogal. As an informant explained,
N The people have more authority than he has (o povo manda mais do que ele). The vogal has to call attention to certain questions. He should call together the inhabitants to raise those questions and not to command them. Then the povo itself decides what has to be done.33. At the council or conselho meetings the inhabitants take decisions on their joint affairs. Convoking the members of the council by giving a signal with the church bell is the cabo1s task. In the eyes of'an observer coming from an urban European milieu, the communal meetings in this small-scale environment have an informal and sometimes even chaotic character. However, it would be a mistake to take the word "informal" as a synonym for "inefficient".
IV.3 The members of the council
Who are the members of the council? In principle, the council consists of representatives of all households or vizinhos (literally, 34. neighbours). As far as I know, council membership in this village has never been confined to a group of households which met a certain -52-
economical standard. Every adult man who has set up his own house• hold gets the right to use communal property after having paid a certain sum. He is then obliged to attend communal meetings and to do communal work as long as his state of health permits it. If he is ill, he may send his wife or an older son or daughter to the meeting. Instead of doing communal work, a council member may also provide a certain sum of money. As a rule, however, this is not done. This obligation is remitted when a man is ill.
In Marras, council affairs are not such an exclusively male affair as they are in certain other villages. According to the old rule, single women are not permitted to assist the gatherings and are obliged to perform half of the work quantity demanded from men or to pay "half a sum" or meia-jeira. In practice, however, they do appear at meetings and not much attention is paid to the quantity of work they perform.
The cabo sees to it that communal duties are observed and that communal properties are used in an honest way. He is competent to levy fines on the neglect of duties. The amount of this fine is determined by the vizinhos in mutual deliberation. What must be understood by the households (vizinhos, casas? which together form the communal council? Nowadays, the households pre• dominantly are small nuclear families which are mutually connected by 37 a very complex network of kinship relations. In the nineteenth century the concept of household had another meaning, however. From the thirteenth century up to 1868 Portuguese law prescribed impartible inheritance. Those who disposed of a viable farm including all necessary land types, used to marry off one of their children, this child becoming the heir. In many cases, the unmarried brothers and sisters kept living at home with the heir. In Marras it frequently occurred that none of the children of one family wanted to marry and that they all stayed together. In some families this occurred even after partition of the inheritance between all heirs had been instituted. The shift to partible inheritance implied an increase in the number of marriages and, consequently, the formation of a number of new families. As a result, the communal councils were confronted with special problems. Dias states that the fourteen new families which arose in the village of Rio de Onor in the first half of this century, were assigned a marginal status. To these families the right on a share in the common grassland hitherto used by all (i.e., some 30 to 35 households) was refused. Moreover, as council member• ship was reserved for those households which disposed of enough land resources to form an integral farm, the new families were denied a place in the council. In the fifties this appeared to become an increasingly serious problem. Dias expected that a conflict would arise, followed by a definite partition of the common grassland
between all inhabitants (Dias 1953:135-6, 140, 169-70). Dias1 expectation has not been confirmed: migration has involved that all valid men who stayed behind, amounting to some twenty-five in 1973, acquired a share in the communal grassland and a place in the council. (I do not know whether the migrants were mainly marginal "new" families or established "old" families.) In contrast to those in Rio de Onor, the new families come up in Marras at the end of the past century were neither excluded from rights on a collective land resource nor from council membership. Yet, that fact that the new families wanted to clear some new land, led to a serious conflict with the old families (see V.4.3). The change in the inheritance law and the ensuing "simplification of the family structure - i.e., the change-over from extended to nuclear families - in addition to the fact that many children have left the community, has resulted in a decrease in the size of the fundamental working unit which is the household. This, combined with the fact that work for private ends has remained comparatively heavy, involves that the fulfillment of communal duties remains a great sacrifice.
-55-
V COMMUNAL ENTERPRISE IN MARRAS
In this chapter an enumeration and account will be given of the' forms of communal co-operation arid communal discussion which exist or have existed in Marras. Evasions of co-operation rules and some conflicts will be treated along with co-operation as a matter of course: they form just another aspect of the dialectical reality the peasants of Marras, like all humans, live in. In addition, the conditions which may explain the disappearance or, persistence of the specific forms of communal co-operation will be discussed.
It would be possible to range the co-operation forms to be described according to three ''spheres"the religious sphere, the sphere of assistance and the economic sphere. However, such a classification is apt to make an arbitrary and artificial impression, for in reality these spheres "intermingle". Indeed, one can state that all the various forms of collective enterprise form a whole and belong to a single.activity field which may well be called the communal sphere (Cf. also Elias 1974:xl, note 4). Therefore, forms of communal co-operation will here be arranged in a provisory way. \The categories used in this chapter are designed to make possible a clear presentation of data rather than to form a classification system.
V.1 The communal handling of church affairs
As is evident from anthropological publications on this 'subject, the clear separation between official church dogma and the population's
religion - which in the middle ages was a general European phenomenon - HQ has persisted in some parts of Spain and Portugal. ' In the region under study, too, church affairs have retained their typically local character. This implies that the priest is not permitted to meddle too much with these affairs. True, the priest has moral authority. This is in agreement with the conservative signature of the northern Portuguese countryside. However, the authority of; priests is not so great as to make villagers abstain from scornful observations.. "A priest happens to have mass celebration as an occupation. He sings and is paid for it", one says in Marras. Characteristic of the unorthodox attitude of a great part of this peasantry is the fact -56-
that in this region a priest has worked who openly lived together with a woman (Cf„ Dias 1953:544-7). From what informants said I gather that many peasant inhabitants, as opposed to the higher authorities, were in sympathy with him. Especially in parts of northern Spain religious activities are very clearly a matter of the collectivity. Both in the Old- Castilian community studied by Freeman and in a village lying not far from Marras on the other side of the border, assisting the mass is a real communal duty. Anyone who is absent has to pay 4l a fine amounting to ten duros (fifty pesetas). If he persists 42 in staying away, he loses his rights to use communal properties. In Marras such sanctions do not exist and church-going is a moral duty only. Not everybody goes to church always and one man is always absent on principle. Yet in Marras, tod, some communal duties in the religious sphere have to be fulfilled. Communal co-operation for the church assumes various forms. Every month another vizinho or household comes in for its turn to ring the bell for the short morning and evening prayer and the mass. One week before the village feast in August the church, the church stairs and the tiny cemetry are tidied up. The clean-up is voluntary work, in practice mainly done by women and children. Heavier work, such as masonry and carpentry and the whitewashing of walls, is done by one or two men who gain a compensation out . of the church fund. In 1939 the men have co-operated communally in building the "house of the church" where church affairs are discussed in wintertime. (Villagers have no difficulties in using this house for' more worldly ends as well. It has been used as a temporary room for the school and as a dwelling for an anthro• pology student and his wife; in wintertime it is used as a ball• room and it will be used as a television hall.) The main forms of communal co-operation for the church serve 43. to maintain the church fund. From this money fund the expenses of the whitewashing of the church walls, olive-oil for the lighting of the church, candles, suits, masses and provisions for feasts are paid. In Marras this money is not obtained from levies or funeral expenses. Burying the dead; for which in some Portuguese communities high amounts i|4 are paid, is here done gratis as a service from the communal council. In some villages of this region funeral expenses are paid by rich fam- -57-
ilies who reserve a part of the cemetry for themselves; this is not common, however. The inhabitants of Marras maintain their church fund by making collections on behalf of various saints and by auctioning certain goods, at communal meetings. Making collections for a saint is a task which yearly falls to a pair of vizinhos who are then called that saint's mordomos. Every family comes in for its turn. For the arranging • of feast days the two mordomos da festa are responsible. Their term begins on 20 January; their turn, too, lasts one year.
On 20 January, St. Sebastian's feast day, various goods are auctioned, among which especially pork meat and the tenancy rights on the lots of grassland belonging to the church good. He who bids the most for a lot of grassland, acquires the tenancy right of one year on that patch of ground. The public sale of that right is the exclusive business of the male vizinhos who are now meeting as the confraternity (in the local dialect: confraderia) of St. Sebastian. Everyone who makes a bid may take a draught from the wine glass (formerly: the horn) which passes continuously; thus it is no wonder that some vizinhos, and especially those who get drunken rapidly, .offer high amounts! Incidentally, someone who in the course of the year turns out to be unable to pay is replaced as a tenant by an appointee who has more . financial capacity - who then scoops up the honour.
On 19 March (St. Joseph); the tenancy right on the arable land properties of the church are auctioned. Until about 1945, after which time many vineyards in these villages have fallen into decay, the men also used to perform the first work in the vineyard of the church on this same day. With the wine of the past year a drinking feast was celebrated. A part of the vineyard's yield was sold by auction.
Collections and auctions are also held at the village feast in August (this feast is also assisted by former inhabitants who some• times offer considerable sums) and on All Souls* day, 1 November. In the time when more youths lived in the community, every year on All
: Souls' day a big holm oak trunk was carried from a slope to the village. The trunk was laid on an ox-cart; its front rested on two special yokes of smooth wood, carried by four strong boys belonging to the mocicade or bachelor group of the village. The trunk was sold by auction and the proceeds were used to pay the expenses of the masses -58-
for the souls in purgatory, (These masses for all those deceased who are neither in heaven nor in hell are typical of Portugal 45 ; and Brazil and belong to the population's religion. They may be considered to be a part of the communal activity centring around death„ The same applies to the custom of all neighbours ' except possible sworn ennemies to pass the night after a death in the house of the deceased. This custom is also known from other places.) My impression is that even the few less religious inhabitants are interested in the communal activities centring round the church - i.e., in so far as business-like and festive activities are con• cerned.
V.2 Assistance
It goes without saying that inhabitants of regions like the terra fria, where assistance from official (state) organizations has small significance, are highly dependent upon one another in case of illness or accidents. Thus, in the first half of this century an "intercommunal" arrangement still existed for assistance to invalid beggars. Such an invalid man made his round from village to village. He slept in the house of the cabo, who also provided a donkey on which the man rode to the cabo of the next village. (By the way, this form of protection of weaker members of society by the stronger cannot be characterized as mutual aid. As is also the case in parent-children relations, the weaker party receives more than the stronger one. Cf. van Baal 1975:16.) This arrangement disappeared when houses where invalids are taken care of were set up in Braganca.
Informants gave me some examples of forms of assistance which have virtually disappeared as a result of the fact that many in• habitants are now somewhat less exclusively dependent on agriculture than they were formerly (many inhabitants receive some modest money remittances from their children.,),. When a vizinho' was ill, the other households assembled on Sundays in order to mow his grass or to gather his crops. When a cow died unexpectedly, the animal was buried by the council members for the mourning owner.
Fire fighting has remained a matter of communal co-operation, _59-
for a fire service covering the whole municipality is lacking. In
the case of big fires the aid of neighbouring communities is invoked.
V.3 The maintenance of communal capital goods
The capital goods which in regions such as the terra fria are managed communally, consist partly of some buildings which can only be "placed" in a traditionally closed economy: communal water mills, ovens, grape presses and smithies. As there is nobody who can use such capital goods on a large scale, it is effective to use and manage them communally. Especially in the western terra fria many bread ovens are owned communally CDias 1953:30). In Marras a communal oven is absent: for the baking of bread for domestic consumption - an activity which is still profitable because of the remote situation of the community - use is made of private ovens. For the poorest inhabitants it would not be paying to build their own ovens: they use a large oven belong• ing to one of the families. Constructing a private mill or grape press is attractive to none of the villagers: thus one can explain the existence of two communal water mills and one communal grape press in Marras. Of the communal mills, one is used in turn by all households. Every vizinho comes in for his turn to be his own miller for a fixed number of hours. The cabo sees to it that this arrangement is followed, for in periods of brought, especially, someone may be tempted to go and grind some of his own grain out of his turn, at a moment when someone else does not make use of his turn. (However, it is also possible for a vizinho to present someone else with his own turn by way of a favour.) Usually a turn lasts twenty-four hours, but when the mill's capacity is diminished by drought the vizinhos reduce this time to twelve hours, so that everyone comes in for his turn twice as fast. This is more practical even though the maximal quantity to be ground each time is halved. Indeed, as was told to me, in Rio de Onor an arrangement is followed in dry years by which a number of people at the same time are assigned a fixed length of time, to use the mill, (Such a set of people is called a dunha. Cf. the part on irrigation.) -60-
In Marras in 1973 a second mill was used because of the drought. This mill grinds faster but is less easily attainable. Since both the amount of cereals to be ground and the number of workers varies • by household, not all were interested in the use of this mill. This became apparent when the vogal wanted to enlist the council to make usable the narrow path, overgrown with heather, which leads to this mill, and to make the mill ready for operation. The majority refused to go with the vogal and cabo to do this job. The unpopu• larity of the vogal also played a part. Some people suggested it was only out of self-interest that he had called together the council: the vogal being the only inhabitant owning a horse, he was one of the few for whom grain transport to the distant mill was no problem. (Most inhabitants have neither a horse nor a donkey.) This episode is an example of a situation in which communal co-operation exists only nominally.
In contrast, the communal grape press remains important enough to be kept up regularly. This press is used to make the popular Portuguese strong drink of bagaco. In' wintertime this drink is made from the dregs of grapes which have been trampled down in a large tub at home.
One of the recent communal building activities in Marras was the construction of a small working-room for an inhabitant who is a part-time blacksmith - i.e., a small communal smithy - at the end of the sixties. From this it appears that the centuries-old insti• tution of the -communal smithy does not yet belong to the past.
The remaining part of communal capital property in Marras consists of the church, which has already been dealt with, and of all streets and paths. Formerly the old school building and the road to Braganca, too, formed part of this property. The old school building had been built in 1926 or 1927 by the inhabitants and a stone mason brought in by them. Explosives to blow up a part of a hill were bought, and from the stone quarry which arose in this way every owner of a ox-cart carried stories to the building site. Those who did not possess an ox-cart and the single women be• longing to the council gave contributions in other ways.
The payment for this work and the building activities consisted of one portion of each of two former communal meadows for every inhabi- -61-
tant. The question why this partition .was attractive for the inhabi• tants will be treated on p.66ff. It must be kept in mind that the council had no money funds for the payment of public expenses. To obtain the money necessary for buying explosives and paying the stone• mason the council sold two smaller strips of grassland, which had also formed part of the communal property, to those inhabitants who hid the most. Thus a part of the communal land disappeared with the construction of a new communal capital good, (However, as will appear
on p.7tr2 j( in Marras there was also another way of getting money for public expenses which did not entail the loss of communal property rights.) In 1953, when the road to Braganca was still owned and managed by the community, the male vizinhos built a wooden bridge. Although the single women did not participate in the construction work, they too had heavy work to do. For example, one of them had to bake bread for the male workers. Baking the bread and everything connected with it, such as gathering charcoal, was very hard labour which was only partially compensated by a small payment from the council.
In later years, the school and road became state property and the ^government renewed the school and replaced the bridge. (According to my informants, however, the bridge was in good condition.) However, the hardening of the village street and square in 1973/74 was only partially the work of higher authorities. The communal council decided on the material to use and on some details of construction. The municipality provided the material and a road-maker, but the inhabitants were brought in by rotation to work together with the road-maker. De¬ pending on the heaviness of the tasks, on some days one and on other, days two, three or four vizinhos had to collaborate. This continued well into the spring, when agriculture demands much labour. Thus the inhabitants of villages like Marras have contributed to the improvement of their country's infrastructure by sacrificing part of their working-hours and performing unpaid work^ In no respect are these activities to be compared with relief work projects, i.e., projects meant to provide employment for people out of work. -62-
V.4 Communal undertakings in agriculture
Communal co-operation in agriculture implies that the vizinhos ; work and deliberate together in the management of communal natural resources and in rendering certain public services in crop farming and cattle-breeding. Apart from the treatment of communal activities in crop farming and cattle-breeding, I will give a description of communal activities in connection with the waste lands, which have functions both for crop farming and for cattle-breeding.
V.4.1 Crop farming
In crop farming, some forms of communal co-operation and co• ordination of individual activities exist.
- Communal co-operation in threshing grain. The threshing of grain with flails has been a matter of mutual aid in many areas. In many terra fria villages, however, the threshing of rye was a veritable public service to which every household contributed: it was a form of compulsory aid among neighbours..
Dias describes how the inhabitants of Rio de Onor were divid"ed into two quadrias or quadrilhas, which were threshing groups the membership of which passed from father to son. This division appears to have been general in these environs; anyhow, it existed in Marras. Within a quadrilha, literally everyone helped everyone. The men flailed the grain for the family whose turn it was to be helped. The women, children and old people carried the flailed grain away. The assisted household offered a banquet. (Dias 1953:199-210) In as far as I know, such communal co-operation in threshing did not exist in regions like Leon and Old-Castile, where threshing sledges were used instead of flails (cf., for example, Freeman 1970:79), How• ever, it is possible that threshing with sledges sometimes gave rise to co-operation within smaller groupings of neighbours. In the forties or fifties threshing was mechanized in Marras: the villagers changed over to threshing by means of a machine hired
from a man who goes from village to village. Every user pays with 5% of his threshed grain. This change meant that-co-operation'lost its compulsory character: co-operation by and for everyone has ceased to -63-
exist. Yet, threshing remains a matter of mutual aid or torna-jeira (work exchange). Any inhabitant who threshes an amount worth mentioning is helped by a number of fellow-villagers. No one - not even the largest owner - repays this service with money: the assisted household pays its helpers back by assisting them when it is their turn to use the machine. This means that there is still co-operation in relatively large groupings. It must also be observed that mechanized threshing is a real communal business in the sense that the owner commits himself to hire out his machine to all parties interested and, likewise, in the sense that the order in which users come in for their turn is determined by the cabo on behalf of the council.
- Communal decisions on privater work on the land. In two respects one can speak .of the existence, in Marras, of what Germans call Flurzwang: a duty to be observed by individual owners . in their work in the land. The open field arrangement implies a, collective co-ordination of in• dividual land exploitation, in the sense that holdings belonging,to one of the courses must lie fallow in any given year; and some communal discipline is necessary when the farmers gather in their cereal crop. The owners use to arrange the date on which they go with their ox• carts to the grain land. One reason for .this is that the narrow paths make necessary some co-ordination in transport. An additional reason may be that the owners want to see to it that no. theft or damage to their crop occurs (this, at least, was what one of my informants said.). However, if some owners want to begin to gather in their crop before the arranged date, they are not forbidden to do so. In the past the enforcement of. this rule has been stricter. Well into the first half
of this: century it was absolutely forbidden to gather in the rye before a certain date determined by all households together. Like• wise, the council determined the data for the cutting of the rye and the vintage. From the time the grapes began to ripen, the access to whatever vineyard was forbidden to anyone. Dias (1953:217) describes how rigidly the vineyards of Rio de Onor were guarded by council members in rotation. (However, it must also be.noted that during the harvest it has always been an affair of honour to offer grapes to anyone who wants them.)
In Spanish communities lying,in these environs such rigid pro• hibitions in behalf of the protection of yields still exists The inhabitants of Marras who, informed me of this matter considered these -64-
arrangements to be unnecessary institutions which have rightly dis• appeared on the Portuguese side of the border. The explanation of the persistence of these arrangements on the other side of the border is not clear to me. - Irrigation. Irrigation water, which in the dryer parts of the region is won both from private wells and from communal tanks or tanques, is brook water in the case of Marras. The inhabitants have a communal right to this water. The persistence of this right has not always been unproblematical. One day the council had to take steps to defend its water right.- In'the framework of a "development policy" which will be treated further on, the state had allotted a patch of land to a man from outside the region. The man wanted to make this land into an irrigated field for the commercial production of potatoes. The land laid close to the source of the brook of Marras. This implied a direct threat to the community: the amount of water for Marras would diminish if the man carried out his plan. The communal council protested vehemently to the municipality (o povo levantou-se, literally: the people rose) and the colonist's plan did not come off.
Irrigation gives rise to various arrangements which exemplify the principle that scarcity may lead to co-operation. Irrigation water being scarce in summer, the vizinhos of Marras and other villages situated by brooks have to perform the same work that is done by the communal councils of those parts of the Alps where summers are dry (Burns 1963:137-9). Regularly, the cabo makes his rounds in order to inspect the system of water gutters. For putting into use the irri• gation system'in spring and closing it down in autumn, all vizinhos come together. In spring the brook water is led into the first of a series of irrigation gutters by means of the closing of a barrage. All vizinhos collaborate in this task. Before this, every proprietor has had to deepen those parts of gutters which run along land in his possession. For the co-ordination of these activities communal meetings on the square must be held. In short, the vizinhos constitute their own irrigation board.
The extent to which the division of irrigation water is a communal affair depends upon the extent of water scarcity. In Marras water is almost never extremely scarce. A proprietor who wants to irrigate one of his chaos (fragments of irrigated arable land on which private rights exist) can do this without any interference by the council..He Is -65-
authorized to put into use the gutter running along the chaos and to make an opening in the earthen wall of this gutter on the place where, his chao lies. Yet there is some co-ordination: the user warns other ' proprietors that they can seize the opportunity to irrigate their chaos as well with water from this opening or this gutter. However, in neighbouring communities where water is scarcer, co-ordination is more comprehensive. There the dunha arrangement is applied each summer. This arrangement, which has already been mentioned in connection with the exploitation of water mills, in this case implies that each time a grouping of, say, four persons is assigned the right to irrigate their chaos during twenty-four hours. These persons themselves arrange how they will use their joint turn. In Marras, this system has only been followed in some exceptionally dry years. (However, as will presently been seen,; the irrigation of meadows was arranged in a rigid way every year.)
A clear parallel exists with the case of the open fields: exactly because scarcity can give rise to conflicts, the inhabitants change over to a more rigid collective arrangement (see p. 18). The fact that these arrangements do work reasonably is explained by the absence of large power differentials as a result of the low degree of commer• cialization.
V.4.2 Cattle-breeding
A number of activities in cattle-breeding, which was of old very important in the terra fria, were communal activities. Which forms of communal co-operation in cattle-breeding have disappeared, which forms have persisted and what are the explanatory conditions? - The herding of horned cattle and pigs. The institution of the communal meadow for horned cattle has been common in many parts of Europe. In summertime, or in those weeks in which crop farming activities demanded maximal labour input, the cows of the various owners were brought, to• gether into one large herd in order to graze on the common meadow under supervision of one or more cow-herds. In this way, work was saved and the cows were>assured of good foodo Likewise, the custom to herd the pigs of all owners in one herd was widespread - at least on the Pen• insula and, according to Dias (1953:64) especially in Tras-os-Montes. -66-
In Marras both traditions existed until about 1925. In spring the owners used to be warned by church-bell-ringing in the morning ; that it was time to bring together their pigs into a herd (porcada or vezeira). The pigs were herded in communal co-operation by two owners each time. In order to keep the animals together each of them went and stood at one of the two open sides of the communal pig meadow (the strip of grassland just down-stream the village). The more pigs an owner possessed, the more days his turn lasted. In hay-time the cows were joint into one village herd, the boiada. They grazed on a long irrigated grass strip or lameiro called "Retorta" which is situated in the southernmost part of the village territory. They also were herded by two owners. Each owner's turn to be cow-herd lasted as many days as the number of his cows grazing on the Retorta amounted to. The council did not think it necessary to determine a limit to the number of animals each owner was allowed to put into the boiada (the same, for that matter, applied to the porcada)„ What was thought important, however, was that grazing took place orderly, in order that this communal resource was exploited as efficiently as was possible. For this purpose the herdsmen let move up the animals a small distance each day.
A good management of this irrigated grassland was crucial in this time of the year when the grass was high. This task was performed in communal co-operation under strict supervision of the village policeman. Every day one of the cow owners had to inspect the irrigation system of the Retorta and to check whether grass had been stolen by inhabitants of a poor neighbouring community where grass was very scarce. In order to demonstrate that he had really gone to the farthest point of the grass strip, the villager whose turn it was had to bring the caiato - which was a wooden hook, hung up on an oak branch at that farthest point by the villager whose turn it was the day before - to the house of the village policeman. (Cf. Dias 1953•' 172-3 on the cambito in Rio de Onor.)In Marras there was a hook numbered with an I and a hook numbered with a II: these hooks must be hung up alternately. This was an effective way of control except when somebody managed to mislead the village policeman by showing a well-made copy of a caiato.
The disappearance of these customs began about 1925, when the Retorta and the grass strip on which the pigs grazed were divided among the vizinhos. Henceforth, the boiada went to a much smaller -67-
raeadow situated farther away among waste lands. The herding of pigs became an affair of the owners individually. What interest had the vizinhos in the abolition of the common rights on the Retorta and the grassland strip near the village? I think it is important to realize that the keeping of horned cattle had become more important in that time (-cf. p. 45), An improvement of market conditions for slaughter cattle will have made it more attractive for the owners of horned cattle - or perhaps for those who possessed the largest number of horned cattle! - to obtain more grassland at their free disposal and to abolish the old system of taking turns in the management of the Retorta and the herding of pigs. According to my informants the old system had demanded much labour: it is conceivable that inhabitants came to regard it as less rewarding when market conditions for'cows improved,
. Incidentally, the expansion of cow-breeding was not advantageous for the animals themselves. Hay became scarcer, so that farmers came to rely more on the production of complementary food like po• tatoes, beets, maize, turnips and rye, and a regimen emerged by which the cows and pigs stayed in their sheds for a longer part of the time. In fact, the complementary forage is a poor substitute 46 for fresh grass and the sheds are small and dark. In the meantime, the cows have ceased to graze in summer on the small meadow situated farther away among waste lands. The communal right on this land patch disappeared with the expropriation of waste lands to be dealt with under V,4,3= What has persisted is a small winter boiada, In the cold season, when fodder becomes scarce, a small herd consisting of the animals of a number of owners who take turns in herding uses to graze on the waste lands and stubble fields. This is one more example of the connection which can exist 47 between scarcity and co-operation,, -Open fields and the herding of sheep. As has been described in chapter 2, the inhabitants of Marras dispose of an open field. This open field lies On the hills. In addition there is a tiny open field situated in the brook valley, the courses of which.are alternately cultivated with summer-corn and crops like beans, maize and potatoes. The persistence of these communal institutions is bound up with the fact that villagers are still interested in breeding sheep which can graze the whole year round on the fallow land on the hills and, -68-
during a short time after the summer corn harvest, on the stubble in the brook valley. Natural conditions explain why the fallow period is longer on the hills than it is in the valley. In Marras and in the eastern part of Tras-os-Montes as a whole, a combination of water scarcity and low natural fertility of the soil have impeded 48 suppression of the fallow period on plateaus and hills. As sheep need other food than cattle and pigs, they are kept in their sheds at night only. During the day they are herded in a communal flock (gado) on the fallow and waste lands. During the first half of this century there were some separate flocks which were not herded in communal co-operation. However, the village flock, numbering some 120 animals nowadays, was four or five times as large. Usually this flock was taken care of by an employed shepherd who obtained food and drink, sleeping-accomodation and a solid woolien suit as a part of his contract. Board and lodging were given by the owners according to a rotation system. This system implied that an owner's turn lasted a number of days amounting to half of the number of his sheep in the gado. In times when no commu• nal shepherd could be found this flock was herded by the owners in rotation. The flock being large, it was necessary to keep the admin• istration of the number of sheep each household had in it. For that end the peasants who could neither read nor write, used long tallies 49 or talas in which Roman figures were carved. Co-operation in the herding of sheep occurred in smaller groupings also. Thus, some fifty years ago the Bairro de Baixo and the Bairro do Outro Lado (the Lower Quarter and the Quarter of the Other Side, each con• sisting of no more than four households!) formed two apart units with their own flocks, herded by the owners. In the course of this century sheep farming decreased in importance. The village flock diminished, other flocks disappeared and ever fewer people wanted to fulfill the occupation of shepherd, which was less remunerative than migration work or other new jobs. In exactly the same manner in which increasing labour scarcity explains the recent increase in the importance of torna-jeira or work exchange in the terra fria as a whole (Ribeiro 1972:65 ) and of co-operation in a Castilian mountain village (Brandes 1975; see note 15)*the scarcity of herdsmen explains why the village flocks of Marras and 'other communities have been.herded by the owners themselves > -69-
since some five years ago.
The length of the turns is proportional to the number of sheep; owned by the household whose turn it is - for example, one day for four sheep or, in busy periods, when it suits the owners to insti• tute shorter turns, one day for six sheep. Now and again these turns give rise to problems. The persons forming this network of communal co-operative relations are constrained to pay attention to each other .lest something would go wrong. An impression of this is given by the following incident (which by the way also illustrates the position of women in this village. As has been said on p.52, in some other villages women are excluded from any participation in communal meetings): In the morning time, when the sheep must be gathered in order to be led to the hill pastures, a question is raised. A complaint is reported to the cabo, who calls together the sheep owners. Two men are accused of having deranged the system by fulfilling their turn of duty for too short a time. One of these men is the largest sheep and land owner of the village. It is not the first time that he proves to dislike the job of herding the communal herd; it is clear that he prefers to work on his land in order to reap big yields. An energetic woman, sixty years of age, who lives next door to one of the wrong-doers (her husband is absent from the meeting) cries: "The exact number of sheep must be counted, for I don't want my neighbour to do too little for my sheep while I drudge for his sheep!" The two culprits stand silently near the others and soon slink off: they can reckon on a fine.
- The herding of goats. Especially in Marras and other villages having the disposal of extensive waste lands, the keeping of goats was an important economic activity. Many poor inhabitants had a herd of goats as their only productive resource. The goats of the inhabitants of Marras were partly kept in a communal herd tended by a paid goatherd. However, goat herding was put to an end by an intervention of the corporate state (see below).
V.4.3 The management and exploitation of the waste lands
The collective natural resources giving rise to communal co• operation and discussions in Marras did not only consist of irri-
> -70-
gation water, grass strips and fallow land: the vast stretches of waste land surrounding the village on all sides, too, belonged to , the communal good. The regional name for waste land or bush is monte. In the whole of Tras-os-Montes, the Importance of monte, overgrown with low plants like heather, cistus and broom has been very great, > A century ago waste lands still covered three fourths of the total 50 area of the province. , In the terra fria the stretches of monte have generally remained vast. However, since the management of this land;has been taken over by the state (the national forest administration) the traditional, communally-arranged way, of exploitation of the monte has practically.come to an end. This change will be dealt with.after the description of traditional exploitation and management. In contrast with what their name suggests the waste lands were used for many purposes. Not Only the goats grazed on this land: the rest of the cattle, was dependent on the, waste lands for supplementary food. Moreover, the monte was used for a form of sporadic crop- farming, i,e,, shifting cultivation, whereby the land was abandoned after one harvest. Firewood was gathered and bees were kept on the • monte. Regularly, hunting was practiced. For; crop farming the waste lands has a crucial function: the possibility to use farming land as such existed thanks, to the utilization of plants from the waste lands as natural fertilizers (Taborda 1932:108,111), Plants like ferns and broom were buried under the ground or were laid down in the sheds in order to be mixed with animal dung. Because parts of the monte were regularly burnt down for various ends, ashes were available as additional natural fertilizers.. In Marras a part of these ashes came down, with the brook water, and so it was possible to enrich grass- strips by irrigating them with this muddy water, (Compare Kleinpenning 1968:176-7 on traditional Wiesenbewa'sserung in; other parts of Europe.) The management of the monte:was a communal matter in various respects. The utilization of this land, required some co-ordination. I suspect that no limit existed to the number of animals an owner was allowed to pasture on the monte: the extensiveness of the terrain will have made such a restriction superfluous. What was necessary was that the private lands on the border of the monte were hot damaged by animals and that the monte itself was maintained well. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, one had to see to it that the goats did not tread upon the fallow land bordering the monte, (As far as I have -71-
understood, sheep grazed mainly on the fallow and goats were only allowed to graze on the monte.) Regularly, heather plants which had become too high, had to be burnt down in order that the animals could eat young shoots again. Supervision on these matters was a council affair. Likewise, now and again it was necessary to organize a hunting- party in order to kill or to expel the wolves living on the waste lands who used (and use) to victimize small cattle. All men of the village joined in the wolf-hunting. Also the hunting of wild boars, which did damage to the crops and besides were a savoury booty, was practiced by all male vizinhos. In the evening a banquet was held. Gathering fire-wood in the thicket serving that purpose is not allowed except on a predetermined day. The persistence of this arrangement is explained by the fact that fire-wood still is essential in this poor economy. On a date determined by them the vizinhos go jointly to the communal thicket with their carts drawn by cows, and everyone gathers an approximately equal amount. The management of the communal monte property by the council Of Marras has become less rigid since the turn of the century. The prelude to this change was a conflict on the exploitation of the monte which had arisen about 1880, when the change in the inheritance law had led to the formation of a number of new families (see p.52-3). The new families, founded by landless herdsmen from outside the community who married into the community, had an interest in reclaim• ing patches of waste land. The old families, who needed no more than their own inheritance in order to be able to grow rye, were opposed to any infringement on the communal right on waste lands. As had been,, the case in Europe as a whole (see p. 20), the owners of peasant farms had certain interests in extensive exploitation of the waste lands; just like the owners of peasant farms in France towards 1800 (cf. Bloch 1966: 225; Moore 1966: 80), the small farmers of Marras were very reluctant to permit any reclamation of communal land by 51 the landless. This was a very serious conflict - indeed, it is told that one of the newcomers, a goatherd, would have been killed by men from among the old families, had he not been warned just in time by a friend. Finally, in the years between 1910 and 1920, the new families had the better end of the staff. In Marras - as well as in Rio de Onor -72-
where the formation of new families had also given rise to problems, and probably in other communities as well - the decision was taken to change over to a less rigid management of the monte. (Cf. p. 52 and Dias 1953:188, 569 on Rio de Onor.) Henceforth small reclamations of monte were conceded to people who had too small a quantity of arable land in their own possession. Possibly this change.occurred under the influence of the campaign for land reclamation and the abolition of communal land rights which was conducted with assuldity especially after the coming of the Republic in 1910 (Oliveira Marques 1972:120-1, n.d.:74-5).. In Marras both the conflict and the distinction between old and new families disappeared in this time. In,addition to the supervision and the handling of conflicts on the exploitation of the monte,. the protection of this good against outsiders, too, was part of the management. Many conflicts on the confines (termos) between the communities used to take place.. When persons from neighbouring communities were caught stealing products like charcoal from a rocada (see below), the church-bell was rung and as many inhabitants as possible pursued the thief. If he was caught he was obliged to pay one cantaro or,12J litres of wine or, if his booty was larger, a hundred escudos. If he escaped, his 52 success contributed to the honour of his community. So much for the communal.management of the monte. Finally, it is important to mention the existence of a curious example of communal 53 exploitation.: the roqada or shifting cultivation. In this area, shifting cultivation was a collective affair. The yield mostly con• sisted of rye. The largest part of it fell to the council, which utilized it as a payment for public expenditures; the rest wad div• ided equally among all vizinhos.,The rocadas were laid out frequently, though not.every year. In August the council members used to come together in order to elect two mordomos who were charged with the work (burning- down monte, tilling the ground with hoes, sowing, harvesting, threshing) as well as,with the management and the distribution of the product. The farming work was done by the mordomos themselves and the other council.members. For the next.rocada two other mordomos were elected. . This communally-arranged - and, as far as the rocadas are con• cerned, communal - way of exploitation of the monte has practically -73-
come to an end in the Salazar period, when the State, with the inten• tion to pursue .a development policy in the interior/ Instituted an almost total prohibition on the keeping of goats and seized vast parts of waste land's in order to plant them with -pines and to grant some parts of them to settlers. Since, the monte in Marras is Only exploited to a very small extent as grazing-land and for the gathering of fire-wood. No compensation was paid to the population for the loss of its waste lands. Did the state attain its aim: the development of the interior? Without reserve I endorse the opinion of the Portuguese geographers Ribeiro and Soeiro de Brito that the results of this policy vis-a-vis the waste lands have been disastrous (Ribeiro 1961:42; Soeiro de Brito 1960:45-6). The allotment of land to settlers did not in any way imply a change for the better for the villagers themselves; the seizure of the vast part of the monte and the almost total prohibition of goat herding implied the further impoverishment of poor peasants who now became even more dependent on employment in urban centres.
As has been described, the population used the monte for many ends: without exaggeration one can state that waste lands had and still have an indispensable complementary function in the rural economy of such poor parts of southern Europe as the terra fria (Cf. Ribeiro 1968a: 125 on southern Europe in general.). True, it must be granted that the number of goats had to be kept within bounds, for goats may indeed do harm to the natural environment. In fact, however, this restriction has been too radical. One should not forget that goat herding constituted the main income source of the poorest. It is clear that large-scale production has been given priority over the main• tenance of a minimum of local economic possibilities for those who had the most marginal position. The utility of large-scale pine production in the terra fria must be questioned the more so as these trees grow poorly in this natural environment. Not for nothing the • 54 "reafforestation" led to (unorganized) resistance and gave much embitterment. In the words of an inhabitant: "Sometimes townspeople still come to Tras-os-Montes in order to buy goat meat. Then we think to ourselves: there are no goats, you'll have to eat pines". In my view it is necessary that the inhabitants' right of say on the former communal waste lands be increased again. Such a change would fit a policy aiming at a better utilization of regional re- -74-
sources and a decrease of social inequalities in the country as a whole. Perhaps the risk of "over-grazing" by goats makes it necessary for the government to keep an eye on the use of this land: it is imaginable that state officials and communal councils will co- 55 operate in the management.
V.5 Conclusion
From the above discussion of specific forms of communal enter• prise in Marras it is apparent that a number of those forms dis• appeared or became less important, and that this is explained by a number of processes: the increased extent of state intervention (especially in the case of the waste lands,), processes in crop farming and cattle-breeding (the decreased emphasis on herding activities in the breeding of cows and pigs, less favourable market conditions for sheep farming) and the migration to urban centres, implying a further decline in the interest for the job of shepherd and, consequently, in the possibilities for sheep farming. As could be expected, council meetings have become less frequent. In the thirties the council used to come together two to three times a week and it seems to have been customary that the men spent almost half of their working time on communal affairs. Nowadays the council of Marras meets about once a fortnight, although sometimes the frequency is higher. Besides it must be noted that community life in its totality has acquired a more marginal character as a result of migration.
In spite of all these trends, however, it is evident that the 56 ' village councils of this region did not become unimportant units. It has remained quite possible to study the practice of communal co• operation. What general conclusions on the nature of communal co• operation can be drawn from the fieldwork data? . First, it is almost unnecessary to say that practice does not conform to the Gemeinschaft ideal: communal problems may give rise to conflicts as well as to co-operation. For instance, even though scarcity problems may and do give rise to communal arrangements, it seems to be no less true that the temptation to evade the rules becomes greater as scarcity increases. (See p. 59 on the water mill.) A typical example has also been given of the reluctance of a larger -75-
peasant to fulfill a communal obligation, namely, the herding of the communal sheep flock for the required number of days. In addition, ; less customary problems may give rise to serious conflicts within communities, as is exemplified by the struggle between old and new families following upon the change in national inheritance law. A second conclusion, however, is that the occurrence of conflicts does by no means necessarily imply the absence of what may be called "community sense". The persistence of a number of communal co• operative traditions involves that Marras1 inhabitants are concerned with their village affairs in a very direct way. Frequently one can see neighbours discussing communal matters in an informal way. The direct concern with communal affairs also appears from the fact that in 1975, when the supply of electricity to Marras had finally begun, a great feast was organized by the council. Likewise, the villagers are proud of the- recently hardened village street and square. It was not without pride that two informants remarked (independently from each other) that their village institutions bear a resemblance to socialism. In a sense I agree with these remarks. True, it would be naive to assume that the existence of forms of communal co-operation makes the inhabitants amenable to socialist ideologies - but what one may assume is that a socialist policy directed at the improvement of the conditions of life in these communities can profitably build upon the existence of these co-operation forms. (See below, p.109-10.)
PART THREE: THE MEDITERRANEAN PLAIN AND THE COLD LAND
-79-
From the past chapters it is obvious that the importance of specific forms of communal co-operation depends on many"different conditions. One of those conditions is the extent of commercial• ization in agriculture. This theme in commercialization (in connection with the subject of communal co-operation) is the main subject of this part. The aim of this part is: -
a) to obtain a more elaborate image of the connection between commercialization processes and structural characteristics of communities. For this purpose, attention will be paid to the signifi• cance specific aspects of commercialization processes have for the size of power differentials within communities and the extent of communal co-operation;
b) to shed light upon the possibilities o#restrictions that physical conditions may form for the emergence of commercial agriculture in specific regions - in order that more clearness be attained on indirect connections between the character of the natural environment and structural aspects of communities. These two subjects will be dealt with in the next two chapters, on the basis of rural historical data on a southern-Portuguese area and a comparison between this area and the terra fria. We move to the southern plain of Portugal, the northernmost part of which is situated at 200 km. as the crow flies southwards from Marras. ) -81-
VI THE HISTORY OF COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION ON THE SOUTHERN- PORTUGUESE PLAIN
The regions of Alentejo and Lower. Beira; form the major part of what the geographer Orlando Ribeiro-has called "Mediterranean Portugal" (Ribeiro 1963). Together, they constitute a preponderantly flat area with a semi-arid climate. This was the part of rural Portugal in which social contrasts were most poignant up to the revolution of 197^-75, when the latifundist families dominating this area lost their supremacy. In this chapter some rural historical data on this plain will be treated. These data are of interest both in connection with the dis• cussion conducted by social scientists on the absence or existence of 5 7 co-operation in the Mediterranean world, and in connection with a more general question: what consequences, do different forms of com• mercialization have for structural characteristics of communities?.. On the southern plain of Portugal, as in southern parts of Spain and Italy, large estates, divided into stretches which were used alternately as grain land and fallow pasture land, were predominant of old. Frequently, cork oaks and holm oaks grew on these grain and fallow lands. These estates are called herdades in Portuguese. It is.not . clear whether the herdades may be considered to be a continuation of Roman latifundia; also, disagreement exists as to the extent to which the Moorish-Christian war has meant a radical break with the.past. But for the aim of this paper it is sufficient to ascertain that this southern plain only resembles the terra fria insofar as extensive grain farming and extensive cattle-breeding form the traditional means of living. As opposed to the terra fria communities, the communities of Lower Beira artd Alentejo were of old dominated by rich families who. disposed of large sheep flocks, herdades and/or many .scattered patches of grain land as well as intensively exploited land near the village. Besides, social inequality has increased in the nineteenth and twentieth century; so it is not surprising that important forms of co-operation were absent until the dismantling of large estates began. From general literature it is apparent, however, that here and in the southern part of the Peninsula in general vast.collective lands still existed.in the past century. For example, there are data on a free grazing arrangement which was less rigid than the open field -82-
system. Now, the question arises how the occurrence of collective lands in this area of old and poignant social contrasts is to be interpreted. Did the collective lands really have a function for the entire population, or were they used only - mainly - by a minority of large owners? In other words: could their management really be considered to be a form of communal co-operation? If it proves possible to answer the latter question in the affirmative, it will be necessary to go into the particular circumstances under which communal co• operative institutions existed in this area.
Relying on Freeman's publications (1968a:45, b:482) and on remarks made by Silbert (1966) I suspect that this question has not system• atically been treated in the case of southern Spain; however, as far as Lower Beira and Alentejo are concerned, Albert Silbert's Le Portugal Mediterranean a la fin de l'Ancien Regime (Sijlbert 1966) has brought more clearness on this subject. This makes it. possible to make three statements on the Southern-Portuguese case: 1:) in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (and earlier) large producers often abused collective land rights in a blatant way; 2) nevertheless:, in many cases certain collective rights and arrangements existed which can be designed as forms of communal co-operation; 3) the existence of these instances of communal co-operation was connected with the specific character• istics of the bond between large producers and peasants in this area. 1) First, a short description will be given of the role of large producers in Alentejo: and Lower Beira under the ancien regime - the period before the liberal revolution of 1834 - and of the way in which they abused collective rights.
Unlike in, e.g., England, no active part:was played by the nobles in the commercialization in southern Portugal; In spite of regional variation in the role of nobles, of Portugal on the whole it can be said that the central authority had been able,to build up a compara• tively powerful position in an early stage. (Possibly this had some• thing to do with the fact that the Moslem territory of al-Garb al- Andalus, which coincided with a considerable part of the later 59 Portugal, had been dominated by strong central rulers. ) Under the ancien regime large parts of land were in the hands of the king (compare p. 48 on Marras). Likewise, the military-religious orders which were directly dependent on the central authority owned much land. Especially in Lower Beira and Alentejo these orders had obtained -83-
enormous domains after the reconquest; so, it was exactly in this part of the country that noble domains were less important. The domain holders were central rather than local authorities. Local life in Lower Beira and Alentejo was dominated by the munici• pality, which was the mouthpiece of large tenants and owners, financiers and traders - in short, of the "powerful men" or poderosos. The large farmers or lavradores of middle and southern Alentejo ex• ploited herdades by growing cereals and by pasturing sheep on the fallow part which frequently occupied a very, extensive surface. As a rule, the lavradores rented some two to three estates from rentiers with whom they had signed long-term and indeed often lifelong contracts. In their turn the rentiers were copyholders (foreiros) of the actual owners: the king, the orders and - sometimes - nobles.^0 In the north• east of Alentejo and in Lower Beira herdades were more seldom found. There the large properties usually consisted of scattered small or medium-sized patches.
Under the ancien regime sheep farming had acquired a more commercial character than crop farming had. In that period the pro• duction and trade of wool played an important part in the world economy (Wallerstein 197^0. Initially, the wool coming from Lower Beira and Alentejo was mainly destined for the national (and, I guess, the colonial) market, but after the signing of the.commercial treaty with the English in 1703 much wool from Alentejo was traded to England. Although the trade of wheat was .also significant, it was only in the most fertile parts - i.e., in some municipalities of middle Alentejo - that commercial wheat production had the first place. In the other parts of the southern plain an expansion of commercial sheep farming took place. Partly,' this occurred at the expense of grain farming: many lavradores changed over to a more extensive way of exploitation of large estates. ^ Nevertheless, crop farming remained important on other parts of the large properties, so that day labourers and sharecroppers remained numerous.
To a large extent, the expansion of commercial sheep farming took place at the cost of the communal rights on land. Silbert gives numerous examples of the ways in which this occurred. Frequently, the municipal authorities let out a part of the collective fallow or waste land pastures to those sheep.holders who bid the highest sums of money, in order to use the proceeds for what in their view were -84-
public aims. Often this occurred at the expense of the poor inhabitants, who surely had no "public interest" in, e.g. the decision of the municipality to let out common village land in order to be able to build military barracks in the principal town! (Cf. Silbert 1966:989-90 on a village in middle Alentejo) Also, it occurred that large tenants or owners allowed their sheep to graze on common land without signing any contract, and that the largest live• stock owners of a place possessed exclusive1 rights on certain "common pastures. Indeed, even before the ending of the ancien regime some collective rights and arrangements, such as the free grazing arrange- 6 2 ment In middle and southern Alentejo, were abolished altogether. These data on the abuse of collective lands are in accordance with the general literature on the mediterranean area. The subject of favouritism, e.g. in the management of public goods, is a general mediterranean theme. I suppose that. Jane Schneider aims at this theme when she states that "in no sense have communal pastures provided a foundation for collective identity among peasants or shepherds". (Cf. Schneider 1971 on scarce resources, conflict and the code of honour and shame in mediterranean societies. Quotation from p.13.) But then one should beware of an exclusive emphasis on the theme of favouritism.- The mentioned forms of abuse constitute Ope side of the question. 2) The other side of the question is that in southern Portuguese agriculture under the ancien regime a number of collective insti• tutions existed which primarily were to the:interest of the peasants themselves. The data on these institutions mainly come from the geographer Orlando Ribeiro, who did research in Lower Beira (Ribeiro 1949), and from the above mentioned rural historian Albert Silbert ( 1966; cf. also Ribeiro^ summary and discussion of Silbert's work: Ribeiro 1970,1971). Besides, in his monograph on a parish in middle Alentejo the anthropologist Jose Cutileiro points out the crucial function the former collective lands had for the poorest inhabitants (Cutileiro 1971). From Ribeiro's and Silbert's data appears first of all that the right on free grazing on fallow land, which was disappearing fast as far as middle and southern Alentejo were concerned, persisted for a longer time in the case of northeastern Alentejo and Lower Beira. The explanation of this difference lies in the fact that the share- -85-
croppers or seareiros were much more numerous in the latter two regions than they were in middle and southern Alentejo. While day labourers, who will have had a less favourable position when defending collective land rights, were clearly predominant in Alentejo as a whole, in the northeast of Alentejo and in Lower Beira the seareiros constituted the "overwhelming majority", which meant that their class position was comparatively powerful. In the less fertile parts of the adjacent Spanish region of Estremadura, too, the seareiros - called yunteros in Spanish ^ formed a relatively large and powerful interest group (Malefakis 1970). What were the sharecroppers1 status and labour conditions and what explains their ability to effect the persistence of free grazing?
The sharecroppers grew rye on small fields or courelas which were in the hands of large owners. Some large owners also had large estates or herdades which mainly served as pasture lands; for the greater part, however, private land property consisted of scattered courelas situated nearer to the communities. A courela used to be leased to a sharecropper for two years, i.e.::,during one cycle of cultivation, including preparatory ploughing activities. A sharecropper worked with his nuclear family and with his own draught animals and plough. On the Portuguese side of the border, at least, the share• croppers had a right on three fourthSof the yield. So their contract clearly had a less "commercial" character than that of the day labourers In my view the willingness of the landowners to conclude such share- cropping contracts was directly connected with the fact that land is relatively infertile in these regions (cf. Silbert 1966:490; Malefakis 1970:127). As long as the possibility of raising the soil fertility in an artificial way remained small, the low natural fertility pre• cluded the possibility of large-scale wheat farming. Instead, the emphasis was on rye farming, which was commercialized to a smaller extent. This meant that the owners would not derive advantage from changing over to large-scale grain production by adding a large number of draught animals and ploughs to their own property and by using a 64 large number of day labourers. The huge part of the rich owners in Lower Beira and northeastern Alentejo could only attain large- scale production in so far as sheep-farming was concerned. The landowners' interest in sharecropping contracts explains why the peasants had a relatively strong position in defending the -86-
right of free grazing against the encroachments of landowners; for the peasants could only retain their sharecropper status as long as the right of free grazing made it possible for them to pasture their draught-oxen on fallow land. The sharecroppers did not possess private pastures; nor could they keep their animals alive by pasturing them on the waste lands only. The right of free grazing held on the courelas, which jointly formed an open field. Usually, this.open field consisted of one course sown with rye and two courses lying fallow, the second of which could partly be sown with a secondary crop like .maize. Although the free grazing arrangement did not apply to.the herdades, the open field consisting of courelas took up a vast area. Qften the large owners tried to obtain a number of contiguous courelas in order to withdraw these land patches from free grazing by surrounding them with one wall. However, the sharecroppers succeeded fairly well in frustrating 65 such attempts to encroach upon the.open field right. The open field system was not the only communal arrangement the persisting collective land rights had given rise to. Communal co-operation in the herding of animals on fallow and/or waste lands occurred in many places. Thus, the povo or people - i.e. all family heads - of the parish studied by Jose Cutileiro owned a stretch of waste land on which each inhabitant was allowed to graze, a certain number of cattle and mares on a certain payment in kind. Likewise, there were communal sheep herds. In some places the pigs of the poorest inhabitants formed a separate communal herd or adua; and up to this century co-operation in goat herding was common among the poor peasants living in the Serra of Algarve to the south of Alentejo. i .On parts of the common waste lands small-scale subsistence farming was practised by all inhabitants in principle. Frequently, the system of shifting cultivation described in note 53 was followed. Here, shifting cultivation was not a communal activity like it was in Marras: in southern Portugal shifting cultivation was .always practised by individuals or nuclear families working singly, just like it is still being done in Brazil nowadays. In southern Portugal the term used for the land clearance was rocas (the term used in Brazil) instead of rocadas (the term used in Marras). According to Silbert, the rocas were an "individualist" form of production. Never- theless, he states that common rules were necessary in order to avoid the risk of fire when stretches of waste land were burnt down for making rocas. Moreover, Ribeiro suggests that customary arrangements concerning the allotment of land patches for rocas will have existed of old. Likewise, it was necessary to arrange the cycle of land rotation, i.e. the number of years after which a plot was cleared anew. Ribeiro noted the existence, in some parts of southern Portugal, of old rotation cycles based on numbers having a magic significance among the population (7, 9, and 21 years). In short, the individual roqas in southern Portugal clearly required: a certain co-ordination within a communal context.
In some cases, a system of strict peripdical reallotments was followed in small-scale farming on the commons. Then the.land was divided into equal shares every year. Evidently, in these cases a greater pressure on the common land existed:, making necessary a stricter collective regulation of its use. In some places this greater scarcity even implied that only the owners of ploughs and draught animals were considered for the allotment, or that those • inhabitants who had drawn a lot giving them the right to receive a share were allowed -to keep that mHl: th®ir death.66 It is important1 to know more abqut the marfagement of the collective lands. Who administered thess-lana;®?- f^uentl^ the management was in the hands pf the mujiic^pa^tyt T^en the management could, be con• sidered to be a form of oammuri^l cp-operation between, the municipality and the population, with the important proviso that no conflict existed on the.apj^e of the. co^ective right by large •owners (indeed, silbert gives countless examples qf such conflicts;); but it also occurred that the 'management was in the hands of the parish council or the joint inhabitants. Everywhere, both in and, outside the principal towns of the municipalities, the inhabitants were united, by law in the povo (people f\7 ' or community) which tended po coincide with the parish or freguesia" as far as this part of the country was concerned. Probably those povos made up of a few landowners an4 a m-ass of 3ay labourers, like many parishes in middle Alentejo - as well as many pueblos in southern Spain - had not much significance as organized groups. Therefore, it is not surprising that neither in Cutileiro's book on a parish in middle Alentejo, nor in the monograph of an Andalu-sian community -88-
written by Pitt-Rivers (1954) mention is made of collective meetings in the past. Yet such data are not completely absent. In a parish belonging to Terena, middle Alentejo, lavradores and seareiros argued in 1823 that they themselves, and not the municipal officials, had the right to organize the periodical allotment of a certain parochial common: according to an old text they were allowed to hold yearly meetings in front of the church in order to select persons who were charged with the division of shares (Silbert 1966:976). Two observations should be made on this datum. First, the meetings near the church, which were mentioned in the old text, as well as the above mentioned cycles of magic numbers, constituted another instance of the intermingling of "social spheres" characteristic of old peasant communities, (Cf. p. 55; compare p. 36 on the village of Folgosinho.) Second, in this case not all inhabitants but only the lavradores and seareiros, who possessed draught animals and ploughs, had the right on a share.
.However, there were some communities where all households were involved in the management and division of:the common land. Situated like "rural slums" in infertile parts of Alentejo which were mainly used for extensive commercial cattle farming, some semi-autonomous communities existed where small-scale farming on common land formed the basis of food production. The land was used by all households, either for shifting cultivation or for periodic reallotments, One may assume that the inhabitants formed their own communal council in order to manage the common land and to treat other affairs. The author Mario Ventura (1973:52-5) gives a very exceptional example of the persistence of such a community. The inhabitants of the small village of Aivados, Alentejo, still hold yearly elections for a board.of three inhabitants who take care of the egalitarian division of the common land, which is the only land the inhabitants have. For the rest the villagers have always been partly dependent on the employment on large estates, (Cf. Wolf 1957 on comparable semi- autonomous communities elsewhere.) As far as Lower Beira was concerned, councils made up of all households were still general in the last part of the eighteenth century. One called them "separate councils" in order to discern them 69 from the municipal councils. In more than one respect these village councils were different from the councils of villages like Marras. -89-
First, there was an interesting difference in size. One of the villages possessing a "separate council" (Alcains) consisted of some 400 to 500 families! Secondly, to a greater extent than the village councils of the terra fria the village councils of Lower Beira were dependent on the municipalities; for the municipal authorities in Lower Beira had usurpated the "right" to let out a part of the common village land to large sheep holders (see p. 83-4). Thirdly, it must certainly be assumed that the power differentials within the village councils of Lower Beira were wide - at least at the end of the ancien.regime. At the same time, however, it must be pointed out that the seareiros, who were very numerous'here, formed a rather homogeneous class and that the richest owners did not live in the villages themselves. They lived in the towns, where they formed their own communities.
Clearly, the existence of village councils in Lower Beira under the ancien regime must be connected with the fact that neither the social contrasts, within the villages nor the extent of centralization were as large as they became in the nineteenth and twentieth century. However, one may ask oneself whether these conditions implied that much communal work was performed in.these.villages. The fact is that those collective pastures which were not at the disposal of the municipality and which were not absolutely indispensable as pasture lands for the village itself could be let out by the villagers to sheep owners. This was a way for the village council to come by money for paying public work. (Compare p. 61 on the sale of a strip of communal grassland in Marras for the payment of a stone mason. However, this was an instance of definite sale by which the common right dis• appeared.) This way to obtain money for the community existed - and probably still exists - in the whole of Lower Beira and Alentejo.
In short, some of the collective rights and arrangements existing in southern Portugal under the ancien regime primarily served the interests of the peasant population itself. This means that real instances of communal co-operation were not absent in this part of mediterranean Europe. These data can be added to material on the particularly numerous traditions of communal co-operation which existed on Corsica and Sardinia (cf. Chiva 1963 on Corsica). My impression is that the im• portance of communal co-operation in the agro-pastoral economy of mediterranean regions has been greater than one would believe on the grounds of the above-mentioned article of Jane Schneider (1971, esp. p.12). -90-
3) Now it is useful to go into the explanation of the existence and persistence (and the eventual disappearance) of the above-mentioned communal rights and arrangements in southern Portugal; for it is not at once clear how one may account for the existence of forms of communal co-operation in an area where commercialization had begun in a very early stage, implying the early emergence of sharp social contrasts. Logically, the existence of these forms of co-operation under the ancien regime can only be understood when one assumes that they date from a time when agriculture had a more small-scale character and peasant communities had more autonomy than they had at the end of the ancien regime. Open fields and periodical allotments of common land will have emerged at a point in that early stage when land scarcity increased, so that many parts of the land could no longer be cultivated with grain in a relatively uncontrolled way - e.g. by means of shifting cultivation (cf. iSilbert 1966:391, Ribeiro 1970:178). . : ; Relevant (pre)historical dates are unknown, however - and so it is not clear how great the autonomy of peasant communities and the importance of small-scale farming were at the time of the origin of the communal institutions in question. Silbert assumes that the open fields as well as, probably, the common land reallotments had their Origin in a time when agriculture in this area already had a definitely commercial character: the revival period after the Christian reconquest. In that period pressure on the land was on the increase, large-scale sheep farming expanded and powerful munici• palities dominated by rich sheep owners arose. Surely the institution of free grazing had a function for the population, but no less it was to the interest of large sheep holders - in particular, the migrant shepherds or transhumants from the Serra da Estrela in central 7 Portugal, who led their sheep to the mediterranean plain in wintertime. As. opposed to Silbert, Ribeiro suggests that the communal institutions in question will date from a pre-Roman'or, in any case, pre-Portuguese stage in which- village autonomy was much greater and commercial production was much less important than it was in the time after the formation of Portugal. From this divergence between Silbert and Ribeiro one may well conclude that the present state of knowledge does not permit any definite conclusion! In;my view Silbert's hypothesis -91-
is not very plausible: for me it is difficult to imagine that insti• tutions like the open field emerged in a period of increasing commercialization. However, all hypotheses will remain speculative as long as no more-data become available on, e.g., the consequences of the Moorish-Christian war for this area; Therefore it is better to turn to the conditions explaining the persistence of the communal institutions until the end of the ancien regime. The fact that some communal institutions having a function for the peasants themselves persisted in spite of the rise of large commercial producers can be understood from the specific aspects the bond between peasants and commercial producers had in that time. A comparison with the case of England (mentioned in chapter 2 as one of the cases treated by Barrington Moore) will make this clear. One aspect of the bond between the peasants and the rich families was the aspect of local rule. The English noble families monopolized the maintenance of order in the countryside; the commercial producers in Lower Beira and Alentejo were not able to do so, in spite of their role as local poderosos or powerful men. In case of encroachments upon communal rights by large farmers the population of southern Portugal could invoke the laws of the central authority, which at least was powerful enough to be able to check a radical disappearance of communal rights and arrangements such as occurred in England. The central laws were directed against the expansion of extensive cattle farming and favoured the persistence of collective rights. The entire ancien regime legislation was directed at the maintenance of old domains - no matter whether impartible inheritances or lands controlled by municipalities or povos were concerned. Many collective lands be• longed to the domains of the military-religious orders; these orders did not find it their interest to let these lands fall into the hands of mighty private persons.
Two other aspects of the bond between:commercial producers and peasants were land tenure and labour relationships. Their character followed from the specific form of commercialization-such as had taken place in this area. As has been said, in southern Portugal under the ancien regime sheep farming had acquired a more commercial character than crop farming had. In two respects there will have been a difference with the English case. First, I think that commercial -92-
sheep farming in southern.Portugal has.never been,as important as it was in.England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This will also have contributed to the fact that possibilities for mighty .private persons to seize communal land-were-.more restricted in the case of southern Portugal* Secondly, southern Portuguese crop farming, •as. opposed, to English crop farming,retained:its traditional labour intensive character. This meant that the peasants'' position-on the • agricultural labour market was somewhat more favourable in the southern Portuguese.case. From this comparatively favourable position the peasants.of Lower Beira..and Alentejo.will have derived some power • when defending communal rights. . In short, as long as the preponderance of the poderosos.in their role of local rulers, commercial land users and employers did not increase in a radical way, the population retained a number of im• portant collective rights. However, the local rulers* position gradually became stronger as liberal entrepreneurs gained more.in• fluence over the central authority. Entrepreneurs adhering to the • liberal ideology entered the national arena, not so much in consequence of processes on the mediterranean plain as in connection with the 71 increasing commercialization of port wine. After the victory of the liberals over the traditional authorities - the domain holders
of the ancien regime - in. 1834 a new legislation: appeared-t the main purpose, of .which.was "to make land free and unencumbered in-order to assert full individual property-rights and to increase production" (cf. Cutileiro 1971:8). Moreover-, a centralization ensued, involving that much of'the land that had belonged to -the orders, the povos and the. old municipalities passed.-into the power of bureaucrats who • represented.the state and: the .new and much larger, municipalities. These new rulers were more disposed to throw common lands on the market. (Ribeiro 1970:58-9, 185.) The radical disappearance of the huge part of the collective rights, however., only..took place.:when a sharp increase in commercial production occurred in the.second half of the .nineteenth .century. Now.commercial production expanded in crop-farming instead of. in. cattle farming,-.An ever, increasing part of the collective lands, made way for.the property of rich urban families, who.made big profits by planting.their new- land with cork oaks and by clearing land for the production of wheat with the use of artificial fertilizers, (Silbert -93-
1966:124-5, 701.). Wheat production became protected by the state (Cutileiro 1971 )•- The consequences for the peasants were very serious. For most of them the loss of the common lands meant the disappearance of the possibility to practice small-scale cattle and crop farming - a possibility-that had always been crucial in view of the fact that it was only during harvest time that commercial farming offered sufficient employment (Cutileiro 1971:22). Moreover, by the virtual disappearance of common pastures many sharecroppers were compelled to sell their 72 draught animals and to .become day labourers. More than ever the peasants had become dependent on the'highly fluctuating employment on the commercial estates. A telling and valuable example of the,way common lands disappeared is given by Cutileiro (1971) in his first chapter. This author suggests that the abolition of common land rights in the freguesia studied by him meant the disappearance of a potential>.basis for co-operative activities. He also stresses the fact that the freguesia was deprived of an important source of income - only a small part of the land was left as a collective property which could be hired out - and so became more dependent upon the municipality. Therefore, one may state that this, process has contributed to the absence of any significant form of co-operation between inhabitants, including local authorities, in this part of the country under the regime existing up to 1974. (The small extent of co-operation within the communal context has also been described as typical of southern Italy. Edward Banfield (1958) spoke of the existence of "amoral familism", by which he meant a pattern or syndrome bound up with the fear of death existing among the inhabitants. In my opinion, the view of other authors that the small extent of co-operation in southern Italy is bound up with particular traits of the bond between landlord and peasants is more 73 to the point.) To which extent could villagers co-operate in order to defend collective rights as well as possible in the period of the definitive disappearance of most of these rights? In the case described by Cutileiro, the freguesia inhabitants and their administrators were not able to offer much resistance. It may Well be assumed that this case was representative for middle- and southern Alentejo. In the area of open fields formed by northeastern Alentejo and Lower Beira -94-
resistance persisted longer (Ribeiro 1949:86, 1970:60; Silbert 1968: 36). Accordingly, my impression is that the persistence of significant collective rights and arrangements into the twentieth century was somewhat less exceptional in Lower Beira and northeastern Alentejo 74 than it was on the rest of the mediterranean plain. What is the explanation of this regional difference within southern Portugal? In my view the large landowners of Lower Beira and northeastern Alentejo had a somewhat less powerful position vis-a-vis the population because the extent of commercialization was somewhat smaller and perhaps increased at a slower rate. Now the importance of discerning different forms of commercial• ization has become sufficiently clear. The Implications of a com• mercialization process for e.g., the degree.to which collective rights are abused, disappear or persist, depend upon the specific characteristics of that process. Questions have to be asked about the scale of commercial production; about the importance of commercial production in crop farming and cattle farming, respectively; and about the specific manner in which the bond between commercial producers and peasants has developed. Finding answers to such questions is essential if one wants to gain insight into the signifi• cance commercialization processes have for the structure of bonds between villagers. -95-
VII PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT, RESOURCES AND COMMUNAL CO-OPERATION
In the past chapter attention was paid to one of the conditions accounting for the division of resources and the extent of co• operation between fellow-villagers: the extent and way of commercial• ization,, In this chapter a discussion will be given of one of the conditions the extent and way of commercialization are connected with: the character of the natural environment. My starting point is that conditions such as the climate and the nature of the terrain, since they involve certain limitations and possibilities for the emergence of specific types of agriculture, also have an essential significance as partial explanations of structural aspects of village life. In previous chapters this way of explanation has been handled more than once,,
The autonomy typifying the traditional western Alpine villages was connected with their particular geographical setting (p„ 26-7). A climatic feature - drought - is relevant to the explanation of the occurrence of open fields in the interior of the northern Iberian zone of small-scale farming (p„ 35-6)= The size of the sharecroppers' class and the general occurrence of open fields in part of southern Portugal under the ancien regime appeared to be connected with the low natural soil fertility characterizing that area (p. 85). Now, an interesting question is whether the manifest and very old differences existing between the terra fria on the one side and Lower Beira and Alentejo on the other may be explained in an analogous
way0 Globally spoken, an age-old contrast in land tenure and community types exists between the north and the south of the Peninsula,, What relevance have physical.conditions for the explanation of this con• trast? As will be seen, this is a very controversial question. It is useful first to give a short summary of the historical processes in Lower Beira and Alentejo as compared with the processes in the. terra fria, taking special notice of two aspects: the division of power resources at the. local level and the extent of communal co• operation o : In the countryside of Lower Beira and especially Alentejo a sharp inequality existed in the division of power resources•> Under the ancien regime already there was question of abuse of common land by.municipal authorities who hired out parts of this land to rich cattle owners, -96-
taking no account of the interests of the peasantry; by doing so, the municipalities also had influence at the level of the povo«, In the nineteenth century the ascendancy of rich families over poor peasants and of municipalities over povos increased further, making possible the disappearance of the huge part of communal rights and arrangements. The peasants of the terra fria had the disposal of vast waste lands, the communal management of which lasted well into the twen• tieth century until it was terminated in a rash and blunt way when, as a part of the centralization process, the waste lands came under the "ccpperate" management of the state; the open fields persisted; unlike: the freguesia authorities of Lower Beira and Alentejo - who normally use a part of the small remaining common lands as an income source by letting them out to those who bid most - the povo councils of the terra fria practically have no income, so that the inhabitants have to perform communal work. Until 1974, at least, the partici• pation of inhabitants.in communal affairs was much stronger in the terra fria than it was in Lower Beira and Alentejo: the smaller power differentials within the communities account for this. It is easy to see that all these differences are related to a difference in the extent of commercial izatio;n. In the south the commercialization of pasture land, arable land and labour relation• ships has taken place much earlier and proceeded much further than in the terra friao Only, the question is whether - or to what extent - this difference can be explained from a difference in physical con• ditions , This question has given rise to a discussion showing features of a political debate. Both in Portugal and in Spain a theory has often been enunciated according.to which the^ private large estate constitutes a natural adaptation, as it were;, to harsh natural con• ditions. The reasoning is that nature has endowed the Southerners in such a thrifty way that in the long run only: the hardiest and largest entrepreneurs among them could keep on their feet,-They alone were able to maintain efficient enterprises on this barren ground: small peasants were not able to manage it under these physical conditions. As this theory has frequently been used;in order to legitimate the status quo in the south of the Peninsula^ it is comprehensible that it has been subjected to a very critical examination by people -97-
who advocated the termination of this status quo! Edward Malefakis has given a detailed treatment on this subject (1970:35-50; also chapter 1), He and, also, Juan Martfnez-Alier (1971) show convincingly that the preponderance of large estates in the western and central part of southern Spain cannot be explained from unfavourable physical features: although parts of this vast area are semi-arid and infertile, the same applies to Old-Castile,. which is a region of small farms; and western, Andalusia, where large estates, are most important, is the most fertile part of southern Spain, These data, surely are to the point; and on the ground of them Martfnez-Alier rightly dis• putes the statement of the anthropologist';.Julian Pitt-Rivers that a correlation between large-scale farming and low rainfall exists in
Spain;(Pitt-Rivers 1963), Moreover, Pitt-Rivers was wrong in assuming that flatness of the terrain correlates with large-scale farming: he, overlooked the importance of small- and,medium-sized farms on the plains of Leon and Old-Castile,
For the rest, however, I disagree with Malefakis' and Martfnez- Alier's opinion. Unlike what Martfnez-Alier suggests (1971:23), Pitt-Rivers does not maintain that large properties constitute .an adaptation to difficult conditions given by nature. On the contrary, in Pitt-Rivers' view small-scale farming is typical of mountainous 75 regions where communications are difficult, . Moreover, the fact that Pitt-Rivers' specific explanation is inaccurate does not necessarily mean that the possibility of an explanation from physical^ conditions - an ecological explanation - is lacking, Jn my view; Martinez-Alier and Malefakis are too hasty in concluding that ecological conditions have lesser relevance to the explanation of the regional, difference in question. explanation of the import- Indeed, Malefakis maintains that the ance of large estates in the south is found in the. specific "historical" conditions which reputedly reigned after the reconquest on the Moors, As has been said in chapter 3, concerning the case of Leon and Old- Castile, Malefakis starts from the disputable assumption that an almost complete depopulation had taken plape,. after which the land was apportioned to a mass of settlers who Came from regions that had not been depopulated. The royal legislation which.had emerged .under those conditions had impeded the rise of large estate owners in later centuries. As to the part of Spain bordering on Lower Beira and -98-
Alentejo - Estremadura - the theory sounds las follows, Estremadura, too, had been depopulated. However, by the time that this part of the Peninsula had been reconquered settlers had become very scarce. Therefore, the land of Estremadura was not divided into small holdings: instead, it came to be used in a labour extensive way for the farming of sheep on large estates (Malefakis 1970:55-7)» This theory does not do justice to the fact that extensive land exploitation was typical for the greater parts of Leon and Old- Castile as well. The crucial difference was that in Leon and Old- Castile larger parts of the fallow and waste lands were managed com• munally - and also that small land owners formed the majority while sharecroppers prevailed in Estremadura, This difference and its per• sistence throughout the centuries cannot be explained by a depopulation hypothesis. Neither Malefakis nor Martinez-Alier inquired sufficiently into the possibility of an ecological explanation. It is not sufficient to demonstrate the inadequacy of the idea that harsh natural conditions account for the emergence of the social contrast between large estate holders and a dependent peasantry: one must as well ask whether relatively favourable natural conditions may account for the emergence of this contrast! In other words, what validity has the hypothesis that the dominant role played of old by mighty lavradores in southern- Iberian communities is linked with certain natural conditions which made possible large-scale production of certain commodities destined for large urban centres, so that it became attractive and possible for elite members to compete for land and to make the peasants into landless and dependent day labourers, sharecroppers and herdsmen? True, it would be impossible to maintain that the southern physical 16 environment is "favourable" in any absolute sense. But still this environment may have special traits which are favourable to the production of certain agricultural commodities which have been in demand during a long period. In order to solve this problem one must compare different parts of the Peninsula, As I prefer to avoid an unnecessary complication of the issue, I will in the first instance confine myself to the eastern terra fria and Lower Beira and Alentejo - and the parts of Spain adjacent to these regions. These regions have in common that extensive grain farming and the herding of small cattle on extensive -99-
pastures are relatively and, in some places,- very important , Together these regions form one large area in the interior and south-west of the Peninsula, The extensivity of land use in this large area is partly con• nected with the traditional character of the techniques employed. Thus, modern irrigation schemes only exist in some smaller river zones and artificial fertilizers are not intensively made use of. However, the traditional character of techniques in crop farming does not form the whole explanation. Techniques of intensive grain farming already were known before the ending of the ancien regime: in certain fertile parts of southern Portugal the fallow period was as short as it was more northernly in Europe - one year in-three (Silbert 1966: 1073—4) o Nevertheless , in most places land use was and is much more extensive. What is the explanation? As far as the southern part of the large extensive farming area is concerned , part of the explanation is in the practice of large owners to use their land in a very ex• tensive way; as far as both the southern and the northern part are concerned, two physical characteristics have central significance for the explanation:,the low natural fertility of most soils and the 77 relatively dry climate. Now, the focal question is whether an ecological explanation can be given of the main regional difference existing within this large sub humid to semi-arid area: the contrast between regions of small peasant farms such as the terra fria, and regions where rich land holders and cattle owners predominate since time immemorial, such as Lower Beira and Alentejo, As has already become evident this difference cannot be explained from a' difference in the relative flatness or roughness of the terrain: when Pitt-Rivers assumed a correlation to exist between large property and. flatness of the terrain, he overlooked the relative un• importance of large estates on the flat landsof Leon and Old-Castile, Likewise, such a theory leaves unexplained why immense private pastures have emerged and persisted on the rough lands of the Sierra Morena to 78 the east of Alentejo, True, it would be no surprise if further in• quiry would show that differences in the roughness of the terrain have significance for the explanation of differences in possibilities of cheap transport and mechanization, and thereby of commercialization, within e,g, the terra fria or the area of large estates; yet the -100-
differences between these areas cannot be explained in this way. In sum, the following ecological conditions have no explanatory value in this case: soil (in fertility and relative dryness of the climate (for these conditions are common to both southern and northern regions) and the relative roughness of the terrain. What condition remains to be considered? It is worthwhile to have a closer look at the relative rigour or mildness of the winters. As is stated in a general work on the geography of the Mediterranean area, both on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Balkans and Turkey the typical mediterranean aspects "decay", as it were, as one moves from the southern coastal regions to the plateaus in the interior (Ribeiro 1968:46). In the interior a continental climate reigns: short, warm summers and long, cold winters. Now if one asks whether a correlation exists between the rigour of the winters and the importance of small land and cattle property the data on the Iberian Peninsula, at least, clearly point in the direction of an affirmative answer. The name terra fria (cold land) proceeds from the peasants of Tras-os-Montes, who use it as a designation for those villages where the long and cold winters have a disadvantageous influence on crop farming and the vegetation of the waste lands. By the inhabitants of Marras certain villages situated at a lower altitude - where olives grow, the wine is better and the waste lands are covered with more sappy plants, so that waste land pastures are somewhat better - are designated as terra quente or warm land villages. Geographers have also come to use these terms. They reserve the name terra quente for certain parts of Tras-os-Montes situated at still lower altitudes, including the port wine region (see p.40). Even in those parts of the terra quente where extensive grain and cattle farming are more important than the production of wine, commercialization is significantly greater than it is in the terra fria. Thanks to the milder climate, olive trees and even almond trees grow in the terra quente. These trees are important from a commercial point of view. The same holds good for cork oaks, which grow in the terra quente as well as in the adjoining part of Leon (Lautensach 1964:388). Surely it is not by chance that an unequal division of land and other resources is typical for these parts where winters are milder! The terra quente shows similarities with that part of the large extensive farming area which lies south of the central mountain — 101 —
ranges - i,e., Lower Beira, Alentejo, Spanish Estremadura, New- 79 Castile and La Mancha. Especially on the enclosed fields around the villages and towns of these regions olive trees and/or cork oaks are of classical importance. Not only the importance of crops like cork oaks and olives but also - and mainly - commercial extensive sheep farming has contributed to the concentration of property in the hands of a few. In the terra quente climate is more favourable to sheep farming than it is in the terra fria. This is apparent from the fact that the port wine region has fulfilled a role for sheep owners from colder zones. In wintertime the winegrowers, being interested in the production of sheep dung for their vineyards, allowed.shepherds Coming from higher lands to pasture their flocks on the wine terraces which are covered with weeds during that time of the year. Likewise, as has appeared on p, 90, the southern-Portuguese plain was an area where migrant shepherds or transhumants from colder regions let graze their sheep in winter. The same applies to the southern-Spanish part of the large area of extensive farming: in Estremadura as well as in the Sierra Morena important winter pastures still exist. In winter the soil, and particularly the fallow land, in the south of Portugal and Spain is covered with a green layer of plants which are pre-eminently suited to feed the cattle, Again, the explanation is in the milder winter climate,^0 In my view, the fact that conditions for sheep farming are better in the southern extensive farming regions does not only explain why the importance of large cattle estates and the abuse of communal land have been so great there: it also explains Why the grain fields fell into the hands of a few mighty persons. First, large sheep ownership makes It possible to dung more grain land. Secondly, as is stated by Anton Blok (1975:83), large estate holders who combine grain farming with .cattle raising are remarkably less sensitive to market fluctuations than modern and.more specialized large entrepreneurs are. This makes it easier for them to maintain their monopolies. Now it. Is clear that, the phenomenon of "communal co-operation between small peasant farmers" has persisted exactly in that part of the large extensive farming area where natural poverty is greatest - in consequence of the severe winter climate especially. To that part belong the eastern half of.the. terra fria,'the major part of Leon -102-
and Old-Castile and,; also, the barren region situated between the terra quente and Lower Beira, called Beira Trasmontana (Ribeiro 1949:30-32), In these northern regions conditions are not favourable for commercial products like wine, olives and cork; furthermore, good winter pastures are absent here. Nor do summer pastures comparable to those lying in humid central- and northern- Iberian mountain ranges exist here. This means that only those inhabitants who bring or let bring their sheep to humid mountains
in summer and to the south in winter - i„ed those who practice transhumance - can apply themselves to large-scale farming for 81 wool. Other people are not able to accumulate resources through such large-scale commercialization. Even though sheep farming is not unimportant in these, regions, small sheep property is predominant. The animals largely belong to the churro breed which has wool of poor quality (see, e,g,, .Taborda 1932:146; jHinderink 1963:80), All these data are in accordance with Nico Kielstra's general statement that within poor countries areas exist where there is something like a "democracy of poverty", i,e,, where the poverty of ecological conditions is so great that the local people are to a large degree left to themselves and that differences in wealth and power within communities cannot take an extreme amplitude (Kielstra 1975:337-8), As far as Europe is concerned, the data point to the conclusion that the long persistence of traditions of communal co• operation is typical of at least two kinds of areas where possibilities
of controlling the natural environment have: always been restricted by features of terrain and climate: 1) mountain areas which have been designated as the "Circum-Alpine culture area" by the anthropologist Robert Burns (see chapter 1), In such areas, like the Alps and the Pyrenees, winters are colder than they are in mountains like the Sierra Morena. Rainfall is high. Other examples are the humid western part of the terra fria, some mountain ranges in central and northern Portugal, Galician highlands and the mountains south.of the Bay of Biscay, 2) regions like the eastern terra fria, which should on the whole be
characterized as plateaus rather: than as mountain areas. Winters are severe and soil, fertility is generally low; rainfall is lower - in some parts very much lower - than it is in the areas mentioned under 1), Besides of the eastern terra fria and Leon and Old-Castile one -103-
may also think of plateaus in the Balkans and Turkey: the long persistence of communal co-operation seems to be typical of these ' 82 areas, toe In Pitt-Rivers* theory mentioned on p.97 there .was no place for the areas falling under 2). In emphasizing the contrast between southern semi-arid regions and the hujnid northernmost part of Spain which falls under 1), Pitt-Rivers took no notice of the explanatory value of the condition "cold winter climate" combined with relative drought and the low natural fertility of most soils. Except for this inaccuracy, however, he was on the right track: he saw the importance of ecological conditions.
In my view, the humid circum-Alpine areas and the dryer plateaus must be considered to form one belt to the north of the zone of olives, cork oaks and winter pastures: one belt of regions where typical mediterranean processes - the early commercialization of products like wool, cereals and wine, the emergence of sharp social contrasts between peasants and large land and cattle holders - have Held off, •Jp the poorest natural environments the estate employing a large dependent peasantry could not emerge: it is the small-scale farming labour and communal enterprise of forgotten plateau dwellers and free mountaineers which forms an effective human response to harsh . ecological conditions.
-105-
VIII CONCLUSION
This paper focussed on the phenomenon of "communal co-operation". In my opinion this phenomenon deserves attention precisely because "life in communities" and especially "(-non-) co-operation in peasant communities" are controversial themes, As has been mentioned, Lewis Morgan and many other nineteenth-century writers adhered to the idea of "primitive communism", while other authors rejected this idea. E.g., Fahrenfort pointed out the former existence of collective arrangements imposed upon villagers by rulers who were led by very practical considerations and followed their own ends, and Margaret Mead stressed the fact that primitive cultures differed sharply from each other as to the importance of co-operation. Likewise, Tonnies as well as field workers like Robert Redfield described the peasant community as a highly integrated group, and their view was criticized by authors like Lewis, Foster and Konig.
My view is that ideas such as those of Morgan, Tonnies and Redfield have rightly been criticized - but that it would be wrong to draw over-hasty general conclusions, as Foster did when he stressed the lack of co-operation among peasants. As I have maintained in the introduction, Foster's conclusion, as opposed to Konig's
criticism of Redfieldfs view, testifies to a lack of attention to the variation in diverse structural aspects of communities. The right question to ask is under which conditions peasants do co-operate and under which conditions they do not.
I have described many different forms of communal co-operation such as they exist or existed in different places and particularly in Marras, a north-eastern Portuguese village where people still are dependent on small-scale farming in a poor environment. As an integral part of this description I mentioned different conflict forms, in• cluding conflicts among co-operating people. I did not emphasize common characteristics of the communities under study, as for example the fact that their inhabitants, as opposed to the inhabitants of modern cities, were or still are highly dependent on ^heir local natural environment and on each other. The emphasis was on differences, the most important of which were
- a difference in time: forms of communal co-operation, have been wide• spread in Europe but their importance has decreased sharply, par- -106-
ticularly since the ending of the ancien regime, - a regional difference: in certain areas, as in the region to
which Marras belongs, many forms of communal co-operation remained important for a long time or up to this day.
What accounts for the great spread forms of communal co• operation have had in the past? The material treated in this paper makes it possible to answer this question to a certain extent. In the earlier stages of the pre-industrial period, the extent of commercialization in agriculture was small. Firstly, this implied the predominance of labour intensive and small-scale forms of agri• culture, in which forms of co-operation such as the pooling of labour in cattle herding and the communal agreement of capital goods and natural resources were important. The small farm holders as well as the landless had an interest in the maintenance of communal rights on the many soils which could only be used in an extensive way. In cases of scarcity the management of communal resources could be very rigid. Another Implication of the low degree of commercialization was that the possibility of the emergence of absolute rulers controlling all aspects of local life remained restricted. Large commercial producers who controlled village life in a nearly absolute way were still absent in most places. Howevereven in places where such large producers did play an important role, they did not always possess the power to put an end to all important communal rights: this appears from the case of southern Portugal under the ancien regime. Therefore, it is important to take notice of the different kinds of power resources the local commercial producers had access to in any separate research Case (e.g. in English history or in different stages in southern Portuguese history): the strength of their position vis-a-vis the rural population depended on commercial possibilities in crop and/or cattle farming as well as on their position vis-a-vis central authorities. (Cf. Moore 1966) The small degree of centralization, too, contributed to the importance communal co-operation forms had: in many places. Communities still fulfilled many worldly and religious: functions which would be taken over by the state and other bureaucratic organizations as states would turn into ever larger integration units (Elias 197*0. In the numerous communities where extreme power differentials were -107-
absent, the fulfillment of these functions tended to be a matter of communal co-operation.
In sum, the low degree of commercialization and centralization form a partial explanation of the importance the phenomenon of commu• nal co-operation has had in Europe. The explanation is only partial, for the origins of forms of communal co-operation are shrouded in the dark. For example, it is not clear when, or to what extent, communities in specific parts of Europe have come to fulfill functions which had been performed by extended kinship groups in an earlier stage.
In addition to the mentioned difference in time - the fact that forms of communal co-operation had a greater spread in the past - a regional difference, too, had a central place in this paper: in particular areas, like the studied northern-Portuguese region, such old co-operation forms still persist. The continuing importance of communal initiatives in Marras turned out to be narrowly connected with the character of the natural environment. I suspect that an analogous connection between social and physical phenomena still exists in many other parts of one general zone formed by humid mountain zones (Burns 1963) as well as much dryer or even semi-arid ^plateaus, to the north of the mediterranean area. Now it has become possible to assess the contribution of ecological circumstances to the persistence of Specific forms of co-operation between the house• holds of Marras.
One can say there is an "ecological basis", i.e. a typical regional combination of natural characteristics that, taken together with aspects of the "underdevelopment" of Portugal such as the small quantities of capital used in agriculture, account for the fact that land use in Marras is to a considerable extent non-commercial and extensive, and thus help explain in many respects why the inhabitants have kept co-operating within the communal context. (These natural characteristics are: cold winters, relative drought and low soil fertility.)
Thus, the long persistence of communal co-operation in agri*- culture and in the maintenance of communal capital goods like;mills and grape presses is bound up with the fact that the inhabitants have continued to use the land in a largely non-commercial way - and this, as we have seen, has much to do with the ecological character- -108-
istics of the region. The long persistence of communal co-operation in cattle farming and in the management and exploitation of the former waste land property should be connected with both the low extent of commercialization and the fact that large tracts of land can only be used in an extensive way, given the unfavourable physical circumstances.
Moreover, the character of the natural environment helps explain why sharp social contrasts are absent in communities like Marras: within the villages themselves there is no possibility of a great social mobility.
Finally, the ecological poverty also has contributed to the fact that there is not enough money to pay workers and specialists who would take over public tasks from the households - which would imply a specialization and perhaps an enlargement of scale in the pro• vision of public services.
As appeared on p. .40-1, this lack of money is to be connected with national as well as specifically regional circumstances. Part of the explanation is in the fact that a massive transference of capital from the cities to poor rural areas did hot come off in Portugal. This is a consequence of the alarming social inequality which existed until recently in the country as a whole, and, in addition, of the low national income. The poverty of Portugal is not easy to explain. The question why Portugal's position vis-a-vis more northernly parts of Europe has become increasingly unfavourable in the course of the centuries is a subject apart. I only want to suggest that the answer might partly be found in the poverty of natural resources in this corner of Europe. For example, a raising of productivity in agriculture is made more difficult by the dry summers and the nature of the terrain. Many parts of the country including the populous North-west are too hilly or mountainous to make a far-reaching mechanization possible*, Unlike the Italian countryside, rural Portugal does not consist of a rich northern and a poor southern part: in the North, too, a great poverty of natural and other resources exists in many places.;But this is a research theme in itself.
In combination with the poverty of Portugal in general and its "forgotten" countryside in particular, the regional ecological basis accounts for the fact that poverty in Marras and other terra -109-
fria communities is so great that the peasants still perform many communal tasks, The great natural poverty of the terra fria entails a particularly great economic poverty or lack of capital. In con• sequence, the own money income of whichever body of local government is• scanty-o As appeared on p, 39, the settlement pattern presents an additional difficulty. People live in small dispersed settlements and this aggravates the centralization problem. This settlement pattern, too, will have to do much with the ecological circumstances. The formation of populous freguesias - a process characteristic of those Portuguese regions where climate and soil condition made possible extensive land use for the production of maize, hay, wine and/or fruit - was not possible here. Likewise, the emergence of large settlements of workers and herdsmen working on large estates
was inconceivable here: such a process could only take place in • • 84 the South where conditions for large-scale: farming were better. In short, in the terra fria an effective centralization is made difficult by the poverty, smallness and dispersed situation of the peasant communities - characteristics which are directly connected with the poverty of natural resources which is very great in this
specific part of the country. :
On account of the foregoing it is clear that research into structural characteristics of peasant communities must imply research into social implications of ecological circumstances also (Cf, Kielstra 1975), Ecological conditions help explain the fact that a sharp social contrast did not emerge in Marras,, and that the inhabitants are still highly dependent on one another, so that co• operation has remained both possible and necessary. For practical ends, too, it is important to find out what ecological conditions mean for the social life of peasants: in this way one may contribute to a realistic appraisal of the possibilities of, e,g,, commer• cialization or a process of specialization in the provision of public services in a region. What future development is likely in the case of the studied part of Tras-os-Montes? In my view there is no great chance that the provision of public services will wholly be taken over by paid workers and specialists in the near future. On the other hand, it does seem realistic to assume that a development policy for this — 110—
region can fruitfully build upon the existence of forms of communal co-operation. As appears from the Alpine case (p. 26-7), the emergence of modern forms of state organization is not necessarily incompatible with the persistence of communal co-operation. In spite of all problems which will present themselves to authorities trying to remove the worst forms of poverty in the terra fria, there are some possibilities of social improvements. True, in the terra fria as in the northern- Portuguese countryside as a whole the general idea of a land reform is not popular; but even so it is clear that one particular land reform measure would be very welcome: the restoring of poorly afforested lands like those of Marras to the local authorities. In addition, the government could create and pay a post of communal herdsman (e.g., goatherd) in the villages: this would mean a modest compensation for the fact that the exploitation of the waste lands by the inhabitants has been forbidden for a long time. In addition, financial support could be given in the case of purchase of new communal capital goods by village councils, (See also note 55*)
However, much depends on the success of measures in the interest of the province of Tras-os-Montes as a whole. An increase of employment possibilities in the region is the primary aim: the crucial question is whether the villagers will become less dependent on employment in cities far away and whether Tras-os-Montes will loose its character of a "forgotten region". -111-
NOTES
1. For example, students of the Middle Ages like Maitland, started,' from the idea of an Initial stage of equality in English history, and the historian Kemble maintained that a prehistoric German community, the mark, stood at. the beginning of English consti• tutional development (cf. Pitkin 1961:2). Von.Maurer and, also, Marx and Engels idealized the mark as an expression of agrarian collectivism. In eastern Europe the idea of a primaeval Slavonic collectivism was popular among nationalists. (Cf. Fahrenfort 1945:37,39;' Bailey and Llobera 1974.) The term "communism of Christ" was used- by a Portuguese author mentioned on p.36 of this paper. 2. In making this review I have drawn upon various sources, among which Dion 1934 and Bloch 195 6 (also translated into English: Bloch 1966) on communal arrangements in traditional French agriculture ; Kleinpenning 1968:318 on, the three-course, system; Tiesing 1943 on the former characteristics of villages in Drenthe, the Netherlands; Dias 1953:19-20,29-34 and Freeman 1968a:44-8 on traditional features of peasant communities in parts of northern Portugal and Spain; Roelofsen 1974 on communal work and surveillance by rotation in a Colombian slum. 3. Precisely because of the smallness of each owner's land parcels - a result of partitions between heirs as well as of former partitions between all inhabitants - the owners have to co• ordinate their private land use in this way. As was observed,on the open fields in northern France: "I.e melange des terres en tres petites parties assujetit'le cul.tivateur a faire de son terrain le meme emploi que les autres." (Dion 1934:35). In note 58 of this paper mention is made of a free-grazing arrangement without such a communal co-ordination of private land use: the land parcels being large, each owner could decide for himself what cropping/fallowing rotation he followed on his land.
4. Moore 1966:498-9. Compare the concept of "interdependence" as •circumscribed by Norbert Elias (1974:XVlII-XIX). • 5.. Wolf 1957, 19,66; Burns 1963; Freeman 1973; Brandes, 1975. The concept of. corporate community comes from Wolf (1957) who, at least initially, used this term.in a restricted sense.-.namely as a designation for those communities.where all land was held in common for taxation purposes, such as the mir mentioned on page 5. 6. Cf. Blok 1975 (especially note 45) on the making of comparisons in anthropology. • 7. See for example p. 90 of this paper. 8. By. "all" I mean: the totality or at least the majority of house• holds. . 9. Contrary to what Eric Wolf assumed (1957,1966) and contrary to one of the theories on traditional agricultural organization
in northern Portugal (critically treated in: Freund 19.70) the occurrence of communal co-operation: forms was not restricted to communities where a. compulsion to pay a collective tax sum had existed: such forms were far more widespread. -1 12-
10. The few things I know about western French regions like the Vendee come from Dion 1934, Bloch 1966 and Kleinpenning 1968: 331. In mediaeval England, too, open fields were absent in some ; regions. As was noted by Donald Pitkin, in mediaeval England as well as in the north-American colony of New England the occurrence of open fields correlated with the existence of a rule of impartible inheritance (Pitkin 1961). However, it is not possible to make general statements on the .basis of this datum, for a correlation impartible inheritance /open fields did not exist everywhere. 11. In Bloch. 1956 there is question of 1'evolution des assem• blies d'habitants /de 1'ile de Re*7 vers une constitution de plus en plus oligarchique /qui? se relie a. tout un mouvement d'ensemble." (p. 183) 12. Cf. Wolf 1966:35-7 on the "neotechnic" forms of agriculture. 13. Cf. Caro Baroja 1946; Foster 1960; Freeman 1968a:44-8,1968b: 480-2; Dias 1953:19-20,29-34. 14. Dias 1948 (not easily obtainable; the contents are unknown to me), Dias 1953; Kenny 1961 (chapter 2); Freeman 1970; Brandes 1975. 15. Brandes studied a small regional centre of some 800 inhabitants (1970) in a Castilian mountain zone.-In this community, where landless peasants had predominated up to the sixties, migration carried with it that poor villagers gained access to land while medium-sized proprietors were faced with a strongly increasing scarcity of labourers. This implied an increase in economic and social homogeneity (or should one say: the emergence of a form of shared poverty?!) within the community, and an increase in the degree of co-operation in agriculture. Compare Slicher van Bath's detailed treatment of the implications demographic processes had for social stratification within peasant societies (1963:128-31). Compare also p.52-3, and p.68 of this paper. 16. The defenders of this viewpoint, among whom Claudio Sanchez- Albornoz, are predominantly historians. Cf. Sanchez-Albornoz 1956:16-33, "Despoblacldn del valle del Duero". Cf. also Malefakis 1970:50-4, "The influence of history". Portuguese authors who assumed that north-eastern Portugal had been entirely depopu• lated are mentioned by Dias (1953:40-1). 17. These writers are, particularly, the ethnologist Julio Caro Baroja, the ethnographically-oriented anthropologist Jorge Dias, the linguist Ramon Menendez Pidal and the geographer Orlando Ribeiro. See "Continuidad y discontinuidad en el periodo de la Reconquista" by Caro Baroja (1946:261-4, especially p.262); Dias 1953:29,40-1 (especially p. 40); "Repoblacidn y tradicidn en la cuenca del Duero" by Menendez Pidal (19 60:XXIV-LVII, es• pecially p.LV-LVII) and "A reconquista ao norte do Mondego" by Ribeiro ( 1968b: 443-4 ).. 18. The members of vici used'to hold common assemblies: this appears from data on the conventus publicus vicinorum (public assembly i of "neighbours") in the Visigothic period (cf. Valdeavellano 1968:40). Around 1100, new settlements arisen from villae in what is now northern Portugal usually had kept their unity: -113-
"Succession or necessity might lead to the partition of a villa but the unit was not dismembered, co-owners taking the place of sole proprietors and sharing among them everything" (Oliveira Marques 1972:51). Cf. also Freund 1970 on the history of settler ment patterns and village organization in the mountain region of Barroso, western Tras-os-Montes. "The high-lying villages of Upper Barr&so ...... seem to have been formed after the Re• conquest /which had been completed in the ninth century in this part of the country? from isolated farms or loose groups of dwellings. Therefore, all the communal aspects of the economy and of village life only appeared later" (page 101). On the other hand, as appears on p.96, villages in the east of Upper Barroso had originated in a stage anterior to the Moorish period. A document from 1258 attests to the early existence of open fields in this part.
19. Adra, dula (Castilian) and also adua (ancient Portuguese; various Portuguese dialects; Galician) are generic designations for duties handled in' rotation. Compare the French word corvee (Burns 1963:147). Moreover, the terms dula and adua can refer to systems of rotation in the use of water (compare the word dunha mentioned under 5.3, and the Castilian word ador) to common land and to cattle herded by communal herdsmen. All these terms derive from Arabic words for "turn". They are used side by side with terms deriving from Latin. Perhaps the word roda (rotation) used in Marras, north-eastern Portugal, comes directly from the old Latin word for the rotations or duties: rota. Cf. Garcia-de Diego 1954, Freeman 1970:33, Figueiredo 1976, De Vries 1973, item rot.,
2p. By "Old-Castile" I mean here that part of the region which is situated in the interior, as opposed to the humid northernmost part. The open fields of north-eastern Portugal, Leon and Old- Castile mostly consist of two courses. Cf.'Lautensach 1964:390. 21. These data come from Ribeiro 1963. 22. Cf. Freeman 1968a and the data on Galicia'in Lisdn-Tolosana 1973. 23. The National Geographic Magazine 1965:304-6. Cf. also Caro Baroja 1946:423 and plate 47; and Freeman 1968a:45: "The coastal regions of Catalonia...... Valencia...... and Murcia...... were reported as allotting and exploiting in various ways communally held waters ...... However, Costa and his colleagues fail to present a good over-all picture of the village organiz• ation in the eastern region". See also Brenan 1971:338 on a fishing community in Catalonia. 24. By "families" I also mean single people living in separate houses. The number is from 1973. 25. In the northern-Portuguese countryside the concept of lavrador still has the same meaning as the concept of,laboureur had in France, namely: owner of one or more pairs of draught animals (oxen or cows in the case of northern Portugal). Townspeople always designate the small or. medium-sized farmer as a campones or Mcountryman,,,. In the ears of the villagers this term has a ) typical "townish" sound (fieldwork datum). 26. The sources for the foregoing were Dias 1953:43ff., Moura Santos — 114—
1967:64ff., Oliveira Martins 1951:410-11 and information from a villager on the former jury. 27. The same anecdote was told in Rio de Onor (Dias 1953:152). 28. In discussing communities in the Sierra Ministra, Old-Castile, Susan Tax Freeman points out an interesting connection between village size and the extent to which solving conflicts is a formal, legal affair or'a question of informal social control. Valdemora, where Freeman did- fieldwork, is made up of eleven families only - and as far as is known it has never happened there that the alcalde pedaneo or "village mayor", who is qualified to levy fines, has indeed placed a fine. (Freeman 1970:86). In a neighbouring community, now consisting of some 150 inhabitants and having consisted of some 300 inhabitants in 1920, court cases among neighbours are more common (Freeman 1968a:48). What I heard about a Spanish community not far from Marras was wholly in accordance with Freeman's finding. In cases of disputes and trespasses the alcalde pedaneo of this relatively large village (some 150 inhabitants now, some 200 earlier in this century) uses to levy fines or juicios. ("How often you can hear those villagers talk of juicios!", one of my informants from Marras said.) Likewise, the fact that the communal council of Rio de Onor, as opposed to that of Marras treats a number of court cases probably has to do with the difference in population size (Rio de Onor: 228 in 1940; Marras never higher than some 125). 29. In these elections all family heads, single women included, have a vote. , 30. Mordomo (Latin: major domus) is an old term which,had various' meanings, e.g. "tax agent" (Goncalves 1968:107-8). Under 5.1 this word will appear in the meaning of "organizer of religious feasts". 31 Compare Barth 1963 on the "entrepreneurs" in the villages of northern Norway, where a large money flow from state to villagers had started. 32. Compare Freeman 1970:84-5. In Valdemora the post of "village major" is regarded as a burden. The male family heads divide this burden by occupying the post in rotation. 33. External circumstances brought an untimely end to this vogal's term: after the fall of the Caetano regime in 1974 a decree from above enacted that all local authorities had to be chosen anew. 34. As opposed to Rio de Onor (note 39) and Valdemora (Freeman 1970). 35. Rio de Onor (Dias 1953:145), Valdemora (Freeman 1968a:136), and Spanish communities near Marras. l 36. Formerly the fines were paid in beeswax instead of in money. In Rio de Onor the good old practice to let trespassers pay a quantity of wine to be consumed by the council still exists. I have no disposal of reliable data on the highness of the fines: the amounts vary according to time and village. 37. Among the inhabitants of Marras a systematic preference for -115-
a definite form of marital residence seems to be absent. The past and present occurrence of "illegitimate" children (a common phenomenon in this region) adds to the complexity of kinship relations. 38. The starting point was that only those valid men who had the use right on this common grassland property, i.e. those men who were allowed to pasture two cows and one calf on this land, could maintain a good farm and were fit to be members of the council. The number of entitled households was not permitted to surpass thirty-five, for there was a limit to the total number of cows and calves grazing on this land. 39. The following assertion in Robert Anderson's book Modern Europe can only be due to a misunderstanding: ".....Time was to prove Dias right, for in Rio de Onor, as throughout northern Portugal, communalism has disappeared (Jorge Dias, personal communication, 1969 )". (Anderson 1973:84.) Compare note 15 on the consequences of migration in a Spanish mountain village. 40. Cf. Freeman 1968a and Christian 1972 on religion in the northern Spanish countryside. Joyce Riegelhaupt points out similarities between religious practices in Portuguese and in mediaeval English villages (1973:849). Compare what Marc Bloch (1966) wrote on communal church .activities in mediaeval France, (see p.16 of this paper) See also Cutileiro 1971:268 on pre- revolutionary Alentejo, southern Portugal: "the most significant aspects of the community's religious life, preserved and fostered by women, are outside the scope, of the priest's activities." However, one should not be led to hasty generalizations: only some 100 km from Marras, in the port region, priests have great authority among peasants and especially among woman. (Own fieldwork, 1977-78.)
41. This applied to the first-mentioned village in 1973. 42. Freeman 1968a:142. " 43. Formerly this fund also consisted of grain which could be lent for interest to villagers. 44. E.g. 1000 escudos (125 guilders) in a mountain village in north-western Portugal- (personal communication from the English anthropologist Patricia Goldey). 45. - Cf. the: note in Enes Pereira 1965:292 on Jorge and Margot Dias' publications on this theme. 46. The increase in the production of complementary forage was a widespread phenomenon in the Peninsula in the beginning of the century. See for example Hinderink 1963:68 on the rise in the production of potatoes, beets and turnips in a region southwest of Salamanca. New lands were cleared for the farming of grain (rye in the case of the terra fria) -, partly destined for animal consumption. Probably the expansion of the stock of horned cattle in Tras-os-Montes (Taborda 1932:153) could only take-place through this production of substitutes for fresh grass. Even so one can regret the importance this second- rate forage acquired in Tras-os-Montes (Taborda 1932:135-6). — 116—
47. In the Spanish border zone east of the terra fria, as well as in Rio de Onor, the old system of the boiada (in Spanish:vacada) grazing on the communal grassland has persisted. Perhaps - I am not sure of it - this is explained by the fact that the in- ' habitants of this Spanish region and Rio de Onor have applied themselves to the breeding of cattle of better quality. In the case of Rio de Onor this specialization is connected with this village's situation in a brook valley where a much larger amount of grass grows than is usual in the villages of this region. 48. Compare Ribeiro 1961:35 on the suppression of the fallow period in western Tras-os-Montes. 49. In an earlier stage, when analphabetism was general throughout Europe, such tallies were common in many places. Cf. the article in Stoett 1953= "Hij heeft veel op'zijn kerfstok". 50. Taborda 1932:107-8. The half of Portugal consisted of waste land (Ribeiro 1970:77). Cf. also the small map in Houston 1964:145 (Common and other waste lands of Portugal in 1868). 51. In addition, the coming of these landless outsiders implied a menace to the integrity of the inherited homesteads. The established, families had always tried to maintain a pattern of •in-rnarriage, but in this small community this was possible only as long as few people married. The shift to partible inheritance implied that marriages - and marriages with people from other villages in particular - became more numerous. In the community of Rio de Onor, which is larger and possesses an important communal grassland., in-marriage* has remained common (Dias 1953: 136; fieldwork datum 1973). 52. In the incursions made into the territory of neighbouring villages a sporting element was not altogether absent. Men could show their courage in such "raids". However, the men's position was not such that they alone engaged in this form of "organized theft". Women from a poor neighbouring community, who applied themselves to basketwork, came to the brook of Marras in order to steal wattles for this purpose. A man who had told me about former "raids" commented laughingly: "Eramos brutos", "we weren't nice ones". 53. Shifting or swidden cultivation occurs in all continents but is not usually a communal affair like it was in Marras and its surroundings. Eric Wolf gives the following general descrip• tion of this way of land use: "Swidden cultivation involves several steps. First, land is cleared by burning off the vegetation cover. Second, crops are planted in the clearing, usually without any additional manuring other than that provided by the ashes of the burned vegetation. Third, the plot obtained is used for one or more years, the duration depending upon local circumstances. Fourth, the plot is abandoned for a time so that it can regain its fertility. Fifth, a new plot is opened for cultivation. This sequence is repeated with a number of plots, until the cultivation returns to the field cleared first and repeats the cycle". (Wolf 1966:21-2.) In Europe, crop farming on the 1 most infertile lands was often practised in this way. In Marras and in Portugal as a whole the cleared plot was used for one year. — 117—
54. In Portugal and, indeed, "everywhere /at this latitude?, from Portugal to Turkey" (Ribeiro 1968a:125), setting fire~to the vegetation is the classical form of protest against the expropriation of waste lands. ' 55. Looking back from 1977 one can notice an improvement. In the revolutionary period from 1974 to 1975 only a minor change took place: the forestry guards of the past regime were accused of having appropriated state funds for themselves and were substituted by new guards. These men did not adopt such rigorous actions against "infringements" by the inhabitants as the former guards had done. In the period of socialist government, 1976-77, an experiment was started. A small part of the waste lands was cleared and planted with rye. This was a joint venture of military, who managed the waste lands at that time, and peasants. The peasants contributed with their labour and the harvested grain was divided equally among them. This venture was only a partial success: one said that production costs had been high, the quantity of grain produced was small, and only some fifteen households had chosen to participate. Anyhow, the fact that such an experiment had been started surely meant an interesting change. I have no more recent information at my disposal. 56. I.e., communal activities remained part and parcel of everyday life. This appeared to me in the beginning of the fieldwork, when an informant wondered at my question about the council of all households and asked: "Don't the villages in your country ) have such councils?" A few inhabitants turned out to be more conscious of the typical character of their council. 57. E.g. Banfield 1958, Wichers 1964, Schneider 1971. ) 58. Each owner could decide for himself what rotation he followed on his land. Cf. Silbert 1966, part II, chapter VIII. See also note 3 of this paper. ,59. Cf. Oliveira Marques 1972:69-70: "The state in Moslem countries was extremely rich and powerful .... This role cannot be forgotten or underestimated in order to explain the changing conditions in the royal power and fortune when the Christian kings took over everything that belonged to the Moslem State". 60. Cf. Silbert 1966:779-83 on the financiers in Alentejo. On property, copyhold and tenancy contracts, see Silbert 1966: 742-55, 756-62, 802 and Ribeiro 1970:139-43. 61. This change-over to a very extensive way of land use is treated on p. 800 of Silbert's book. The largest cattle owners offered high rents and effected the expulsion of former tenants, who had applied themselves to crop farming. Often the new tenant intentionally demolished the former tenant's house in order to make the property loose its character of a crop farm. This occurred in spite of the fact that national law under the ancien regime prohibited the breaking of long-term, tenancy • contracts without valid reasons. In addition, see Silbert 1966:671, 684, 840 on trade and ; -commercial farming; p. 1052, 1060, 1063 on the fertile parts , where commercial grain farming was important, (and, accordingly, communal rights and duties were unimportant). -118-
62. Cf. Silbert 1966:957, 980, 1003; Cutileiro 1971:17-8. 63. According to Silbert's estimate (1966:825, 1039), towards 1800 three quarters of Alentejo's population consisted of day- labourers. However, this estimate is based on data on a municipality in Middle-Alentejo, where the relative numbers of sharecroppers was smaller than it was in northeastern Alentejo. Unfortunately, documents on day labourers are scarce. 64. By the way, we may ask ourselves if on-going commercialization involves that large-scale production becomes advantageous in all respects. From the point of view of a large commercial grain farmer, the employment of a large number of day labourers could be advantageous .as it enabled him to determine for him• self how many people worked on his land at any moment; seen from the viewpoint of productivity, however, small-scale production was more advantageous. See Cutileiro 1971:57-8 on sharecroppers in Alentejo; compare Chayanov 1966 on the logic of small-scale, labour intensive production. 65. See Silbert's chapters on open fields and 1966:1041-2. See also ' Ribeiro 1970:36-47, 55-8, 156-63. The small size of the courelas made co-operation according to the open field system necessary. Silbert lays stress on the interest large sheep farmers had in the persistence of this open field right: they could abuse it by hiring a part of the fallow land from the municipality. However, where such large sheep farmers were absent, too, the sharecroppers could be active in defending free grazing rights: this appears from p. 1061-2 (including note 1) of Silbert's book (1966). In my view, the abuse of open field rights must be regarded as an adroit adjustment of the "powerful" to an arrangement defended by the sharecroppers primarily. See also Silbert 1966: 3l6ff. 66. See on communal co-operation in the herding of cattle: Cutileiro 1971:16; Silbert 1966:296, 699-700, 978-9 and Dias 1953:21. On shifting cultivation Silbert 1966:1054, Ribeiro 1970:176, 189 and Ribeiro 1949:84-5. On periodic reallotments: Silbert (1966) part I, chapter V and part II, chapter IX, and Ribeiro 1970:47-53, 168-77. 67. Silbert 1966:300. 68. See Silbert 1966:974 (where a typical example from the adjacent part of Spain is mentioned), 988, 990, 1064. I have borrowed • the concept of "rural slum" from the South-African writer Marquard who uses this term to designate the Bantustans. 69. Silbert 1966:274-5. See also p. 273-4, 213. Data on the re• lationships municipality/village and village/large cattle owners are given on p. 300-2 and 325ff. 70. See Silbert 1966:100-3 (on the consequences of the reconquest), 215-6, 390-6, 1053-5 (on agrarian structure after the reconquest), 365-9, 390-6, 957, 999, 1019-20, 1042-3, 1056-9 (on the emergence of specific communal arrangements). Compare Ribeiro 1970:65-75, 224, and passim; 1971:103. 71. Cf., for example, Serrao 1963:403. 72. Ribeiro 1949:86. Besides, the decrease in the number of share- -119-
croppers was accelerated by the commercial producers' change• over to more capital intensive methods and the resulting de• crease in their interest in sharecropping contracts. In 1960 day labourers formed 67,5% of the population active.in agri• culture in Lower Beira (Alentejo: 73%). Source: Estatfsticas Agrfcolas 1960. The sharp decrease in the importance of the sharecroppers class is also treated in Cutileiro 1971 and Feio 1949:74-5, 90. 73. See Cutileiro's examples of conflicts between local rulers and the population on "common" goods such as an industrial school (1971:189-93). See Wichers' (1964) and Silverman's (1968) criticism of Banfield's view. 74. Cf. Ribeiro 1949:98-102, 1970:47ff., 60; Silbert (1966) part I, chapter V, p. 1005 ff. 75. Pitt-Rivers 1963:19-20. Compare Susan Tax Freeman's explanation of the occurrence of councils of all farm.'households in the villages of the Sierra Ministra: the terrain is rough and the Sierra is regarded as poor and desolate, containing little worthy of exploitation (1968b). 76. In many respects the mediterranean physical environment compares unfavourably with that of northwestern and central Europe. Cf. Ribeiro 1968a:46-7, 49-54, 58-62 (in the Portuguese language). 77. As usual, the explanation consists of various part explanations, each of which is important. Compare Ribeiro 1968a: 128 on the } extensivity of land ude on mediterranean latifundia: "It is evident that transhumance has favoured the persistence of the latifundium, and even where the memory of transhumance was ) lost, the extensivity of land use persists in the form of the large-scale breeding of small cattle. Here there is a closely- knit tissue of physical conditions and human reactions: pastor- alism compensates for the large estates' low yield; but extensive pasturing and the regime of latifundia hinder the formation of a minute /small-scale? agriculture...... ". 78. Lautensach 1964:451. 79. Cf. Lautensach 1964:405-6 on the difference between the north• ern Meseta (Leqn and Old-Castile) and the southern Meseta (northern Estremadura,.New Castile and La Mancha). (As appears on p. 179-80 of this book, Lautensach, too, adheres to the theory of the past depopulation of vast parts of the Spanish interior. I attach greater value to Lautensach's own theory on the way in which an area like the Iberian Peninsula can be divided into geographical zones according to four "co-ordinates". See p. 33-5.) ' As Malefakis remarks, because of the colder climate there is less crop variety in Old-Castile than in the regions to the south of it; this implies a restriction of commercialization possibilities in Old-Castile (Malefakis 1970:45-6). This remark is in accordance with the "ecological" hypothesis defended here. In fact, Malefakis does not reject all possibilities of ecological explanations. i 80. Cf.Taborda 1932:147 on the conditions for sheep farming in the terra quente; Alvarenga 1970 and Dias 1951:29-30 on transhumance -120-
to the port-wine region; Miralbes Bedera 1954:339 and Silbert 1966:250 on the vegetation of winter pastures. In some parts
of Spain transhumance has persisted. Since the Civil War the ; sheep are transported by train (Miralbes Bedera 1954:371, Kleinpenning 1968:208). In a classical publication on trans• humance in Spain by Andre Fribourg (1910) a map shows where the winter pastures are or were situated. Nota bene: from another classical publication on transhumance routes (Aitken 1945) it appears that Fribourg was wrong in regarding the pastures near Valladolid, Old-Castile, as winter pastures! 81. Landowners from Soria, Segovia, Leon and Salamanca practised (or still practice) transhumance (Miralbes Bedera 1954:343, Aitken 1945). 82. It would be interesting to draw a comparison between the communities of the eastern terra fria and the Turkish villages described by Paul Stirling (1963, 1971 ): I think I. would lay more stress on the explanatory value of ecological features than Stirling did. Lack of time prevents me from dwelling on this question. 83. However, with a further increase of scarcity the use right could loose its communal character and become a privilege of a smaller part.of the households (p.53, 87). 84. Cf. Ribeiro 1938, l'Habitat rural au Portugal, and Ribeiro 1963:102-3, 132-4, 1968a:163-72 on the formation of settlement patterns. -121-
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PAPERS ON EUROPEAN AND MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETIES:
1. Boissevain, Jeremy & Anton Blok 1974 Two Essays on Mediterranean Societies (out of print)
2. Blok, Anton 1975 The Bokkerijders Bands, 1726-1776. Preliminary Notes on Brigandage in the Southern Netherlands (out of print)
3. Aya, Roderick R. 1975 The Missed Revolution: The Fate of Rural Rebels in Sicily and Southern Spain
4. Meer, Philip van der 1975 Problemen van Marokkaanse Arbeiders: Kultuurverschillen en kommunikatiestoornissen (out of print)
5. Kielstra, Nico 1976 Two Essays on Iranian Culture and Society
6. Meertens, Donny & Henk Driessen 1976 A Selected Bibliography on Spanish Society
7. Blok, Anton 1976 The Bokkerijders Bands, 1726-1776. Preliminary Notes on Brigandage in the Southern Netherlands (2nd & revised edition) (out of print)
8. Brunt, Emma 1977 Boerinnen, burgeressen en buitenlui. Een antropologisch onderzoek naar vrouwenverenigingen in een Nederlandse plattelandsgemeente
9. Teeffelen, Toine van 1977 Anthropologists on Israel. A Case Study in the Sociology of Knowledge
10. Wylie, Jonathan 1978 The Faroese Reformation and its Consequences
11. Bennema, Jan Willem 1978 Traditions of Communal Co-operation Among Portuguese Peasants. Preliminary Report
JAN WILLEM BENNEMA received his M.A. in social anthropology from the University of Amsterdam He is currently doing research in Portugal