First published in 1977, The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984 is a significant contribution to history.

First published in 1977, The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984 is a significant contribution to history.

Agrarian transformations within and across countries have been significantly and dynamically altered during the past few decades compared to previous eras, provoking a variety of reactions from rural poor communities worldwide. The recent convergence of various crises – financial, food, energy and environmental – has put the nexus between ‘rural development’ and ‘development in general’ back onto the center stage of theoretical, policy and political agendas in the world today. Confronting these issues will require (re)engaging with critical theories, taking politics seriously, and utilizing rigorous and appropriate research methodologies. These are the common messages and implications of the various contributions to this collection in the context of a scholarship that is critical in two senses: questioning prescriptions from mainstream perspectives and interrogating popular conventions in radical thinking. This book focuses on key perspectives, frameworks and methodologies in agrarian change and peasant studies. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of rural development studies: Henry Bernstein, Terence J. Byres, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Marc Edelman, Cristóbal Kay, Benedict Kerkvliet, Philip McMichael, Shahra Razavi, Ian Scoones and Teodor Shanin. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This new and abridged edition of Scenarios of Power is a concise version of Richard Wortman's award-winning study of Russian monarchy from the seventeenth century until 1917. The author breaks new ground by showing how imperial ceremony and imagery were not simply displays of the majesty of the sovereign and his entourage, but also instruments central to the exercise of absolute power in a multinational empire. In developing this interpretation, Wortman presents vivid descriptions of coronations, funerals, parades, trips through the realm, and historical celebrations and reveals how these ceremonies were constructed or reconstructed to fit the political and cultural narratives in the lives and reigns of successive tsars. He describes the upbringing of the heirs as well as their roles in these narratives and relates their experiences to the persistence of absolute monarchy in Russia long after its demise in Europe.

Crucial to the world history of folkloristics is this key study, first published in 1992, of the development of folklore study in the Soviet Union. Nowhere else has political ideology been so heavily involved with folklore scholarship. Professor Howell has examined in depth the institutional development of folkloristics in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century, concentrating especially upon the transition from pre-revolutionary Russian to Soviet Marxist folkloristics. The study of folklore moved from narrator studies to the description of the relationship of lore to larger contexts of social groups and social classes. Showing an exceptional knowledge of Russian, political theory and folkloristics, Dana Howell provides a valuable window into the rise of folkloristics in a country undergoing almost unprecedented changes in social and political conditions.

Debates about labour markets and the identity of those who, in an economic sense, circulate within them, together with the controversies such issues generate, have in the past been confined by development studies to the Third World. Now these same concerns have shifted, as the study of development has turned its attention to how these same phenomena affect metropolitan capitalist nations. For this reason, the book does not restrict the analysis of issues such as the free/unfree labour distinction and non-class identity to Third World contexts. The reviews, review essays and essays collected here also examine similar issues now evident in metropolitan capitalism, together with their political and ideological effects and implications.