The concept of ?peasant? has been constructed from residual images of pre-industrial European and colonial rural society. Spurred by Romantic sensibilities and modern nationalist imaginations, the images the word peasant brings to mind are anachronisms that do not reflect the ways in which rural people live today. In this path-breaking book, Michae

The concept of ?peasant? has been constructed from residual images of pre-industrial European and colonial rural society. Spurred by Romantic sensibilities and modern nationalist imaginations, the images the word peasant brings to mind are anachronisms that do not reflect the ways in which rural people live today. In this path-breaking book, Michael Kearney shows how the concept has been outdistanced by contemporary history. He situates the peasantry within the current social context of the transnational and post?Cold War nation-state and clears the way for alternative theoretical views.Reconceptualizing the Peasantry looks at rural society in general and considers the problematic distinction between rural and urban. Most definitions of and debates about peasants have focused on their presumed social, economic, cultural, and political characteristics, but Kearney articulates the way in which peasants define themselves in a rapidly changing world. In the process, he develops ethnographic and political forms of representation that correspond to contemporary postpeasant identities. Moving beyond a reconsideration of peasantry, the book situates anthropology in global context, showing how the discipline reconstructs itself and its subjects according to changing circumstances.

Farewell to the Peasantry? questions class-reductionist assumptions in certain Marxist and populist approaches to political movements in twentieth-century rural Mexico, highlighting the interpretation of the process of political class formation.

This book explores major shifts and reorientations in the recent history of American Anthropology, reflecting the author's vision of what anthropology is and what it has the potential to become. The title phrase 'changing fields' can be read in two ways: One meaning refers to how, since the mid-1960s, the larger national and global social, intellectual, and political fields within which American anthropology is situated have profoundly changed. The second meaning refers to how, in response to these changing fields, the author, like many other anthropologists, changed the locations of his fieldwork along with his research problems and theoretical perspectives. The book engages three fundamental intellectual-political challenges that American anthropology is destined to confront (or at its peril, avoid): becoming more self-reflexive, achieving theoretical and methodological holism, and defense of universal human rights.

This book explores the position, role and significance of the peasantry in an era of globalization, particularly of the agrarian markets and food industries. It argues that the peasant condition is characterized by a struggle for autonomy that finds expression in the creation and development of a self-governed resource base and associated forms of sustainable development. In this respect the peasant mode of farming fundamentally differs from entrepreneurial and corporate ways of farming. The author demonstrates that the peasantries are far from waning. Instead, both industrialized and developing countries are witnessing complex and richly chequered processes of 're-peasantization', with peasants now numbering over a billion worldwide. The author's arguments are based on three longitudinal studies (in Peru, Italy and The Netherlands) that span 30 years and provide original and thought-provoking insights into rural and agrarian development processes. The book combines and integrates different bodies of literature: the rich traditions of peasant studies, development sociology, rural sociology, neo-institutional economics and the recently emerging debates on Empire.

During the past decade, life in post-socialist states has been fraught with instability and conflict. This book focuses on changing rural-urban relations - and growing divisions between them - in the context of the reforms. Contributions to this volume explore responses to capitalist-oriented policies and reasons for rural disenfranchisement. The work takes an ethnographic approach to exploring how 'global' processes engage with local, rural concerns in the post-socialist world.

Popkin develops a model of rational peasant behavior and shows how village procedures result from the self-interested interactions of peasants. This political economy view of peasant behavior stands in contrast to the model of a distinctive peasant moral economy in which the village community is primarily responsible for ensuring the welfare of its members.