Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pamela Leonard, Deema Kaneff (Eds.) - Post-Socialist Peasant - Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and The Former Soviet Union-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2002) PDF
Pamela Leonard, Deema Kaneff (Eds.) - Post-Socialist Peasant - Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Eastern Europe, East Asia and The Former Soviet Union-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2002) PDF
Post-Socialist Peasant?
Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity
in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the
former Soviet Union
Edited by
Pamela Leonard
Independent Scholar and Adjunct Lecturer
University of North Carolina
and
Deema Kaneff
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
oatorave
*
Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Pamela Leonard and Deema
Kaneff 2002
Chapter 3 © Pamela leonard 2002
Chapter 8 © Deema Kaneff 2002
Remaining chapters © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2002
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-79339-8
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified
as the authors of this work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2002 by
PALGRAVE
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of
St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and
Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press ltd).
ISBN 978-1-349-41979-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37642-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230376427
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British library.
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Post-socialist peasant? : rural and urban constructions of identity
in Eastern Europe, East Asia and the former Soviet Union I edited
by Pamela Leonard, Deema Kaneff.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Index 221
Notes on the Contributors
vi
Notes on the Contributors vii
Frances Pine has been conducting research in Poland since the late
1970s. She is the author of many articles on kinship, gender and econ-
omy in the Polish countryside, and is co-editor of the book Surviving
Post-Socialism (1998). Her current interests include history and memory,
migration, and anthropology and law. She is at present a Bye Fellow of
Girton College, Cambridge.
Acknowledgements
viii
Acknowledgements ix
thanks to Chris Hann and Frances Pine who offered important insights
to versions of the Introduction. Their input has considerably enriched
our work and we very much appreciate their guidance and encourage-
ment throughout the project. While grateful to all those who have
inspired the ideas contained in our Introduction, in the end, we bear
the responsibility for the contents.
Some time has passed since we first met to discuss the issue of post-
socialism and changing rural-urban relations and the contributors to
this volume now live in different continents across the world. However,
the book remains the concrete product of our cooperation. In the pro-
cess of putting together this work, the editors have also learned much
from each other and we would like to acknowledge the value of this
growing friendship born of academic cooperation.
1
Introduction: Post-Socialist Peasant?
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff
In the decade since the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union, and market-oriented reforms in China and
Vietnam, changes in lifestyle such as those described above are fre-
quently noted; the old boundaries that marked rural from urban have
radically altered. This book explores of the concept 'peasantry' in the
The setting
The three regions from which the papers are drawn - East Asia (China
and Vietnam), the former USSR and Eastern Europe - provide the spatial
context of the work. While the areas display considerable diversity, they
also present significant commonality - in terms of the main theme -
justifying their placement within the same work. In these regions agri-
culture has played and continues to play a significant role in the lives of
the people. Indeed the majority of the population in post-socialist states
maintains connections to the land, a situation quite different from that
in 'the west'. These regions have also been the geographical source of
much of the literature on 'peasantry' published from early this century
to the present - and more recently, the subject of important social,
economic and political reforms.
If we consider the post-socialist changes in their widest framework,
they are an attempt to dismantle the centralised state system founded
on Marxism-Leninism, replacing socialist ideologies - in their divergent
manifestations - with principles of the free market. The now symbolic-
ally important date of 1989, or 1991 for the Soviet Union, signifies the
point at which a critical upheaval of the political and economic land-
scape occurred. In many cases, however, the reforms were initiated
several years earlier. Gorbachev's perestroika was begun in the mid-
1980s, while in China 1982 marked the beginning of widespread agri-
cultural and market reforms (which were significantly extended in the
early 1990s). In the same period, capitalist countries have also taken
steps towards dismantling the welfare state and privatising once nation-
ally owned services, but these policies have not involved such massive
shifts in the state's aims and its ideology. Post-socialist governments are
now adopting principles once associated exclusively with capitalism -
that is, large-scale privatisation of property and the free-market
economy. In these states people are reassessing models of progress and
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 3
on cheap labour from the countryside. The effect in all three regions
includes: migrating populations resulting from unemployment, low
prices paid for agricultural products, changing laws and increasing re-
gional differentiation.
Growing interdependency between rural and urban peoples in a con-
text of an expanded market economy is leading, in turn, to the 'com-
moditisation' of social relationships, a phenomenon true for relations
within rural areas as between them and 'outsiders'. Everyday activities
once carried out as 'favours' - long-term exchanges between kin and
friends - are now given monetary form or at least reciprocated with a
valued precision which once would have been offensive to all parties
involved.5 At the same time, rural and urban inhabitants everywhere
comment on the moral disintegration they are witnessing, on growing
crime rates and on the deepening gap between rich and poor.
Since collectivised agriculture was not merely a means of production
with economic importance, but embedded in political and social rela-
tions (Hann 1998, Hivon 1998), the withdrawal of the state from rural
areas through decollectivisation has implications far beyond the strictly
economic. Apart from those points noted above - increasing connec-
tions between rural and urban regions and commodification of social
relationships - economic instability has also provided a framework for
rising nationalism and anti-western feelings. These tendencies are symp-
tomatic of the general disruption and destabilisation of social networks.
Decollectivisation has resulted in an increase of a wide variety of ten-
sions, including those associated with ethnic, generational, and gender
inequalities (see Bridger and Pine 1998). The divisions indicate a 'process
of individuation', where the pursuit of individual property rights has
made fragile many of the solidarities of the socialist period (Verdery
1994: 1108). Furthermore, greater village autonomy, arising from the
state relinquishing its command and control over agriculture, has
also meant a shift in political dynamics. Local figures now running
agricultural production are important actors with significant influence
and power in determining production and the control of community
resources. Most often these leaders are not accountable to anyone
further up the political hierarchy, as they were during the socialist
period.
Thus, decollectivisation has resulted in political, social, economic, as
well as physical upheaval, with far-reaching and often unintended con-
sequences (Bridger and Pine 1998: Introduction). In this book we focus
on one of the many inequalities which have come sharply into focus as a
consequence of post-socialist reforms: the growing polarisation between
6 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Theories of the peasantry, like all theories, tell us as much about the
circumstances and conditions of the analyst, as of the subject being
described. It is with this spirit of reflection that this volume takes up
the category of peasantry. Of particular interest to the papers collected
here are the interactions, commonalities and differences between west-
ern social scientists on the one hand and political and intellectual elites
who determine policy in Eastern Europe, Russia and China and Vietnam
on the other. There has been some remarkable overlap in concepts used
by these distinct groups, although they have rarely used the same con-
cepts at the same time. The peasant emerged as an important socio-
logical category as theorists worldwide sought to construct models of
social progress and come to terms with the growth of capitalism. 'The
peasantry' have been a problem for these theorists; they embody a mode
of production and way of thinking that was felt to be antithetical to
capitalist and socialist development alike, while at the same time, their
subordinate class position and their sheer numbers have made them an
important revolutionary force that could not be ignored.
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 7
reference to past events and theories. The following two sections deal
with theories developed before the reform period and are divided into
socialist theories of the peasantry and constructions of the peasantry
emanating from social science in the west. It is necessary to include both
these bodies of knowledge since approaches in the post-socialist period
are rooted in both capitalist and socialist social science and the histories
that underlie both types of state ideologies. We seek to demonstrate that
social sciences and political histories have followed parallel tracks that
have at times reinforced one another. The final section looks at the post-
socialist period when the marketplace has gained unprecedented prom-
inence with policymakers. It is in this current period that intellectuals,
amongst others, within post-socialist states have rediscovered the con-
cept of peasantry just as western anthropologists seem to be questioning
the enduring relevancy of the concept.15 These differences, once again,
relate to different underlying definitions of the meaning of social pro-
gress, a question we argue is best explored by including local ideas, a task
taken up in more detail by the following chapters.
The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the con-
servative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condi-
tion of his social existence, the smallholding... not the country folk
who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies,
linked up with the towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied
bondage to this older order want to see themselves and their small-
holding saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents
not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant; not his
judgement, but his prejudice; not his future, but his past...
(Marx 1978: 609)
urban-factory sector above the rural one. While surplus profit from
agricultural production was channelled to the prioritised area - industry
- rather than being reinvested in agriculture, the position of rural in-
habitants was nevertheless aided by state investment, carried out
through collectivisation and the 'modernisation' of agriculture.
Such an approach underlined socialist policy, not only in the USSR,
but also after World War II, in the East European countries and China as
well. The close association between Moscow and the East European
Communist Parties originates from the inter-war period, when all but
the Czechoslovakia Communist Party were forced into illegality (Schop-
flin 1993: 51). It was under the USSR-controlled Comintern that
material resources were passed on to the East European parties. The
Comintern set policies, fostered closeness between the parties and
expected them to follow a Marxist-Leninist (Bolshevik) type of social-
ism. The pressure of Bolshevism especially in the initial inter-war period,
was an important component in the development of the communist
parties in Eastern Europe (Schopflin 1993: 47-51). Via the Comintern,
Soviet Marxism was given out as the true Marxism to Communists world-
wide. 'And it was still a scientific interpretation, only now it was the
vanguard group, the Communist Party (of the USSR) which was equipped
with the scientific understanding of history' (Marx and Beyond, 1973). The
parties never freed themselves from Soviet influence, although arguably
the period of de-Stalinisation allowed limited scope for diverging devel-
opments (for example, the cases of Hungary, Poland or even Romania).16
The fact that the East European Communist Parties were closely
bound to USSR dictates was clearly evident in the policy area with
which we are most concerned - agriculture and the 'peasantry'. Al-
though the countries entered the post-World War II period with
differing levels of development, the East European Communist Parties
modelled themselves on the Soviet Union form of Marxism-Leninism
that gave priority to industrialisation. Rapid industrial development
both in heavy and light industries was dependent upon the cooperative
organisation of agriculture, relying on the use of modern technology
and industry. In Eastern Europe, agricultural collectivisation provided a
surplus labour force that was absorbed by industry. The commitment to
industrialisation programmes thus created a huge population shift, as
once predominantly rural countries became urbanised. Thus the pre-
dominantly rural-located populations of the pre-World War II period
were reversed by the 1980s.
Agricultural production based on cooperative organisation was
viewed from the perspective of Marxist-Leninist ideology as decreasing
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 15
the class distance between all working people - between the urban
proletariat and the new agricultural workers in rural areas. The latter,
now enjoying conditions similar to the urban proletariat (including
pension schemes, holiday periods and so on), were placed on an equal
footing as regards the means of production, at least in the eyes of the
law, if not in practice. 'Agricultural Workers' became a term signalling
the merger. Such policies improved conditions for the peasant popula-
tion as a whole and contributed to the better opportunities available for
particular individuals of peasant background to climb up the political
ladder. The improvement in the peasant social standing was so pro-
nounced, that some commentators felt the revolution had been co-
opted by the rural population, transformed into what was then termed
'peasant socialism' (Tepicht 1975). Closing the gap between the urban
proletariat and agricultural workers was believed to provide the main
condition for the establishment of socialist equality, based on the elim-
ination of class difference. Ultimately this provided the means of transi-
tion of the socialist state into communism.
Despite the differing means of creating collective agricultural enter-
prises - from state-owned collectives formed by the nationalisation of
land in the USSR, to the legally privately owned land in Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria and Hungary which was worked cooperatively - all were driven
by the same concern to create particular relations of production that
would allow the historically inevitable development of society. This
vision of social development necessitated the elimination of the 'peas-
antry'. An effect was to negatively position the 'peasantry', even the
newly termed 'agricultural workers', with respect to the more modern,
higher living standards of the urban proletariat who represented a
more advanced stage of Marxist-Leninist development. The discourse
of difference in terms of the town/village, urban/rural contrast was a
way of speaking about class relations (Kaneff forthcoming); while
the concern to eliminate distinctions between categories, to bring
about class unification, was viewed as a historical necessity. Interpret-
ations of rural workers as 'backward', 'conservative', 'resistant to change',
'insular' and 'uneducated' - amongst other negative labels abundant in
academic and other socialist writings of the pre-1989 period - logically
followed from their location in a Marxist-Leninist history.
The role of intellectuals in this project of socialist development is
complex.17 Populist variants of Marxism are particularly noteworthy as
alternative formulations ultimately persecuted out of existence. In
Russia, the term populist (narodnik) was applied in reference to a group
of intellectuals who were encouraged to 'go to the people' after being
16 Post-Socialist Peasant?
This view, shared by many theorists, raises the questions: is the weakness
of peasant political movements a social fact, or is the problem that many
theorists judge the peasant movements according to their own idea of
what constitutes a social revolution? What exactly are the criteria for
effective political action?
Too frequently peasant political movements are held up to the im-
probable standard of wholesale rejection of capitalism in the abstract
and/or a sublime resolution of class conflict. James Scott has recognised
that such an abstract approach is alien to the village context; it is 'too
remote', and fails to 'capture the texture of local experience' (1985: 348).
For this reason Scott concludes that resistance by subordinate classes
'begins close to the ground, rooted firmly in the homely but meaningful
realities of daily experience' (ibid). This focus on the quotidian may be
closer to judging peasant political action by the actors' own criteria, but
does Scott's focus on resistance, with its stress on class oppositions, leave
us with a one-dimensional account of peasant political life? If the argu-
ment against peasant revolutionary consciousness is tautological, with
change measured by the terms of the analyst, rather than by the pea-
sant's own categories, then perhaps we need to appreciate the particu-
larities of peasant moral codes, worldviews and historical schema that
lie behind their revolutionary political actions. As Evans (1986: 40-1)
has noted, 'While the content of the peasants' vision is the raw material
of his analysis, it is never the aim of Scott's analysis and so the "good
20 Post-Socialist Peasant?
life" is never taken to mean more than petty struggles for small material
gains.' The shift in emphasis from revolutionary consciousness to every-
day resistance seems to reproduce the idea that the peasants have no
larger sense of where they are headed. 23
It makes little sense to ask why people hold these values, in the hopes
that, discovering the causes, we can bring about change. At this level
22 Post-Socialist Peasant?
values and categories of thought are ultimate and given; they have no
causes and they cannot be further reduced.
(1971: 295)
Thus the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of the 'modes
of thought' debate which considered the question of whether 'science
and rationality' was a qualitatively different way of interpreting reality,
separating its adherents from the rest of the primitive world (Horton
and Finnegan 1973; Wilson 1970). This 'us and them' division repro-
duced the older opposition between superstitious and backward peas-
ants and rational and progressive modernisers. As Flower demonstrates
in Chapter 2 of this volume, it is an approach which still has currency
with Marxist social scientists in China today.
In a political economy framework, however, this cultural division
dissolves. The focus on relations of power gave the political economists,
such as Eric Wolf (1969) or Sidney Mintz (1973), a more dynamic ap-
proach to meaning which put all belief systems on a more equal footing.
For political economists, cultural constructs are seen as a reaction to
changing circumstance rather than simply the inherited values charac-
teristic of an ancient way of life. Cultural meaning is no longer idiosyn-
cratic but rather has a universal basis defined by the pursuit of economic
and political interest.
This perspective as it relates to peasantries has had a most articulate
and sophisticated proponent in Eric Wolf. Although Wolf's earlier work
on peasants (1955, 1966) was focused on delineating peasant social
types from ethnographic example, in his later work (see below), he
emphasised the processual nature of culture formation. He stressed
that culture, even so-called traditional culture, should be seen as a
process, not a given (1982: 387), and thus the persistence of cultural
practices required explanation as much as the advent of new forms
(1969: xiii). Here, cultures are conceived of as responses to identifiable
determinants (1982: 388). In Europe and the People without History (1982),
Wolf's anthropology examines the implications of modes of production
for understanding social classes, advancing an approach focused on the
exercise of power. He explored particular modes of production such as
those based on kinship, tribute, and capital, their attendant power
relations and intrinsic contradictions, looking at the ways in which
they have tied people together for better or worse. His project, moreover,
was to look at the world as a whole, a totality, a system (1982: 385).
Importantly, he states that modes of production represent neither stages
nor even types, but rather represent ways of thinking about key strategic
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 23
relationships that form the context of human lives (1982: 100). This
refusal to reduce people to the typologies that inform social scientific
analysis means that Wolf avoided the worst pitfalls of an essentialising
discourse.
Nevertheless, because of his earlier work, Wolf has been placed along-
side Scott as a 'moral economist', an approach that asserted that peasant
society was a distinct type of moral community. Wolf asserted that peas-
ants typically aim to keep the destructive aspects of market penetration at
bay; and where they are self-provisioning closed corporate communities,
they can be somewhat successful in this effort (1966:44-8; 1969: xiv). For
Scott, it was specifically the peasant's economic position on the brink of
survival that committed him/her to communal over individualist strat-
egies which were better able to address the urgent priority of risk aversion
(1976: 1). Wolf and Scott both assert that as new forms of social relations
attending market formation are accepted to various degrees, traditional
aspects of peasant life come under siege (Wolf 1966; 1969: 48; Scott 1976:
1-11). Capitalism progresses by playing to tensions already present
within the peasant communities, for example the interests of provincial
elites against others; and ultimately, market development means peas-
ants are displaced as land is commoditised (Wolf 1969: 280-3). This
notion of social opposition has a strong resonance with Lenin's model
of social differentiation articulated in his work The Development of Capit-
alism in Russia (1956). In Lenin's view, increasing commercialisation in
the countryside was transforming the bulk of peasants into a proletariat
in opposition to a class of large-scale capitalist agricultural producers.
Scott (1976) explains that the peasant tends to look back nostalgically to
tradition because, in contrast to the new relations of production, it was a
system which guaranteed the right of subsistence, just as Wolf (1969)
interprets peasant political movements of the twentieth century, (fre-
quently found in the form of socialist revolutions), as backlash efforts
to stave off the destructive aspects of capitalism and preserve traditional
rights. Both Wolf (1969: 275) and Scott (1985: 346) quote Bertold Brecht:
'it is not communism that is radical but capitalism'. From this perspec-
tive, socialism and peasantries have a natural alliance in their opposition
to the transformations of the market-place.
Popkin (1979: Ch. 1) asserted that such views of peasant behaviour
made Wolf and Scott (as well as Polanyi and Hobsbawn) moral econo-
mists as opposed to political economists. He set out to demonstrate that
peasants are ultimately just as individualistic, self-interested and calcu-
lating as the shrewdest corporate players, possessing no special claim to
moral frameworks. By questioning the risk-averse characterisation and
24 Post-Socialist Peasant?
fact that the concept of peasantry is 'ever more out of alignment with
reality' (Kearney 1996: 6; see also Cohen 1993). Myron Cohen has
described how the term 'peasant' (nongmin) was adopted in China with
Marxist and non-Marxist western notions of the peasantry 'putting the
full weight of the Western heritage to use in the new and often harshly
negative representation of China's rural population' (1993: 156-7, also
Flower Chapter 2, this volume). Cohen is a champion of the peasants/
farmers against their unfair characterisation - as 'backward', 'feudal' and
'stagnant' - at the hands of the Chinese elite who, he points out, persist
in the stereotype despite the fact that many rural areas have undergone
rapid economic diversification, mechanisation, and modernisation.
If the peasantry is a politicised concept it is not surprising that sources
differ on its enduring relevancy. Chinese applied anthropology con-
tinues to adhere to a Marxist evolutionary schema while western
anthropologists perceive this approach as having a primary aim of
assimilating 'primitives' into Han civilisation (Guldin 1994: 247).
Cohen, for his part, argues that intellectuals would do well to replace
the essentialised peasant cultural identity with an approach to Chinese
economic culture based on the 'family as a corporate unit creating,
deploying, and managing its human resources and its property in a
highly commoditised environment so as to provide for family survival
or enhance family welfare' (1993: 165). Cohen's suggestion that we
abandon essentialised notions of peasant culture cuts to the heart of
the matter. We are less comfortable, however, with his suggestion that
the old notion be replaced with a definition so narrowly focused on
family economy. While it is certainly true that 'enhancing family wel-
fare' leaves plenty of room for subjective pursuits, we are concerned that
positing this kind of economic identity makes it an attractive tool in the
hands of economic reductionists; a means to undermine consideration
of the substantive content of the political visions and cultural practices of
the people we study. It seems preferable to develop an anthropological
perspective that neither assigns to the peasant an essential identity
outside of history, nor assumes his/her views are of the same logic and
same intent as that which drives capitalist economies. The point here is
not that rural inhabitants renounce wealth or the hope of economic
progress, but rather that their critiques of particular programmes for
progress have content worth considering in their own right.
Our focus on identity is an attempt to look at rural-urban relation-
ships in terms of rural people's broader goals. Whereas economic experts
and policy-makers initially predicted a quick and smooth transform-
ation to market capitalism, the fact that socialist forms have persisted
28 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Post-socialist peasant?
Notes
1. We are aware that labels such as 'state agents', 'policy makers' and 'intellec-
tuals' mask as much diversity as the term 'peasant'. A number of chapters in
this work highlight some of the complexity and variation existent in urban
identities. However, for our purposes of understanding the rural perspective,
a more detailed exploration of urban categories has to be limited.
2. In the case of China, land has not been privatised, nevertheless, there is
individual responsibility for rights over the land.
3. Kovacs 1998: 139.
4. Personal communication, Frances Pine.
5. In an inversion of this process, gift-giving may also be used to create a sense
of distance from pervading commoditisation (Czegledy Ch. 9, this volume).
See also Flower and Leonard 1996 for an account of traditional gift-giving
and the process of increasing commoditisation in the Chinese countryside.
6. In an interesting exception to the portrayal of peasants as antithetical to
progress, Humphrey notes that contemporary reformers in Russia called for a
return to the old peasant archetype as a model for decollectivisation. It may
be worth noting that this idealisation of peasantness took place in a context
where there was no living group thought to represent this peasant ideal.
7. Redfield (1947, 1950, 1956, 1962), Redfield and Singer (1971).
8. Kroeber (1948), Kroeber and Kluckholm (1952).
9. See Kearney (1996) for a more complete exploration of the idea that the
concept of peasant in social science proceeded out of the dualistic thinking
of the cold war era.
10. The case of Poland offers the exception that proves the rule. There it was the
peasant's attachment to small family farms that became problematic, since
the family farm was the form that prevailed in Poland under socialism.
11. See e.g. Redfield (1956), Shanin (1966), Wolf (1966).
12. An irony also discussed by Cohen (1993), Kearney (1996) and Ching and
Creed (1997).
13. The notion that peasants are intrinsically narrow-minded and politically
weak is very persistent. On page one of a recent book on Village China,
Christiansen and Zhang write: 'Yet we do not wish to take the notion of
peasant "power" too far. Kate Xiao Zhou (1996: 12) is right in regarding
peasant behaviour as a "spontaneous, unorganised, leaderless, non-ideo-
logical, apolitical movement". Her formulation reveals both the strengths
and limitations of "peasant power". Peasants are strong because they are
spontaneous, unorganised, leaderless and so on, but they are weak for the
same reason. They cannot coordinate and aggregate their political interest.
They can react only to their different realities, indifferent to and oblivious of
the proclaimed policies of the state, and only occasionally respond to them if
they intrude into the village reality, or they can bend and break the rules
imposed from outside' (1998). For an account of (a successfully) organized
political action in the Chinese countryside involving the conscious construc-
tion of a positive rural identity see Flower and Leonard (1997).
14. Evident in Ching and Creed's Introduction (1997).
15. For example Kearney (1996) and Cohen (1993).
38 Post-Socialist Peasant?
16. Cf. the marginal position of Tito's Yugoslavia with the compliant position of
Bulgaria.
17. Verdery (1991: 88) indicates the tense position of intellectuals in socialist
Romania, as a group both necessary to the legitimisation of the state but also
posing a potential danger to it. However, the Party's control of culture's
means of production (Verdery 1991: 89), and internal competition within
the intellectual domain between factions vying for resources controlled cen-
trally (Verdery 1991: 92-4), frequently served to bring about intellectual
compliance with Party goals.
18. Lenin offers his critique of the populist position in The Development of Capit-
alism in Russia (1956). See e.g. his comments on how the 'Narodnik econo-
mists' got it wrong (182).
19. See e.g. Pickowicz (1994), Hann (1987).
20. We would like to acknowledge Regina Abrami (personal communication) for
outlining these differences. Abrami also observed that 'the corrupt' versus
'the society' held significance in Vietnam.
21. See discussion in Shanin (1971: 470). Also see Gamson (1991) for a descrip-
tion of Wolf's invention and participation in the first 'teach-in' on the war in
Vietnam.
22. Wolf (1966; 1969) Shanin (1971, 1972, 1987, 1990).
23. See Kelliher's (1992) account of peasant political action in China leading up
to the reform.
24. Kearney's recent work (1996) offers a more comprehensive account; see also
bibliography in Gutkind et al. (1984).
25. See Redfield (1947, 1956 and 1962), also Redfield and Singer (1971 esp. 358-
59). For a critique of this position, see Lewis, who recognises the ethnocen-
trism implicit in the rural-urban dichotomy (1965: 494), the danger of
generalisations about the nature of social life in the city (1965: 497), even
the limitations of seeing primary relations as less important in the cities than
in rural areas (1965: 497); criticisms also discussed in Lewis (1953).
26. Shanin (1971: 471).
27. This may seem ironic given that Bailey is ultimately known as a major
proponent of transactionalist theory, a school which analysed human behav-
iour as consistently based on gaming-like calculations of self-interest (see e.g.
Bailey 1971). Nevertheless, in this work he is concerned with discerning
calculations of interest as founded on peasant 'cognitive maps' and peasant
notions of a 'moral community' of insiders versus outsiders. While the
peasant is calculating his interest, he does so from a foundation of potentially
misguided cultural notions that may actually confound his interests.
28. It is in this tradition that the rediscovery of the theories of Chayanov by
western social scientists can be placed. Chayanov emphasised that his theory
of the labour-consumer balance (asserting that peasants limit their self-ex-
ploitation when basic subsistence needs are met) should not be seen as 'a
sweet little picture of the Russian peasantry in the likeness of the moral
French peasants, satisfied with everything and living like birds of the air'.
Peasants' behaviour was instead to be seen as a function of the economic
circumstances wherein they had to win 'every kopek by hard, intensive toil'
such that even if Rothschild 'for all his bourgeois acquisitive psychology' was
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 39
Select Bibliography
Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso).
Bailey, F. G. (1969), Stratagems and Spoils. A Social Anthropology of Politics (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell).
(1971), 'On the peasant view of the bad life' in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and
Peasant Societies, (Penguin: Harmondsworth) 299-321.
Bernstein, H. (1990), 'Taking the part of the peasants' in H. Bernstein, B. Crow, M.
Mackintosh and C. Martin (eds), The Food Question: People Versus Profit?
(London: Earthscan Publications) 69-79.
Bourgholtzer, F. (1999), 'Aleksandr Chayanov and Russian Berlin', The Journal of
Peasant Studies, 26: 4, 13-53.
Bridger, S. and Pine, F. (1998), (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies and
Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Rou-
tledge).
Bruno, M. (1998), 'Playing the cooperation game: strategies around international
aid in post-socialist Russia' in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Social-
ism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet
Union (London: Routledge).
Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. (1999), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change
in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).
Chayanov, A. V. (1966), The Theory of Peasant Economy, D. Thorner, B. Kerblay and
R. E. F. Smith (eds), (Homewood, 111.: Irwin).
Ching, B. and Creed, G. W. (1997), (eds), Knowing your Place: Rural Identity and
Cultural Hierarchy (New York: Routledge).
Christiarsen, F. and Zhang, Junzuo (1998), Village Inc.: Chinese Rural Society in the
1990s (Richmond: Curzon).
Cohen, M. L. (1991), 'Being Chinese: the peripherilization of traditional identity',
Daedalus, 120: 2 (Spring) 113-34.
(1993), 'Cultural and political inventions in modern China: the case of the
Chinese "Peasant"' Daedalus, 122: 2 (Spring), 151-70.
40 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Evans, G. (1986), From Moral Economy to Remembered Village: The Sociology of James
C. Scott (Clayton, Australia : Monash University).
Fischer, E. (1999), 'Cultural logic and Maya identity', Current Anthropology, 40: 4
(Aug.-Oct.) 473-500.
Flower, J. and Leonard, P. (1996), 'Community values and state cooptation: civil
society in the Sichuan countryside' in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society:
Challenging Western Models (London: Routledge) 199-221.
(1997), 'Defining cultural life in the Chinese countryside: the case of the
Chuanzhu Temple' in F. N. Pieke, E. B. Vermeer and W. L. Chong (eds), Coopera-
tive and Collective in China's Rural Development: Between State and Private Interest
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe) 273-90.
Foster, G. M. (1965), 'Peasant society and the image of limited good', American
Anthropologist, 67, 293-315.
Gamson, W. (1991), 'Commitment and agency in social movements', Sociological
Forum, 6: 1 (March) 27-50.
Gudeman, S. and Rivera, A. (1990), Conversations in Colombia: The Domestic
Economy in Life and Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Guldin, G. E. (1994), The Saga ofAnthropology in China: From Malinowski to Moscow
to Mao (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe).
Gutkind, P. C. W., Papadopoulos, D., Vincent, S. and Aprahamian, S. (1984),
'Third World peasantries: a select bibliography', Peasant Studies, 12: (1) 30-89.
Hann, C. M. (1987), 'The politics of anthropology in socialist Eastern Europe' in
A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home, ASA monographs 25 (London: Tavistock
Publications) 139-53.
(1995), 'Philosophers' models on the Carpathian Lowlands' in J. Hall (ed.),
Civil Society: Theory History Comparison (London: Polity Press) 158-82.
(1998), (ed.), Property Relations. Renewing the Anthropological Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press).
and Dunn, E. (1996), (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London:
Routledge).
Harries-Jones, P. (1993), 'Between science and shamanism: the advocacy of envir-
onmentalism in Toronto' in K. Milton (ed.); Environmentalism: The View from
Anthropology (London: Routledge).
Hauser, P. M. (1965), 'Observations on the urban-folk and urban-rural dichoto-
mies as forms of western ethnocentrism', The Study of Urbanization (New York:
Wiley) 503-17.
Hinton, W. (1991), The Privatization of China: The Great Reversal (London: Earth-
scan Publications).
Hivon, M. (1998), 'The bullied farmer. Social pressure as a survival strategy?' in
S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism: Local Strategies and Regional
Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (London: Routledge)
33-51.
Hobsbawn, E. and Ranger, T. (1983), (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Horton, R. and Finnegan, R. (1973), (eds), Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in
Western and Non-Western Societies (London: Faber & Faber).
Kaneff, D. (forthcoming), Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a Model'
Bulgarian Village (Oxford: Berghahn).
Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 41
(1982), Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press).
Yang, M. (1994), Gifts, Favors and Banquets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Zhou, K. X. (1996), How the Farmers Changed China. Power of the People (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press).
2
Peasant Consciousness
John Flower
In 1992, my wife and I went to the small city of Ya'an in western Sichuan
to attend the babahui, a large rural market held on the annual festival of
the city god. We walked to Ya'an with a group of young people from
Xiakou, a mountain village of 400 people, ten kilometres from town,
where we lived during our fieldwork. One of our companions was Yao
Suhui, a seventeen year-old girl who often served as our guide. Suhui
faced a future of limited possibilities, and a past that was equally restrict-
ing. She also faced discrimination as a 'peasant', as witnessed in my
fieldnotes for that day:
44
she could by studying the seeds for sale very intently. As we left, her
reaction was to downplay the incident and to say that 'We peasants
(nongmin) always run into that kind of thing.' Later we heard reports
that our appearance in the city with a group of peasants had aroused
a lot of city people's vicious comments behind our backs...
the 'thought tide' (sichao) renaissance of the 1980s, during which many
intellectuals reflected on what they perceived as their historical failure
to modernise China. These intellectuals renewed the unfulfilled mission
of creating a modern, 'enlightened' China through science and democ-
racy - a mission bequeathed by an earlier generation of intellectuals in
the first decades of the century, and given an added sense of urgency by
the resurgence of 'feudalism' and brutal suffering inflicted on intellec-
tuals as a class in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). This combined
sense of mission and historical experience reinforced the conviction
that intellectuals in the 1980s needed more than ever to undertake
both national construction and the reconstruction of the national char-
acter. Establishing a new intellectual identity involved defining relation-
ships with other segments of Chinese society, especially with China's
peasants. Intellectuals asked, what was the nature of that relationship,
historically, and how had it influenced the development of China's
cultural identity?
One critical view of the way Chinese intellectuals have answered these
questions is that they are elitist in their attitudes toward peasants.
Myron Cohen (1993) highlights the invented, contingent nature of
the peasant cultural category by pointing out the new language that
appeared in intellectual discourse during the modernisation campaigns
of the New Culture Movement (1915-27). The radical break from trad-
ition engineered by new 'intellectuals' (zhishifenzi) in this period was the
conceptual precedent for social scientists and political activists in the
1920s and 1930s to introduce neologisms such as nongmin (peasant),
mixin (superstition) and fengjian (feudalism). Intellectuals working
under the new imperative of modernisation-through-cultural icono-
clasm found their concrete target in peasants and in what peasants
were made to represent: a historical force blocking progress, an eco-
nomic system perpetuating poverty, and a stubbornly persistent reposi-
tory of feudal values. 'Rural backwardness' and the 'peasant question'
became not just a pragmatic problem to be solved, but also the symbolic
realm through which competing visions of China's cultural identity
were defined.2
From the historical vantage point of the post-Mao era, many intellec-
tuals, especially younger scholars, rejected this positive stance toward the
peasants, some going so far as to criticise what they perceived as the older
generation's complicity in their own persecution. Emboldened by Deng
Xiaoping's 1978 rehabilitation of intellectuals as 'thought workers' -
symbolically encoded in the appearance of a bespectacled scientist along-
side the worker-peasant-soldier triumvirate on Chinese currency - social
critics began to call for a return to the New Culture Movement ideal of
developing a politically 'independent personality' in intellectuals, and
for a reassertion of their rightful place of leadership in society. Where
intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s faced the peasants hat in hand in an
attitude of humility and admiration, ready to sacrifice themselves for the
nation, the generation who took the stage in the 1980s saw peasant
values in a negative light, and blamed China's backward condition -
and their own low social status - on the 'peasant consciousness' (nongmin
yishi) that had permeated Chinese society. Intellectuals defined peasant
consciousness as a way of thinking, born of 'primitive' subsistence agri-
culture and stubbornly resistant to historical change, that stood as an
essentialised reflection of all that is wrong with Chinese culture.
50 Post-Socialist Peasant?
'Peasant consciousness' has soaked into our system, into our daily
life. It's everywhere. When you fight it, it just becomes part of you.
I've tried to be rid of it, but I'm afraid it has seeped into every cell of
my body.
(Link 1992: 138-9)
Intellectuals used the dual nature theory, and the idea of feudalism, as
ready-to-hand explanations of historical failure, but in doing so they
took the discussion of peasant consciousness out of history and into the
realm of 'human nature'. As Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s began to
'rediscover humanity' and reflect on the Chinese national character,
they developed a positive identity and set of values associated with the
idea of the intellectual's 'independent personality' (dull renge) (Wan
1991: 72), and a corresponding negative identity and set of values in
the concept of a peasant personality or peasant consciousness.
Culture fever
In the post-Mao renaissance of Chinese intellectual life, the evaluation
of tradition and development of Chinese culture were the central ex-
pressions of intellectuals' sense of social concern. After 30 years of
Maoist rule, during which 'culture' was relegated to the epiphenomenal
level of 'superstructure' or cynically manipulated in revolutionary class
struggle, Chinese scholars rediscovered culture as a live issue determin-
ing the fate of their nation. As Lin Tongqi describes the new place of
culture in Chinese intellectual discourse, 'now it is widely held that
culture as patterns of behaviour, as value systems, or as structures of
meaning not only has an independent existence of its own, but also is
sedimented into the deep psychological structure of each individual'
(Lin 1995: 741).6 Scholars explored the new field of 'culturology' (wen-
hua xue) in search of a qualitative definition of the 'humanity' they had
rediscovered after years of Marxist dogma.
'Culture fever' began in the discipline of history, when, in the early
1980s, the question of reviving the study of Chinese culture first arose.
By 1986, research on Chinese culture had reached a flood tide, and the
'fever' had spread to philosophy and social sciences such as anthropol-
ogy and folklore studies. The debates focused on interpreting the 'deep
structure' 7 of Chinese traditions (especially Confucianism and, to a
lesser extent, Daoism), on the comparative study of Chinese and west-
ern cultures (Li and Zhang 1988), and on questions of methodology in
culture studies.8 In its most basic sense, culture fever put humanity, the
'subjective', at the centre of the intellectual agenda, using it as a criter-
ion, along with scientific rationality, against which the cultural trad-
ition could be judged.
Just as culture fever had many dimensions, it also was carried out on
many levels. Dialogue on the valuation of Chinese traditional culture
was not limited to the 'cultural luminaries' of Beijing University, Fudan
University in Shanghai, or the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
52 Post-Socialist Peasant?
although these served as the focal sites of debate. The very nature of the
topic discussed - Chinese cultural identity - was inclusive, and interest
ran high among not just less famous academics but the educated public
in general. In addition to over 1500 articles published in academic
journals and in more popular periodicals such as New China Digest
(Xinhua Wenzhai) and Du Shu, many new book series dealt with Chinese
culture, as did articles in national newspapers, especially the People's
Daily and Guangming Daily. Culture fever peaked in intellectual circles
in 1986, but it reached its zenith among a broader audience in 1988 with
the airing of the television documentary River Elegy (Heshang), which
presented a distilled version of many of the more iconoclastic ideas
developed in culture fever debates.9
Heshang is a kaleidoscope of images, interviews and historical refer-
ences, a documentary designed to topple the blocks of received wisdom
that form the edifice of Chinese cultural patriotism. One by one the
symbols, national heroes and historical legacy of an 'ancient people' are
toppled and replaced with a (largely) negative assessment of Chinese
culture.
Perhaps the most celebrated example of this inversion of symbolic
meaning is the treatment of the Great Wall, seen not as a symbol of
Chinese greatness, but only 'a great and tragic gravestone forged by
historical destiny' which 'can by no means represent strength, initiative,
and glory; it can only represent an isolationist, conservative and incom-
petent defence and cowardly lack of aggression' (Su and Luxiang 1991:
130). The iconoclast reinterpretation of the Great Wall proceeds through
a kind of 'naturalism' or 'cultural objectification' from a physical object
to a characteristic 'psychology', or 'spirit'. Thus Xie Xuanjun, a lumi-
nary of the 'culture fever' movement, and a consultant and co-author of
Heshang, raised the idea of China's 'Great Wall spirit u(changcheng jing-
shen)" characteristically long on conservatism, short on innovation; it
pays attention to defensive methods but lacks the will to attack; it
promotes virtue while scorning efficiency; it is content with poverty
and with fate but unwilling to take risks...' (quoted in Su and Luxiang
1991: 130, fn 48).
In episode four of Heshang, 'The New Era', this social science icono-
clasm is extended to the human half of the naturalist metaphor in a
commentary on peasant psychology. In the traditional Confucian hier-
archy, the social status of peasants was the highest, a recognition of their
importance as producers of food. In Mao's time, the peasant - and
especially the 'poor and lower middle peasant' - was elevated to a high
position in the new revolutionary hierarchy, and peasant rebellions in
John Flower 53
ants in the communist base areas. In this sense, the story Feng tells is as
much about the unfulfilled mission of intellectuals as about peasants.
Indeed, peasants appear as an abstract consciousness, a historical 'force',
but the historical 'subject' is the intellectual class who lead or fail to lead
that force toward the ideals of democracy and rationality. Thus peasant
consciousness is a sin not of moral failure but of ignorance; a sin that
can only be expiated by the leadership of the enlightened.
Feng develops a typology of peasant consciousness that breaks the
concept down into its constituent abstract 'isms' (zhuyi): egalitarianism
(pingjun zhuyi) in economic consciousness, the worship of power (bai
quan zhuyi) in political consciousness, 'ethicism' (lunli zhuyi) as the
hallmark of moral consciousness, 'closedness' (fengbi zhuyi) in social
relations, and the 'obscurantism' (mengwei zhuyi) of religious conscious-
ness. This approach that combines abstraction with historical analysis
makes Peasant Consciousness and China a blueprint of the negative peas-
ant identity, and a mirror to intellectuals' thinking on their historical
relationship with that peasant 'other'.
Feng's typology of peasant consciousness builds from the axiomatic
proposition that 'Chinese peasant consciousness is a unity possessing a
dual nature,' and his historical explanation of the peasantry's dual
nature closely follows Marxist theory. As he expresses this widely held
point of view, Chinese peasants
The argument ostensibly deals with the feudal period of Chinese history,
but it applies equally as an indictment of the egalitarian economic
policies and political campaigns under Maoist 'peasant socialism'. The
criticism of the failed revolution is not simply suggested in veiled alle-
gory, but rather follows from the internal logic of the abstraction itself,
where peasant consciousness was produced by historical social relations,
yet exists outside of history - affecting it, obstructing it, persisting
through history but remaining unchanged by it.
This process of abstraction can be seen in Feng's account of the
political dimension of peasant consciousness. In keeping with a Marxist
perspective, Feng attributes the peasants' faith in both the absolute
power of the emperor, and in the ability of the 'upright official' (qing
guan) to exercise paternal benevolence, to the peasant economy and its
corresponding mindset/consciousness. Since 'in the peasant's inner
world (nei xin shijie) it was difficult to develop an independent, self-
determining personality' peasants 'lacked the internal demand' for rep-
resentative, democratic government, and 'over the course of time the
"spirit of rule by man" [renzhi jingshen] penetrated into the peasants'
soul', (1989: 13). This psychology played itself out on the historical stage
in empty victories and the pointless sense of eternal return. But just as
importantly, Feng's conceptualisation of peasant consciousness in terms
of a characteristic psychology inimical to the spirit of democracy reflects
a contemporary conflict of values between intellectuals and peasants, a
contest for China's soul.
Feng shows this conflict of values between intellectuals and peasants
in his treatment of 'ethicism' (lunli zhuyi), the moral orientation that
informs both the economic and political components of peasant con-
sciousness. Once again, Feng highlights the dual nature of peasant
consciousness, and its incompatibility with modern life:
of the few in exchange for meeting the basic needs of all; demanding
restraint on the development of the commodity economy in order to
guarantee the stability of the small peasant economy. While it is true
that these kinds of demands have a certain sense of 'justice,' they
necessarily sacrifice the progressive development of the social econ-
omy and at the expense of inhibiting the individual... In terms of
politics, the peasants 'ethicised' politics, and saw the 'benevolent
government' of their rulers as the ideal politics... Generation after
generation of being enslaved and lacking freewill made it difficult to
make the transformation to 'the morality of citizenship' (gongmin
daode), in the modern sense.
(1989: 15)
affecting both Mao and his peasant supporters left them 'absolutely no
way of imagining the diversity and richness of the world', in a state of
'idealizing everything intrinsic to oneself and 'unable to take a meas-
ured approach to anything "from outside," especially things from
abroad' (1989: 19). Feng characterises this isolation as a kind of path-
ology corrupting peasant ethics to 'the point where the purity and
kindness expressed in peasant social relations were not built on the
rational foundation of moral belief, but were intertwined with the
backwardness and ignorance suitable to the isolated environment
of life in the countryside, and in large degree dependent on that
isolated environment for its persistence.' The cure Feng prescribes to
restore a healthy relational consciousness consists of moving 'from
isolation to openness (kaifang), from ignorance to open-mindedness,
and most importantly to build complete social institutions', (1989:
21). The impetus for these changes must clearly come from outside,
from the leadership of intellectuals endowed with the perspective of
rationality.
In Feng's account, rationality serves as the universal standard against
which the flaws and shortcomings of peasant consciousness are judged;
conversely, peasant consciousness is the mark against which rationality
is measured. It is significant that Feng completes his typology of peasant
consciousness by tracing its flaws back to the height of peasant irration-
ality - religious obscurantism or superstition - and at the same time
makes clear his own project of exposing peasant consciousness as the
obstacle to reason/rationality he and most intellectuals champion. In
the light of 'cold rational reflection', the religious beliefs of Chinese
peasants are superstitions, reflecting the peasants' 'need to comprehend
the world, to grasp for the kind hope of fate'. Despite his sympathy for
the plight of the peasants, Feng completely negates the value of their
religious consciousness since it stands in such contradiction to his own
value system based on rationality. In the critique of peasant conscious-
ness, intellectuals frequently used 'feudal superstition' in this way, as a
blanket negation of peasant irrationality.14
The themes which appear most frequently in intellectuals' character-
isations of peasant consciousness can be seen in Feng's typical account:
the 'small producer economy' as article of faith and determining factor
in peasant makeup; the metaphorisation/reification of the peasantry as
a violent natural force; a sense of history as a cruel and ironic 'eternal
return'; and (most reliably) positing an abstract peasant identity
through 'psychology', 'spirit', 'consciousness', 'personality'. Added to
these are further characterisations of the peasant life of the mind that
60 Post-Socialist Peasant?
sense of recalling all the rites and duties of the Confucian familial order,
and is here opposed to ziyou - freedom; literally, 'self-possession' - the
yearning for expressing individuality at the heart of both intellectuals'
quest of self-discovery, and the demands of the protesters of 1989 for
'freedom and democracy'. In the same way, shufu (bonds, fetters) in-
vokes the 'four bonds and five relationships' of the traditional Confu-
cian social order - and loyalty to the state - in opposition to duli gexing,
the goal of independent individuality sought by intellectuals after their
experience of repression and subservience in the Maoist era. Ziran ren,
the 'man of nature' is clearly the backward peasant, just as zhuti refers to
the post-Mao intellectual's exploration of 'subjectivity'.
Qin thus opposes the abstraction of cultural iconoclasm, since it puts
traditional culture as a determining cause rather than a reflection of
'social relations', but he is recasting the discussion of culture around the
abstraction of peasant culture. In fact, Qin's position essentially validates
the cosmopolitan aspects of the Chinese cultural tradition by isolating
the universal problem of peasant culture:
Conclusion
(1992: 38). Fei believed that China needed to move from being a society
based on human sentiment, to one where decisions relied instead on
rationality (127).16 His ultimate hope was that Chinese intellectuals
would return to their native places to help lead a transition from this
'earthbound' consciousness to a rational democracy (1992: 145-6).
As an influential apostle of western social science theory in China, Fei
Xiaotong in many ways exhibits the 'self-colonising' tendency historic-
ally present among China's modern educated elite. Interactions with the
peasant 'other' were invariably undertaken from the conviction of the
intellectuals' superiority, since social science by its very foreignness 'was
privileged over native categories' (Barlow 1990). It is ironic that, in the
hands of Chinese intellectuals, western social science became the criter-
ion for asserting their own modern, rational, progressive elite status and
for fixing a feudal, superstitious and backward identity on to the peas-
ants. Thus social science research and activism in the countryside all
proceeded a priori from fundamental assumptions of an all-encompass-
ing, 'totalising' abstraction.
The implications of this social science legacy were not simply aca-
demic. As intellectuals in the late 1980s asserted their identity against
peasant consciousness, they ran headlong into the Party, the very real
manifestation of the power of peasant consciousness to dominate their
lives. Still, intellectual critics of the Party shared with Party reformers a
common cause of modernisation. Thus, both Feng and Qin spoke the
same language as Party reformers, criticising the Chinese attitudes of
'dependency' and 'isolation' obstructing modernisation, promoting the
commodity economy, and basing their analyses on Marxist theory. In
the same way, the pragmatist mainstream within the Party justified
market reforms in terms of Marxist theory by locating China in the
gradualist 'first stage of socialist development' - an explicit rejection of
the Utopian voluntarism of Maoist economics, which sought an epipha-
nal 'great leap forward' into communism through 'putting politics in
command' of production. Party reformers spoke of 'smashing the iron
rice bowl' of dependency on the work unit, of breaking China's isolation
by not only 'opening up' to the west but also opening up an entrepre-
neurial attitude in people's minds to spur the commodity economy.
Even on the issue of political reform - the 'fifth modernisation' of
democracy - intellectuals and Party reformers shared some common
ground: neither group supported universal suffrage that would give
peasants the vote, and both were in favour of giving intellectuals more
influence in policy decisions. The point is that when intellectuals criti-
cised the Party, they were attacking the elements of peasant consciousness
66 Post-Socialist Peasant?
within the Party; when they opposed socialism, they opposed peasant
socialism. Critiques of peasant consciousness were not simply allegor-
ical attacks on the Party, rather intellectuals' criticism of the Party
reflected the degree to which the Party was identified with peasant
consciousness.
Put in this context, the idea of peasant consciousness developed by
intellectuals in the 1980s had more than theoretical significance; it
served to legitimate the rural-urban split that continued to grow
throughout the 1990s. Stagnating incomes in the countryside fuelled
massive migration of rural labour to the cities and coastal areas, yet
policy-makers kept in place the restrictive household registration
system, and carried out campaigns to clear cities of the destabilising
'floating population' of migrant workers.17 Even as urban labour outlets
were being closed to rural people, local state agents began to give out
IOUs for farmers' crops, and to levy ad hoc fees and taxes to fund
business ventures of little benefit to villagers.
Rural Chinese reacted to these developments with widespread protests
in 1992-3 (just as Deng Xiaoping and Party pragmatists signalled their
commitment to even deeper market reforms), and the central govern-
ment responded with assurances that they would 'lighten the peasants'
burden' (jianqing nongmin de fudan). But in the new market-oriented
development scheme, the central government had difficulty making
good on its promise: the success story of rural development through
'TVEs' (township-village enterprises) remained largely confined to ad-
vantaged coastal and 'exurb' areas, and the highly touted village elec-
tions initiative advocated by the Centre had only limited impact, and in
some cases even met resistance from local authorities.
In this new climate of shifting power relations, 'peasant conscious-
ness' served as a conceptual lynchpin of the shared modernisation
discourse among intellectuals, policy-makers, and state agents - a con-
sensus that in many ways filled the vacuum of receding state power and
delegitmated ideology in the post-socialist context. Even as the central
state's influence waned with the rise of the 'socialist market economy',
local state agents (especially at the county and township level) grew in
power, and could justify their continued authority over local affairs
through the concept of peasant consciousness.
Constructing identities was all about the scramble for power and
position, in other words, and each construction provided different
answers to the question, 'who will be the decision makers in the post-
socialist constellation?' Would it be intellectuals reclaiming their pater-
nalistic role of enlightened, concerned conscience of society? Would
John Flower 67
Notes
1. Examples of works by western scholars sympathetic to Chinese peasants in
their analyses of systematic underclass include Cohen (1993) and Potter and
Potter (1990). For a Chinese view of the household registration system's
discrimination against peasants, see Dutton (1998).
68 Post-Socialist Peasant?
2. On intellectuals' framing of the peasant question in the 1920s and 1930s, see
Luo (1989: 22-8). The conceptualisation of rural backwardness in the same
period is explored by Douw (1991). Modernisation campaigns Duara (1988a).
3. Douw (1991) attributes this phenomenon to the historical pressures of polit-
ics during the republican period (as do Li Zehou (1986) and Vera Schwarcz
(1986)), but other critics (Cohen (1991; 1993) and Metzger (1990: 270-1))
point to persistent strains of elitism in the thinking of Chinese intellectuals.
4. For a discussion of state-peasant relations during the Great Leap Forward, see
Leonard, Ch. 3 this volume.
5. Chinese intellectuals' self-perception as victims can be seen beginning with
the outpouring of 'scar literature' (shanghen wenxue) in the immediate after-
math of the Cultural Revolution (Link 1983a, 1983b; Barme and Lee 1979),
and the genre of intellectuals as victims is well represented in western litera-
ture on modern China (e.g. Thurston 1987). Western sinologists are generally
sympathetic to this view (see especially Link 1992), but Barlow (1991: 226)
notes the phenomenon more critically.
6. The ideas of cultural 'sedimentation' and exploration of the 'subjective' Lin
derives from Li Zehou's introspective archaeology of the Chinese national
character. Li's historical project aimed to not only to reclaim an objective
account of the development of Chinese thought, but also to achieve self-
understanding through uncovering elements of the cultural past still living
in the modern Chinese personality.
7. The idea of 'deep structure' was introduced in 1983 by Sun Longji (Lung-kee
Sun) in a book that was tremendously popular among Chinese intellectuals.
See Sun (1988) and his article (1991). Barlow (1991: 225) also notes Sun's
popularity.
8. In terms of their approaches to the study of Chinese culture, scholars such as
Li Zehou, Pang Pu, and the philosopher and intellectual historian Tang Yijie
adopted a humanist, historical perspective in their interpretations of trad-
itional thought and culture, while Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng developed
an abstract, scientistic philosophy based on 'systems theory' to explain the
'superstable system' of China's feudal society. As much as they differed in
style and content, both the historical and 'natural science' methodologies
shared a commitment to 'humanism' and 'rationality' (Lin 1995: 738).
9. Heshang not only popularised culture fever after it had reached a crescendo of
momentum in academic circles, it also brought this 'reflection' to a critical
mass by upping the political stakes: after Heshang the politics of culture broke
out into overt antagonism between iconoclast intellectuals and conservative
elements of the Party leadership who objected to its 'ethnic nihilism' (Bod-
man 1991: 22). By 1989, Heshang had become associated with pro-reform
thinking and embroiled in factional struggle. As the standard-bearer of 'cul-
ture fever' and an emblem of dissident thinking in general, Heshang became a
primary target of official renunciation after the suppression of the protest
movement of 1989, and intellectuals involved in the project either fled the
country or were imprisoned.
10. The quotation is from Su and Luxiang (1991: 168-9), with the alteration of
suzhi translated as 'quality' instead of the term 'makeup' used by Bodman. In
a note Bodman explains: 'The term suzhi is here translated as "makeup"
instead of "character" or "nature". It really means something more like
John Flower 69
Select Bibliography
Barlow, Tani (1990), 'Zhishifenzi [Chinese intellectuals] and power', Dialectical
Anthropology, 16, 209-32.
Barme, Geremie and Lee, Bennet (1979), (eds), The Wounded: New Stories of the
Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Joint Publications).
Benton, Gregor (1982), (ed), Wild Lilies, Poisonous Weeds: Dissident Voices from
People's China (London: Pluto Press).
Bodman, Richard W. (1991), 'From history to allegory to art: a personal search for
interpretation', Deathsong of the River: A Reader's Guide to the Chinese TV Series
70 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Introduction
In China, the post-socialist context has been characterised by a
deepening of market reforms along the lines of what is termed a 'social-
ist market economy'. While the new opportunities that come from the
market have undermined old definitions and boundaries that formally
defined the Chinese peasantry (the system of household registration,
the primacy of agricultural production), the rural-urban split in this
particularly Chinese form of market economy is even more stark than
in the past. The term peasant (nongmin) far from becoming extinct is
finding new life in the reformed economy (see also Chapter 2, by John
Flower). This chapter looks at evidence of a new politics of identity
emergent in China's socialist market economy.
To understand the complex issues that attend modernisation in
China, and rural dwellers' place in that process, the notion that we
analyse peasant motivation as reducible to a rational or moral calculus
is impoverishing. Such analyses tend to homogenise farmers perspec-
tives along the lines of an economistic model, 1 whereas a close look at
the ethnography demonstrates that rural peoples' decision making
shows economic considerations intertwined with value judgements
and alternative social visions. The concept of 'identity' has been a useful
innovation in the anthropologist's toolkit; it encourages a more inclu-
sive analysis that can put economic life into a broader frame and in
terms closer to the subject's own categories. Most importantly, it creates
a space for the inclusion of people's conscious reflections on their life
situation. This paper suggests that one useful way to analyse rural view-
points is to look at how farmers express themselves through their inter-
actions with the landscape. It asserts that rural people express their own
73
sense of identity in the very concrete and particular choices and attitudes
related to agricultural production. Such a portrait of rural people's inter-
ests and identities focuses on issues that are important to the villagers
themselves and is expressed in terms which parallel their own.
In a mountainous region of Sichuan province, China, each spring the
farmers of Xiakou village decide how much of their land they will plant
in 'old corn' (lao pinzhong) and how much in 'new corn' (xin pinzhong).
Old corn signifies varieties of corn which have been passed down among
the generations of farmers who have lived on these steep slopes. New
corn is purchased from the state, and is comprised of hybrid varieties
capable of higher production. Old and new corn operate like metaphors
for old and new social values, but being more than a metaphor, the
choice of corn embodies the complex and even contradictory realities of
lived experience.
In the course of fieldwork (1991-93) I became fascinated by the many
factors farmers considered when deciding whether to plant old variety or
new variety corn. While an understanding of these issues yielded respect
for the farmers' ability to make rational economic choices, as well as
validation of the hypothesis that security can be more important than
pure profit, it also revealed that the choice has a significance that goes
beyond its immediate economic rationale. The symbolic significances
which inhere in the choice of old or new corn entail value judgements
on the nature of farmers' relationship to the land, to each other, and to
the state. Old and new corn are each emblematic of different social values
which are unequally appraised by farmers and officials or even different
farmers. Embedded in the differing assessments of farmers and bureau-
crats are different ideas of what it means to be modern, and separate
identity constructs which, in turn, are the result of differing historical
experiences. Looking at farmers' own interpretation of their past experi-
ences suggests that rather than being resistant to change, farmers seek
change on their own terms, based on their own set of interests and often
at odds with the interests of urban-based state agents. A look at the
farmers' mode of interpreting the landscape demonstrates the import-
ance of 'public morality', and the focus on farmers' historical conscious-
ness brings out the ambiguity, competing interests, and contested group
identities at the heart of modernisation discourse in China today.
Every family in Xiakou has access to arable land which they farm
themselves by hand. Some families in Xiakou plant exclusively old
Pamela Leonard 75
corn while others plant exclusively the new corn, but most families mix
the two with about 60 or 70 per cent of the land planted going to the
new variety. There is a township regulation, often flaunted, that farmers
should plant 80 per cent new corn. New corn, also referred to as hybrid
corn (zajiao yumi), produces significantly more kernels per mu planted. 2
Old corn, also called 'native corn' (bendi yumi), propagates from seed
harvested the year before. Old corn is less demanding of labour and cash
for its cultivation. Before liberation in 1949, farmers in this village relied
almost exclusively on the cultivation of old corn for their food grain;
rice was considered a luxury and hybrids had not yet been introduced.
According to their own accounts, before Liberation, each family
achieved total corn harvests comparable to those of today, but with
more land and labour invested in its cultivation. Hybrid corn was intro-
duced during collective times but only became widespread after the
market reforms of the 1980s.
Villagers say that with reform of the production system in 19823 came
the widespread adoption of new variety corn, significantly greater use of
chemical fertiliser, and a doubling of crop yields over the preceding
period. The connections among a range of innovations that came at
that time are subtle. The reform increased farmers' willingness to work
by rewarding those who worked harder. An efficient labour force made
viable the use of improved hybrid varieties of grain. People also empha-
sise that native corn has a better taste and before reform, corn was the
staple food. After reform, people consumed more rice, and because rice
replaced corn as the staple, they were more willing to grow the relatively
tasteless hybrid corn. At the same time, the advent of improved varieties
of grain, along with expanding opportunities for off-farm income in-
creased reliance on chemical fertiliser. Increased use of chemical fertil-
iser and hybrid corn, in turn, generated its own cycle of increasing
dependence on the cash economy, because increasing amounts of pur-
chased chemical fertiliser were needed to sustain yields and this cash
came from off-farm wage labour. To understand these connections and
how they have changed farmers' lives, it is necessary to look more
closely at what farmers say about the differences between old and new
corn, and about the nature of chemical versus organic fertiliser.
Native corn can be propagated from the seed of last year's harvest,
while hybrid seed must be purchased each year from the state as the
kernels it produces are sterile. The price of hybrid seed is significant
enough to deter some farmers. In 1992, the year of my initial fieldwork,
Wu Wenxue planted all native corn. Other families planted more native
corn that year because they said they did not have the money to buy
76 Post-Socialist Peasant?
hybrid corn seed. Since his is one of the poorer families, I suspected Wu
Wenxue did not have money for the seed. But this is not the answer he
gave, and his answer threw additional light on properties of the two
corns. First he said that the new variety corn requires strict and prompt
management. If the leaves go a little brown indicating it needs fertiliser,
it needs it immediately, and if it does not get chemical fertiliser at that
moment, the yield will be next to nothing. The same principle applies to
weeding. Native corn has several weeks leeway in which one can weed,
whereas for hybrid corn there are only several days. Furthermore, with
native corn one can wait until it is fully ripe to harvest, while hybrid
corn must be harvested when it is only 80 per cent ripe. If one is not
prompt with the new variety corn, worms come and the cobs fall down
and the farmer gets nothing. Therefore, he says, many people call native
corn a 'lazy' crop.
Since during the collective period, no one went off-farm to labour,
and there were no days off, more time was spent at agricultural labour in
the village. Nevertheless, because people wasted a lot of time, they could
not manage the extra work required for hybrid varieties. 'People took a
lot of rest breaks and did not work hard. At that time, if one person
worked hard, the person next to him might be half as fast, and so they
would see there was no advantage to their speed and they, too, would
begin to slow down.' If these conditions were bad for the old native
corn, they were impossible for the more unforgiving hybrid corn. But
the story does not end there.
The common perception is that the old corn is better tasting and more
nutritious than new corn. It is said to be drier and stickier and sweeter.
Old corn also has a more porous texture, while new corn becomes too
fine when it is milled. Poorer households eat more corn, since rice is
mostly purchased, so they are likely to prefer old variety corn. Wu
Wenxue planted old variety corn because he felt he was unprepared to
meet the labour requirements of new variety corn, and because he said
he liked the flavour of the old corn. Before decollectivisation eating corn
cakes was standard. As incomes expanded in the wake of reform, as a
result of the introduction of dairy goat farming and increased income
from wage labour, people were increasingly able to buy rice, the pre-
ferred grain and an important local symbol of affluence. Some people
would quip that they were 'eating milk' when they ate rice because it
was often the milk money that was used to buy it. People now eat more
rice because they can afford it, but they also eat less corn cake because
the old stone mills are no longer in service and people do not like the
texture of corn milled in the new electric mills. Now corn is rarely
Pamela Leonard 77
consumed by humans, but rather it is fed to dairy goats and pigs. People
use the cash from the dairy goats and wage labour to buy rice, and at the
same time have more pork to eat than before. Some of the poorer
families, however, continue to eat corn cakes.
Not only did the advent of new variety corn depend on a motivated
and timely labour force, and less human consumption of corn cakes, it
was also favoured by increased availability of chemical over organic
fertiliser, or in other words, a greater availability of disposable income.
It is not that hybrid corn cannot be grown with only organic fertilizer; it
can and is in the vegetable gardens. This requires much more labour
invested in carrying buckets of manure, however, and farmers are un-
likely to be willing to do this for the more distant and extensive
cornfields. Since chemical fertiliser is not used in their vegetable gardens
(see discussion below), they have grown different crops of corn next
to each other - one crop using only organic and one crop using
chemical fertiliser. Thus they are clear about the differences between
chemical and organic fertiliser as they relate to the cultivation of corn.
Chemical fertiliser has a quick result, while household fertiliser, they
say, is more slow acting. New variety corn has more rigorous cultivation
requirements so favours using fertilizer with a fast effect. Farmers
frequently point out that where the soil is poor, old variety corn will
produce better results than new corn. New corn is rigorous in its require-
ments because it is short and fast developing. The old variety is more
forgiving in poorer soil and copes better with the slower effect of house-
hold fertiliser because it grows taller and more slowly, taking an add-
itional month to reach maturity.4 Thus as land becomes poorer, one can
expect more and more old variety corn to be grown.
The choice of old or new corn is thus based on a complex set of
considerations, with the general effect that a more wealthy household
is more likely to plant more new corn, while a household with less cash
and/or less labour will favour old corn. The general trend since decol-
lectivisation has favoured new variety corn. The increased cultivation of
new variety corn fits with the increasing off-farm demands on young
men's labour. These demands, along with rising expectations of a life
more free from drudgery, have meant that there is now a greater reliance
on chemical fertiliser over household manure. Reliance on chemical
fertiliser, in turn, has further consolidated farmers' reliance on having
an available supply of cash in order to buy seeds and fertiliser.
To fully understand the dynamic of this cycle of increasing depend-
ence on the cash economy, it is necessary to take a closer look at what
farmers say about the nature of chemical fertiliser. Today farmers view
78 Post-Socialist Peasant?
rural post each day by bicycle. The township head told me that he felt it
was unfortunate that the second team of Xiakou was the village chosen
for our fieldwork, as, in his opinion, they were not a particularly pro-
gressive village. He offered as evidence the fact that they still planted a
fair amount of old variety corn and required continual pressure to get
them to plant the more progressive hybrid varieties. He revealed that, to
his mind, the central dynamic at play in production is the opposition of
superstition (mixin) and science (kexue). He brought up as an example of
superstition the idea of fengshui, a traditional mode of interpretation
that focuses on the movement of energy (qi) through the landscape.
Adherents of fengshui seek to understand how the movement of qi is
affected by the shape and placement of mountains, trees, and rivers, as
well as man-made features, through time, since the fengshui of a particu-
lar location is believed to have a strong influence on the fate of those
connected to that place. This was problematic to his mind because:
You can have the same 1 mu piece of land and get different produc-
tion results. One person who is capable can get a lot out of it; another
guy who is lazy and doesn't work hard produces very little. But
instead of blaming himself, he blames the fengshui of the land!
there today? Peasants always get the worst of it. They have to pay
more and more for fertiliser, and they have to use more and more.
This is a big problem because our earnings stay about the same, but
the price of fertiliser keeps going up. In the Old Society agriculture
was good. We did not grow this soft spongy corn you have now, but
like the white corn you can still find in Xiakou it was tasty and
strong. We used to use household fertiliser (nongjia fei) to fertilise
the rice and it tasted much better and grew well. Today the ammonia
(tang an) actually contains poison - one part in ten thousand. Fertil-
iser is addictive; you have to use more and more. When fertiliser was
first imported from Japan, you only needed a little pinch and waaah,
what results! Big green leaves and good growth. Now you have to use
a big handful to get the same crop to grow. England addicted us to
opium; Japan addicted us to fertiliser!
the cities who have neither guaranteed work nor access to land. 9 Villa-
gers, including those who go off to work, are grateful for the personal
freedom (ziyou) they associate with their connection to the land and an
independent means of subsistence. I have known villagers to refuse
contract work on the basis that the poor pay and rough conditions are
not worth their while when they can survive on their own produce.
Whether engaged in contract labour or not, villagers are very aware that
they still exist as part of a category and class of citizen in China labelled
peasant (nongmin).
Because officials are connected to the urban centres both through the
pattern of patronage on which they rely and in the standard of living
they have been able to realise, they persist as a category apart from rural
folk. The appearance of these cadres in the countryside reinforces the
sense of a growing rural-urban split predicated on differing standards of
living and different class interests. While there is, in reality, considerable
variety in the attitudes and actions of individual officials, this chapter
focused on the negative stereotype of the urban-oriented official. Never-
theless, it is important to emphasise that there are many good officials
in China and their dedication is helpful to the farmers and also appreci-
ated by them.
During the day you worked for 'production' which was not to feed
yourself. At night you were closed into an empty house. You might
sneak out but you had nothing but your hands. The best you could
do was use your hands to steal. There was no difference between that
life and being in jail; the whole thing was like a prison. The store-
houses had grain, and in the fields there were some vegetables, but
only officials were able to access them. It was very bitter. If you were a
poor peasant you were a little better off. If you were a bad element
[had a bad class background] you had it very hard.
That this villager said the word 'production' (shengchan) meant 'not to
feed yourself demonstrates that a powerful legitimating ideology of
centralisation - that of increasing production - was cast into a cynical
light by this seminal experience. While bureaucrats will still refer to the
famine as a 'natural disaster', or argue over whether it was the result of
excessive rightism or leftism, villagers tend to pin the blame squarely on
excessive powers given over to uncaring officials who themselves had
enough to eat.
The experience of the Great Leap Forward laid bare the sense in which
centralisation under collectivisation was, from an economic standpoint,
antagonistic to the interests of farmers. The impact of Maoist policies on
the rural population stands as one of the great ironies of modern Chinese
88 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Conclusion
Experiences during the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine
taught t h e m to reject the centrist myth; they learned that the strong
centralisation of power in the hands of officials was not to their benefit.
The history of the Production Team and the reforms that followed is the
history of farmers putting this lesson to practice. They steadfastly
rejected communal production by voting with their feet. While the
post-reform climate has allowed t h e m greater freedom to develop new
ways of earning a living, it has yet to free t h e m from the legacy of the
historical opposition of peasant and intellectual, or from mandated
control of local resources from above. It may be that m a n y rural people
are critical of the modern values that put profit above h u m a n relations,
and production over distribution, but the variety of viewpoints on the
constellation of changes now sweeping China defy any simplistic reduc-
tion; the aspirations and desires of rural Chinese can neither be reduced
to preserving a 'moral peasant' village as an access point to food security,
nor as a rational maximisation of personal profit at any price, but rather
represent complex and individualised reflections on the promise of
modernity (both as an identity and as an economy) and their own
anticipated place in it.
Notes
1. James Scott, in the Moral Economy of the Peasant (1979), argued that farmers
could not be analysed as simple profit maximisers; he demonstrated instances
where concern for food security caused peasants to forgo profits. Nevertheless
his focus remained on demonstrating peasant economic rationality.
2. One mu equals 0.15 acres or 0.06 hectares
3. It was at this time that agriculture was decollectivised and each family was
given cropland on contract - a certain amount of grain would be given to the
state in exchange for the land, but all produce beyond this amount belonged
to the farmer.
4. I have recently learned that farmers in Xiakou can now purchase a tall variety
of hybrid corn, a good indication that extension workers in China are paying
attention to the needs of farmers. I look forward to learning more about the
implications of this development.
5. See Zweig (1997: 185-99), Cohen (1993) and Potter and Potter (1990:
296-312.)
6. This point echoes Verdery's (1996) argument that post-socialist conflicts (such
as ethnic tensions) are not just throwbacks to a pre-socialist period, or even
new developments, but were nurtured by the socialist system.
7. As a cafeteria administrator during the famine years - a fact whose added
significance should become clear below.
Pamela Leonard 93
8. Better televisions and VCRs are more common, but only two families of
thirty-some in the village have been able to build new-style houses, while
housing in the urban centres has almost universally improved.
9. A recent policy initiative will lay off up to half of the employees of govern-
ment-owned industries, but not even the laid-off workers are perceived as
being reduced to the status of the peasant. They will not compete for the
same jobs, since, as the villagers point out, they are not used to doing work/
physical labour (laodong); here it is implied they are not used to doing real
work at all.
10. These are typically government subsidised experimental research stations.
11. See Flower, Ch. 2, this volume.
Select Bibliography
Cohen, Myron L. (1991), 'Being Chinese: the peripherilization of traditional
identity', Daedalus, 120: 2 (Spring) 113-34.
(1993), 'Cultural and political inventions in modern China: the case of the
Chinese "Peasant"', Daedalus, 122: 2 (Spring) 151-70.
Douw, Leo (1991), 'The representation of China's rural backwardness 1932-1937',
Ph.D. thesis (University of Leiden).
Pickowitz, Paul G. (1994), 'Memories of revolution and collectivization in China:
the unauthorized reminiscences of a rural intellectual' in R. S. Watson (ed.),
Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism, (Sante Fe: School of Ameri-
can Research Press).
Potter, Sulamith H. and Potter, Jack M. (1990), China's Peasants: The Anthropology
of a Revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Scott, James C. (1979), The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Verdery, Katherine (1996), What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
Zweig, David (1997), Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe).
4
Just a Peasant: Economy and Legacy
in Northern Vietnam
Regina M. Abrami
Introduction
94
P. Leonard et al. (eds.), Post-Socialist Peasant?
© Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 2002
Regina M. Abrami 95
I never farmed in my life and didn't have a clue what to do. I only
remember my horror the first time a leech attached itself to my leg. I
was sick for weeks and could not work. Of course, they could say
nothing. I was sick.4
How did I start selling pots? I was just selling when the worker came
up to me and asked if I wanted some [pots]. He didn't have them with
him at the time, but I said, 'Sure'. The next day he returned with two.
Later, he'd ask, 'How many do you want?' I was always careful never
to ask for more than I knew I could sell in a day. 'Maybe five', I said.
He returned the next day with three. It was like that. Sometimes, he
came with the right amount and other times less. I never asked why
or where he got these things from.7
streets and pavements are to be used only for traffic. The People's
Committees of the provinces and cities directly under the Central
Government shall stipulate in detail the use of the inner part of
108 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Section 3 of the same Article states that 'any encroachment of road beds,
the road sides and pavements for marketing, show and sale of commod-
ities ... is banned'. For itinerant peddlers, Decree 36 was something akin
to a declaration of war. Pushcarts were confiscated and the daily ritual of
duck and dodge between local traffic police and rural peddlers intensi-
fied significantly.
Itinerant trade has not ended in Hanoi. Decree 36, nevertheless, made
a caricature of market regulatory oversight by securing it through a
traffic law. As an odd testimony of open markets and fallen barriers to
trade, peddlers now must remain on the move as a rest break is a
violation of law. The Decree also encouraged the further commodifica-
tion of law by raising the price of market participation for peddlers
subject to rent-seeking local state actors.14 When Decree 36 first
appeared, some rural Party cadres encouraged local villagers not to
take their carts and elaborately tooled bicycles to the city. Other cadres
expressed their disagreement with the law, but claimed to be powerless
to respond. Yet, in other cases, rural cadres fought back against the new
law. On behalf of local villagers, they demanded the return of carts and
pedicabs confiscated by the Hanoi police, claiming that they were local
state property.15
Problems that lie elsewhere once again press upon the shoulder
poles of rural traders. Today, editorials and pictorial satires frequently
appear in the police-run newspaper Capitol Security (An Ninh Thu Do),
demanding a resolution to the blight of itinerant traders. A film, Liveli-
hood (Kiem Song), chronicling in fiction the misfortunes of rural citizens
in Hanoi, was aired three times in 1996 and again in 1997 and 1998.
In the film, a sympathetic police captain tells a male migrant worker
to stay out of Hanoi where 'complicated situations' (tinh hinh phuc
tap) are common, including this migrant's false arrest. But, truth is
even stranger than fiction. An unpublished report by the Hanoi City
Bureau of Commerce argues that 'temporary markets are not compatible
with the needs of building a civilised city' and that all should be
eliminated by 2010 (Phan 1997: 12). Much like reports on renegade
state commercial workers during the planned economy period, this
report is noticeably silent in its portrayal of those empowered with
managing markets. It suggests only that more skill and training is neces-
sary.
Regina M. Abrami 109
noon daily, but remain in the city until late afternoon when shop
owners are willing to discuss payment. The language that marks these
commercial relations is not hostility, but sympathy (thong cam). To the
extent that a rural trader can produce sympathy, the vendor may pay for
goods sold. But, sympathy can and is mutually invoked, variously
stalling and ending time.
Such sympathy has become the currency of commerce in Vietnam. It
is invoked not only to seek benefit and tolerance from other members of
society, but also from the state. In their portrayal of commerce as small
trade and service to others, rural citizens are making an appeal to be seen
as 'patriotic labour'. This sentiment is aptly captured in miniature by the
itinerant poison sellers of Hanoi who promise their commodity's power
to kill 'Russian mice, French mice and American mice' ('chuot Nga, chuot
Phap va chuot My').18
rural traders 'believe' they are peasants anymore t h a n that they believe
their labour aims toward the collective good. It is only possible to
recognise that the p h e n o m e n o n of rural commercial actors claiming to
'just be peasants' and 'small traders' is less the product of a market
economy and more its creator. These terms reflect ongoing political
conflict over the moral legitimacy of economic ends, and in a language
that can only be understood as the legacy of socialist Vietnam's toler-
ance of peasants and peddlers as poor, but ultimately loyal citizens.
The socialist model of development predicted the end of the peasantry.
It did so by conflating political and economic identities, and assuming
that individuals would act on these 'class' interests. Liberal theory simi-
larly imagined the economy as a closed system within which laws of
history and sources of identity could be explained in terms of changing
incentives. Neither economic theory can account for such post-socialist
economic oxymoron as the 'peasant entrepreneur' without doing vio-
lence to the history that gave rise to such a character. In this chapter, I
have shown that the cultural context within which economic activity
occurs is at least as important as economic structure and individual
interests in accounting for the course of historical change.
Notes
1. I would like to express my gratitude and thanks to Pamela Leonard. Her many
helpful suggestions and comments went well beyond the scope of her editorial
duties. My research in Vietnam was supported by grants from the Fulbright-
Hays Dissertation Committee and the Institute for the Study of World Politics.
2. The definition of ideology that I am using is common to New Institutional
Economic approaches. See North 1990: 22-3 and especially North 1981:
45-58.
3. This section draws on materials from National Archive #3, especially files from
the Ministry of Domestic Commerce.
4. Interview in Hung Yen Province, May 1997.
5. Interview Gia Lam District, Hanoi, April 1997.
6. Interview in Bac Ninh Province, July 1997.
7. Interview in Hung Yen Province, June 1997.
8. In Vietnamese, 'Xahoi Chu Nghia co nghia gi? Xep Hang Ca Ngay!'
9. There are no accurate figures of the total number of rural citizens residing
'temporarily' in Hanoi. Estimates range from 30000 to 60000 individuals. Of
this number, it is not possible to tell what percentage engage in trade. Further,
these figures do not include individuals who circulate daily between the city
and the countryside or individuals who have not registered with local author-
ities.
114 Post-Socialist Peasant?
10. These scholars and researchers are typically affiliated with the Institute of
Sociology, National Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as the
Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Welfare. For example, see the work of
Dang Nguyen Anh and Doan Mau Diep.
11. Of course some villages are comprised of households that engage in both
production and sales.
12. Interview, Ninh Hiep village, Gia Lam district, June 1994.
13. These racketeering cases were chronicled in detail in the following news-
papers, An Ninh Thu Do (Capitol Security), Ha Noi Moi [New Hanoi) and Kinh Te
Thoi Bao (Economic Times). In addition, underground circulars made their way
throughout the city during both trials.
14. It is too soon to tell whether the recently passed Enterprise Law, combined
with ongoing administrative reforms, will temper rent-seeking.
15. This is partially true insofar that some pedicabs, pushcarts and bicycles were
obtained through bank loans and credit cooperatives.
16. In an economic context, this phrase usually refers to pursuing an activity
beyond one's means, level of experience or knowledge. It also refers to the
danger of making others jealous or encouraging rent-seeking by appearing
well off financially.
17. Interview, Ninh Hiep village, Gia Lam District April 1997.
18. Coming largely from Thanh Cong village, Chau Giang district, Hung Yen
province, these traders rely on a tape-recorded sales pitch that blares from a
speaker attached to their bicycles.
Select Bibliography
Bahro, Rudolph (1978), The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: Verso).
Ban Chap Hanh Dang Bo Thanh Pho Ha Noi (Hanoi City Party Executive Com-
mittee), (1972).
Bluestone, Daniel M. (1991), The pushcart evil: peddlers, merchants and New
York City's Streets, 1989-1940', Journal of Urban History, 18: 1, 68-92.
Bo Thuong Nghiep (1997), (Ministry of Commerce), Tinh Hinh Hop Tax Xa Mua
Ban (The supply and marketing cooperative situation), (unpublished report).
Clark, Gracia (1994), Onions are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West
African Market Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Cross, John C. (1998), Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City
(Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Dang, Nguyen Anh (1997), 'Ve Vai Tro cua Di Cu Nong Thon-Do Thi trong Su
Nghiep Phat Then Nong Thon Hien Nay' (The role of rural-urban migration in
developing the countryside today'), Xa Hoi Hoc (Sociology) 4: 60, 15-19.
'Decree No. 36-CP on the 29th of May 1995 of the Government on Ensuring
Traffic Order and Safety on Roads and in Urban Centers', Official Gazette, 15
(1995).
DeSoto, Hernando (1989), The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third
World (New York: Harper & Row).
Doan, Mau Diep, Henaff, Nolwen and Trinh, Khac Tham (1997), 'Report on
spontaneous migration survey in Hanoi', Centre for Population and Human
Resource Studies, Project VIE/95/004, (unpublished report).
Regina M. Abrami 115
Fforde, Adam (1989), The Agrarian Question in North Vietnam, 1974-1979: A Study
in Cooperator Resistance to State Policy (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe).
Fforde Adam and Paine, Suzanne H. (1987), The Limits of National Liberation:
Problems of Economic Management in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (London:
Croom-Helm).
Fforde, Adam and deVylder, Stefan (1996), From Plan to Market: The Economic
Transition in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press).
Gourou, Pierre (1955), The Peasants of the Tonkin Delta, A Study of Human Geog-
raphy, (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Hart, Keith (1992), 'Market and state after the Cold War: the informal economy
reconsidered', in R. Dilley (ed.), Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Dis-
course and Practice, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) 214-27.
Hong, Quang (1993), 'Nghich Ly Cho Ha Noi' (The irrationality of Hanoi's
markets'), Thoi Bao Kinhte Viet Nam (Vietnam Economic News), 10: 16.
Kerkvliet, Benedict J. (1995), 'Village-state relations in Vietnam: the effect of
everyday politics on decollectivization', The Journal of Asian Studies, 54: 396-
418.
Kuran, Timur (1995), Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Prefer-
ence Falsification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Le, Huu Duyen (1981), (ed.), 30 Nam Xay Dung va Phat Trien Thuong Nghiep Xa Hoi
Chu Nghia Viet Nam 1951-1981 (Thirty Years of Vietnamese Socialist Commerce
Construction and Development, 1951-1981) (Hanoi: Nha In Bao Ha Noi Moi (New
Hanoi News Publishers)).
Li, Tana (1996), 'Peasants on the move: rural-urban migration in the Hanoi
region', Occasional Paper No. 91, (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies).
Malarney, Shaun (1998), 'State stigma, family prestige, and the development of
commerce in the Red River Delta of Vietnam', in R. W. Hefner (ed.), Market
Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms (Boulder: Westview
Press).
McGee, Terry G. (1973), 'Hawkers in Hong Kong', Center for Asian Studies Mono-
graphs and Occasional Papers, No. 17, (University of Hong Kong).
Nghi Quyet cua Thanh Uy ve Nhiem Vu Tiep Tuc Cai Tao Thuong Nghiep
Tu Nhan va Quan Ly Thi Truong (Party Committee Resolution to
continue the task of transforming private commerce and market management),
(n.d.).
Ngo, Thu Trang (1998), 'Lao Dong Nu Nong Thon o Do Thi Thuc Trang va Xu
Huong Bien Doi Lao Dong - Viec Lam va Muc Song qua Khao Sat tai Ha Noi'
(The condition of female rural labor in the city and the direction of labor,
employment and standard of living changes through observations in Hanoi'),
(unpublished manuscript).
Nguyen, Thi Thanh Binh (1998), 'Tac Dong cua Di Chuyen Lao Dong Theo Mua
Vu Len Cac Moi Quan He Lang Xa o Mot Lang Dong Bang Chau Tho Song
Hong' ('The impact of seasonal labor mobility on village relations in one village
along the Chau Tho and Hong Rivers'), (unpublished manuscript).
North, Douglas C. (1981), Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W
W. Norton & Co.).
(1990), Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press).
116 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Pham Hung (1963), Tang Cuong Lanh Dao Cong Tac Thuong Nghiep (Strengthen
Leadership of Commercial Work) (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That (Truth Publish-
ing)).
Pham Hung va Tran Quyet (1986), Lam Tot Cong Tac Quan Ly Ho Khau, Nhan Khau
(Work Well To Manage Household Registration and Population) (Hanoi: Nha Xuat
Ban Cong An Nhan Dan (People's Police Publishers)).
Phan, Van Da, (1997), 'To Chuc Mang Luoi Cho va Quan Ly Cho tren Dia Ban Noi
Thanh Ha Noi Den Nam 2010', So Thuong Nghiep Ha Noi ('Organize market
networks and manage markets in Hanoi to the year 2010'), Bureau of Com-
merce, (Hanoi: unpublished report).
Quan Hai Ba Trung (1996), Ha Noi, 'Bao Cao Tong Ket Cong Tac Quan Ly Luc
Luong Lao Dong Tu Do tu Ngoai Thanh, Ngoai Tinh den Dia Ban Quan', ('Final
report on management work of free laborers from the suburbs and provinces
arriving to the district'), (unpublished report, Jan.).
To, Duy Hop (1997), (ed.), Ninh Hiep: Truyen Thong va Phat Trien (Ninh Hiep:
Tradition and Development), (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia (Na-
tional Political Publishing House)).
5
Rural Identities in Transition:
Partible Persons and Partial Peasants
in Post-Soviet Russia
Louise Perrotta
117
P. Leonard et al. (eds.), Post-Socialist Peasant?
© Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 2002
118 Post-Socialist Peasant?
How then should we interpret the relation between the hoped for
'post-socialist peasant' and the real-world peasant farmer? Indigenous
perceptions of private peasant farmers range from the stereotypical
image of the hard-working cautious peasant farmers, to crafty entrepre-
neurs, to the useless and idle dependent on the generosity of neighbour-
ing collectives. Although there are many examples of successful private
farming which conform to the stereotype of a small, family run, owner-
occupied undertaking, the majority of these are those which were set up
early on, and benefited from preferential credits and subsequent infla-
tion. Many of the Peasant Farms that have emerged in Russia are not
owned and managed by ex-employees of collective farms (or 'peasants'),
but by ex-farm directors, or previous employees of the Department of
Agriculture, who seized the opportunity to acquire land and soft credits.
Some Peasant Farms are owned by persons with no previous experience
of agriculture, but who exploited the opportunity to access preferential
credits, which they then invested in non-agricultural activities (specific-
ally highly profitable trading activities).
It has also become increasingly clear that the wholesale transform-
ation of large former state and collective farms into huge numbers of
small private Peasant Farms represents serious technical difficulties.
Demarcation of millions of small land-holdings (average land shares
are about five hectares per shareholder), is hugely time consuming and
expensive, requiring extensive surveying and establishment of demar-
cated boundaries. Secondly, the equitable distribution of physical land
plots encounters insuperable difficulties. Where this has been at-
tempted, the distribution of land plots is accomplished either 'by nego-
tiation', by 'lottery', or, more rarely by some form of competition (for
example, auction). Where distribution of physical land plots is 'negoti-
ated', there are clear inequalities in participants' abilities to pursue their
interests. On any farm there is good land and poor land, of varying
convenient location and it is simply impossible for each to acquire a
fair share of land value. The Russian system of land valuation and share
distribution attempts to create land shares of equal value, by 'equating'
larger plots of poor land to smaller plots of highly fertile land. The
Russian system, however, fails to take the important factor of 'location'
into account. As it is impossible for everyone to receive a plot of land
which is accessible, the equitable distribution of actual land parcels is, in
fact, impossible. Although distribution by lottery is fairer in principle, it
nevertheless results in unfair distribution of land-holdings. Similarly,
auctions are only feasible where land shares are combined and competi-
tors bid with their combined land shares for the most desirable plots. (In
Louise Perrotta 121
the case of an auction land share certificates are used in lieu of cash and
land parcels are 'auctioned' to those who can offer the largest quantity
of land shares for a given land parcel.) If the aim is to create private
Peasant Farms on the basis of individual- to family-sized land share-
holdings, auctions become unworkable, as the distinctions between
competitors are insufficient. Each family will have one to perhaps four
land shares maximum - and no one family would be able to offer larger
quantities of shares for the better land.
Further it is continuously argued that although individual- to family-
sized plots are sometimes viable economic entities, this is not and
cannot always be the case. Land-holdings within easy reach of residence,
services, transport and stores are a physically limited good. Too many
individual/family land shareholders will end up with five to fifteen
hectares, located 15 km from home, services, roads and so on. If some
land-holdings are suitable for market gardening or other small-scale
agricultural activities, broad acre farming requires large land-holdings
to be profitable. It has been suggested that this problem can be over-
come by the recombination of land holdings into Associations of Peas-
ant Farms. Again although there are excellent examples of successful
Associations, there are equally significant examples of 'purely formal'
Associations. In one example, the former collective farm continued to
operate as a hierarchically managed, inefficient, and undemocratic
entity, in spite of the individualisation of land ownership. Although
farm members knew that they 'owned' five hectares, and could point
out their land holdings on a map, they overwhelmingly expressed a lack
of interest in private ownership: 'what can I do with five hectares
located beyond the next village?' Further they continued to work 'for
the director', who continued to make all management decisions and to
exclude his theoretically equal co-owners from the management pro-
cess.
Thus the logistical difficulties of widespread demarcation of physical
land plots has combined with the impossibility of creating millions of
economically viable private Peasant Farms to undermine the attempt to
transform the rural proletariat into a class of land-owning peasants in
wholesale fashion.
Although policies aimed at increasing private Peasant Farming have
generally failed to create a large class of small, efficient, land-owning
peasant producers, there has been a simultaneous attempt to capture the
benefits of individualised private ownership, whilst retaining collective
production structures. The distribution of ownership of land and non-
land assets of the former state and collective farms to their members has
122 Post-Socialist Peasant?
can achieve the same ends. As we shall see below, this formal privatisa-
tion only seems to be able to deliver the hoped for results when other
factors are also present.
Non-land assets
Similarly, ownership of non-land assets (buildings, machinery, equip-
ment, stores, livestock) has been devolved to farm members. However,
individual non-land shares (commonly known as property shares) are
not equal. The farm's assets are evaluated at 'book value', and unequal
shares are distributed, based on the different labour input of individual
farm members. These differences are usually the product of a coefficient
which takes into account salary and years of service. (Thus a worker with
twenty years service receives a larger property share than a recent re-
cruit; a farm director receives more than a dairymaid even when both
have been farm members for an equal length of time). Property shares
are confusingly expressed in 'roubles', which reflect not the current cash
value of their property share but the relative proportion of the farm's
assets at book value at the time of share distribution. Thus the rouble
value of property shares are correct relative to each other, but do not
reflect current cash values as they only periodically take into account
inflation or post-share distribution amortisation of the value of non-
land assets.
Again, the privatisation of ownership of non-land assets was explicitly
aimed at replicating the careful husbandry of scarce resources in private
ownership. It was widely acknowledged that as long as the machinery
and equipment belonged to everybody and to nobody, no one had an
interest in their maintenance; this lack of interest was linked to the
rapid deterioration of non-land assets on state and collective farms. As
noted above for land, it is questionable whether the recent privatisation
of non-land assets has increased interest in their care and maintenance.
In a sense, the post-reform privatisation of non-land assets represents a
less significant change from Soviet-era practices than the privatisation
of land. If land was formerly the property of the 'whole people' repre-
sented by the state, non-land assets were for all practical purposes the
property of the collective farm. What has changed is the calculation of
what proportion of the farm's assets is 'owned' by each individual
member. However, as this does not represent the ownership of this
tractor or that lorry, it remains a fairly abstract relation, in and of itself.
As we shall see below, other factors need to be present if the hoped for
improvements are to be realised.
Louise Perrotta 125
units (that is, privatisation of the state and collective farms). Whether as
owner-occupant peasants or as shareholders with an interest in rents
and dividends, reform policies hoped to alter the behaviour of produ-
cers, increasing 'labour discipline' with a new series of incentives. As
noted above, this has been partially successful, provided that formal
privatisation is accompanied by practical innovations (participation in
decision-making, receipt of returns etc.). However, even where 'labour
discipline' has improved, and where land and assets are husbanded
more carefully, the overall results of sectoral reform have been devastat-
ingly disappointing. Overall production and productivity per hectare
are decreasing; agricultural wages have fallen far behind those of other
sectors; many farms are technically bankrupt. As structural privatisation
has produced not improvement but a deterioration in the agricultural
economy, we need to question both the assumptions that underlie the
policy and to look further afield for possible explanations. Although
some commentators suggest that privatisation has failed because it has
not gone far enough (for example, insistence on individualisation of
demarcated land holdings), agricultural managers and workers lay the
blame at the door of a number of off-farm factors.
Off-farm factors
(indeed throughout the FSU), almost every rural household and increas-
ing numbers of urban households enjoy private ownership of a small
plot of land (average size 0.06 ha.). Here pensioners and workers, share-
holders and proletarians, doctors, industrial managers, and collective
farm workers engage in stereotypical peasant production: small-scale,
owner-occupied, using family labour, mostly for household consump-
tion with some surplus sold or exchanged. The phenomenon has been
facilitated by wide-scale distribution of land to households, and is uni-
versally welcomed. The enthusiasm for subsidiary household produc-
tion is linked to three factors:
Conclusion
Annex
Laws
1. On Land Reform, 23 October 1990, amended 27 December 1990.
2. On Peasant Farms, 22 November 1990, amended 27 December 1990.
3. On Ownership in the RFSR, 24 December 1990, supplemented and amended
24 June 1992, 14 May 1993 and 24 December 1993.
4. The RFSR Land Code, 25 April 1990.
5. On Payment for Land, 11 October 1991.
6. On the Rights of Citizens to Acquire as Private Property and to Sell Land
Parcels to Conduct Subsidiary Farming and Dacha Operations, Horticulture
and Private Housing Construction, 23 December 1992.
134 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Presidential decrees
1. No. 323, On Urgent Measures for Implementation of Land Reform, 27 Decem-
ber 1991.
2. No. 218, On Regulations for Determining Norms of Free Transfer of Land to
Private Property, 2 March 1992.
3. No. 480, On Additional Measures for Allotting Land Parcels to Citizens, 23
April 1993.
4. No. 1139, On Certain Measures to Support Private Peasant Farms and Agricul-
tural Cooperatives, 27 April 1993.
5. No. 1767, On Regulation of Land Relations and Development of Agrarian
Reform in Russia, 27 October 1993.
6. No. 2287, On Introduction of Land Legislation of the Russian Federation in
Accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, 24 December
1993.
Government resolutions
1. No. 9, On Supporting the Development of Peasant Farms, 4 January 1991.
2. No. 86, On Procedure for Reorganisation of Collective and State Farms, 29
December 1991.
3. No. 708, On Procedures for the Privatisation and Reorganisation of Enterprises
of the Agro-industrial Complex, 4 September 1992.
4. No. 503, On Affirming the Procedures for Approval of Land Purchases and
Sales of Small Land Parcels, 30 May 1993.
5. No. 324, On the Experience of Agrarian Transformation in Nizhni Novgorod
Oblast, 15 April 1994.
Other documents
1. Recommendations for the Reorganisation of Collective and State Farms, 14
January 1992.
Notes
1. The capitalisation of 'Peasant Farming' is deliberate as a Peasant Farm is a
specific juridical entity with specific rights and so on. This makes it different,
in important ways, from a generic peasant farm.
2. The 'disparity of prices' refers to the different rates of inflation, increasing the
cost of agricultural inputs (especially fuel) far more rapidly than the prices of
primary agricultural produce.
3. Monopsony is where an organisation/enterprise is the sole buyer for a given
product or service (as opposed to a monopoly where an organisation is sole
producer of the product or service). This lack of competition between purcha-
sers adversely affects producers since the former control prices, terms, condi-
tions of payment and so on (in a similar way to a monopoly which can set its
own prices, terms and conditions in the absence of competing producers).
Louise Perrotta 135
Select Bibliography
Braverman, A., Brooks, K. and Csaki, C. (1993), (eds), The Agricultural Transition in
Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR, (Washington DC: World Bank).
Chmatko, N. (1994), 'Les Agriculteurs Russes Face aux Changements Economi-
ques', Information sur les Sciences Sociales, 33: 2, 371-95.
Csaki, C. (1993), 'Transformation in agriculture in Central-Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union: major policy issues and perspectives' in A. J. Rayner and
D. Colman (eds), Current Issues in Agricultural Economics (Basingstoke: Macmillan
- now Palgrave.)
Holt, S. (1995), Gender and Property Rights: Women and Agrarian Reform in Russia
and Moldova (Washington DC: World Bank).
Pallot, J. (1990), 'Rural de-population and the restoration of the Russian village
under Gorbachev', Soviet Studies, 42: 4, 655-74.
Perrotta, L. (1995), 'Aid agencies, bureaucrats and farmers: divergent perceptions
of rural development in Russia', Cambridge Anthropology, 18: 2, 59-72.
(1998), 'Divergent responses to land reform and agricultural restructuring in
the Russian Federation' in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism:
Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union (London: Routledge).
USAID Report, (1994), Farm Reorganization and Privatization in Russia (August).
Van Atta, D. (1993), The Farmer Threat: The Political Economy ofAgrarian Reform in
Post-socialist Russia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press).
Wegren, S. (1992), 'Private farming and agrarian reform in Russia', Problems of
Communism, 61: 3, (May-June) 107-21.
(1994), 'Farm privatization in Nizhnii Novgorod: a model for Russia?', Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, 3: 21, (27 May) 16-27.
(1994), 'Rural reform and political culture in Russia', Europe-Asia Studies, 46:
2, 215-41.
World Bank (1992), Food and Agricultural Policy Reforms in the Former USSR: an
Agenda for Transition, (Washington DC).
6
Subsistence Farming and the
Peasantry as an Idea in
Contemporary Russia
Caroline Humphrey
136
ence on subsistence agriculture, and despite the fact that they have a
firm and not necessarily negative idea of what the peasant life is, most
people are in various ways reluctant to identify themselves with it. Is
this because they cannot be peasants, or because their values and hopes
are now such that do not want to be peasants - or both?
I first discuss the case of rural agriculture and then that of urban
farming. In the final section I make some speculations about the wider
political implications of the stances that people in fact are taking.
How robust are our people. However much the authorities tried to
eradicate the feeling of ownership, nothing came of it. Here's one
aunty buying milk from another. The deal is done right in the bus.
Both the one and the other have three-litre jars. But one's is full and
the other's is empty. Protecting their sacred personal property, they
don't exchange jars, but in the midst of the journey start pouring the
milk. Of course, it spills. They both got angry and started to scold the
driver - why did he, heck, swing so hard round the corners?
(Meshcheryakov 1999: 81)
In short, every effort is made to avoid using the word 'peasant', even
when the word fits. The only reason for this circumlocution is that
the authorities associate the word with the image of the unruly,
ungovernable muzhik (bumpkin) class that has more than once re-
belled against the regime.
(1991: 229)
Of course, this rosy vision of the past takes form in contrast to under-
standings of the present day (and vice versa). In brief what has happened
is that collective production has plummeted during the 1990s, and
production on the plots has not risen sufficiently to compensate. The
liberalisation of prices for agricultural products caused a drastic fall in
incomes, and the poverty and uncertainty this produced are now com-
pared bitterly with the Brezhnev period. Indeed, that era was indeed
'better' for rural populations. Two questions arise: why would villagers
identify with a future construct of 'the peasantry' that has none of the
security (even if illusory) they associate with life ten years ago? 'Life has
never been worse than in the present; life today is sickening (toshno)/
agreed many of Koznova's respondents (1997: 368). And: even if such a
peasant life were attractive to some, are there realistic possibilities for
villagers to achieve it?
Today, the faltering collectives and the plots are disastrously entan-
gled. Householders are unable to manage their plots without help from
the collective (ploughing, fertiliser, cattle feeds, hay-making, spare
parts, fuel, and so forth), yet the collectives cannot give all this out
and also pay wages. Without wages, people are reluctant to work for
the collective and they steal from it too (Panarin 1999a), and so the
vicious circle goes on. This means that 'objectively' collective farmers
cannot be peasants, because they cannot manage an autonomous small-
holding, and 'subjectively' they cannot be peasants because an import-
ant part of their consciousness remains that they are specialised
professional parts in a social whole. Someone who has been trained as,
and sees himself as, a tractorist may be reluctant to take on the general
farming work of the 'peasant' enterprise (pig-keeping, lambing, and all
the rest of it). Furthermore, the very term 'collective farmers' gives the
wrong impression, because it suggests that all the people living in
villages are engaged in hands-on farming. This is far from true. The
lists of village-dwellers include numerous accountants, machine repair-
ers, builders, drivers, engineers, secretaries, bakers, furnace workers, etc.,
and this is not to mention the teachers, doctors, librarians, Trade Union
officials and so forth who live in villages but are now paid by the state
rather than by the farm (Humphrey 1998: Ch. 9). 10
Still, as I have said, all villagers are now relying on their plots for
subsistence.11 Let us look at this 'smallholder activation' in more detail.
In the 1990s, the plots have been freed from tax in most places, have
been made available for purchase, that is, they can now be the property
(sobstvennosf) of the farmer rather than the collective,12 and earlier
restrictions on the number of livestock held have been removed. How-
Caroline Humphrey 143
ever, it is not just economically, but also ideationally, that the plots do
not correspond to the peasant farm. For a start, they are still called
'personal subsidiary holdings' (lichnoye podsobnoye khozyaistvo, LPKh),
expressing the idea of their secondary character. In Buryatiya, they are
too small to support the entirety of a household's food needs at locally
defined reasonable standards through the year (Panarin 1999b). For this
reason, and because there is little work in the collectives, young people
are leaving the land to take temporary work elsewhere (mines, building-
sites, and so on.). Therefore, the 'household' that cares for the plots is in
many cases not a full household and may consist only of old people.
With the drastic fall in availability of petrol and electricity, work on the
plots is even more manual than in late Soviet times. Finally, as Panarin's
team discovered in Tunka, Buryatia (1999b) strategies for farming the
plots still rely on collective farm inputs rather than the classic 'peasant'
support of kin and neighbours. It is not that neighbours and kin do not
help one another - they exchange labour and ready-made goods. But
they lack the technology to keep the smallholdings going in the current
mode of production. Even if all the useful land of the collective were to
be divided up and given out to the households - which would give each
household enough land for respectable subsistence - in reality the
system could not survive, because the type of cattle preponderant in
Tunka requires artificial fodder (now produced by the collective with
heavy machinery) and without it, their productivity would decline;
it would then be necessary to increase the number of cattle, and
the land would then be insufficient (Panarin 1999b, Humphrey 1998:
Ch. 9). Villagers know all this well: consciousness of the virtual impossi-
bility of turning the smallholding into a peasant farm reinforces the
existing specialised-worker identity and the myriad of daily decisions
that maintain the miserable interdependency between the collective
and the plots.
There is yet another problem with realising the peasant life, the idea
of sobstvennost' (ownership) itself. Administrators are now encouraging
farm directors to encourage property-consciousness among their
workers. But there is complete confusion about what this means: the
promotion of commercial farming along neo-liberal lines, or some 'peas-
ant' hybrid in which control of land and profits still ultimately remains
in state hands? Full rights to buy and sell land is rejected by the great
majority of people, on the grounds that this will give rise to rapacious
landlordism. According to Koznova's materials, rural people associate
the idea of sobstvennost' only with material income, the products from
the smallholdings, or income from collective seen as dividends for their
144 Post-Socialist Peasant?
shares. Most of them do not link ownership with the peasant connota-
tions of responsibility, risk, strategising and selling. And if they do make
such associations, they may reject them: T think that I could probably
be a salesman no worse than anyone else,' said one animal technician
aged 33 in a collective farm of Vologod district, 'but I was brought up
from my childhood to work the soil' (Koznova 1997: 365). It is assumed
that the 'working the soil' and 'salesmanship' are incompatible.
The ambiguity over ownership refers not just to the plots but also to
the property of the collective. Here we could refer to Stark's notion
(1996) of 'recombinant property' and Verdery's idea (1999) of 'fuzzy
property', both referring to the situation where the same item is subject
to complex overlapping rights. In Russia, members of collectives in
theory 'own' those collectives through their shares. Yet, they do not
control them (the farm directors, state Land Commissions,13 and the
Ministry of Agriculture do). Hence it is not surprising that workers
mostly do not want to get involved in the details of wider economic
decision-making, leaving this to the managers. They are confused by the
new system of values: 'Under socialism everything was counted as the
people's (narodnym), but now all of it is being sold to the people for
money,' said another of Koznova's respondents (1997: 375). By the late
1990s this situation is even more confusing, since no one has money to
buy anything from the collectives and all external loans have dried up.
Even so, the whole idea of 'selling off the collective property (seen in
'privatisation', the issue of shares, the 'selling' of shares for land and
machinery in the early 1990s to selected fermers, etc.) has undermined
the emotive link between workers and the collective. Almost everyone
put their shares back into the collective, but for many workers an indis-
solvable tie was nevertheless lost: the collective is now seen as alien
(chuzhoi), no longer 'ours' (nash) (Koznova 1997: 375).14 Consequently,
it is among the managers, who do have to take decisions on behalf of the
collectives, and the few energetic milkers or machine-operators who still
identify with it, that one might find a sense of 'real ownership' (Koznova
1997: 365).
Ultimately, the issue of sobstvennost (ownership) goes back to the
question of control. An adviser on agriculture to the Buryat government
told me:
others. In fact, there is no one to complain to. Officials will say, 'It's a
pity,' but that's all.
In our society, everything depends on your post (dolzhnosf) and
your power-authority (vlastnoe polnomochiye). You feel yourself an
owner because of your powerful position, not because of your legal
rights. That's why the people who became fermers did so because of
their close ties with structures of power, and only those who cultivate
those links can succeed.15
benefits, the plots immediately beside their houses, and thieving (Koz-
nova 1997: 365).
The 'peasant-farmers' set up at the beginning of the reforms are the
most plausible candidates for a new peasantry. Koznova (1997: 379) gives
the examples of K., whose grandfather had been a peasant in Siberia, and
decided to become an independent farmer (fermer), seeing this as a revival
of an ancient, forgotten way of life; and, C, who had spent his life
working in a factory, whose decision to become a farmer was influenced
by the fact that his ancestors were state peasants. Note, however, that
ancestral inspiration is not enough. Anyone setting up as a fermer would
have to have official contacts. Most commonly these were people who
were already managers of collectives and who obtained approval to hive
off the profitable parts for themselves (Humphrey 1998: Ch. 9). The
reality is that independent private farms required large capital loans
and equipment to get established, and hence were restricted to those
with powerful connections. Furthermore, it turned out that successful
operation of lone farms was almost impossible on the basis of a single
family - the great majority of such farms failed altogether, or turned into
trading companies. Now, only a tiny number of private fermer operations
survive. They usually employ workers and they are mostly located in
situations where there is ready access to city markets (Panarin 1999a);
in other words, they succeed as commercial, not 'peasant', farms.
Group operation tends to fall foul of the peasant ideal of equality.
Even if a communal group of shareholders (tovarishchestvo) sets up a
private farm, the logic of decision-making and control of shares by those
who contribute more (or less) labour leads to fears that the main share-
holder will become an 'individual master' (yedinolichnyi khozyain) while
the lesser shareholders soon become his hired labourers.18 The account-
ant of such a farm, aged 44, dreaded returning to the collective, but was
even more scared by the private farm. 'That [the collective] was such a
nerve-wracking thing, such a responsibility! They called you up, you
were rooted to the ground... No, I don't want to go back to that. But
living with a master? We are painfully unaccustomed to taking orders.
The ones in the collective, they were not masters, that was socialism!
The Party and the Trade Union would protect you' (Koznova 1997: 378).
From the outside, fermers may be counted peasants if they themselves
work the land with their own hands. Interestingly, it is held that they
should produce not just for themselves but also for the state. Koznova's
respondents said (1997: 379): 'Most fermers are not peasants, they are
self-seekers (rvachi) and give nothing to the state'; 'the fermer is after big
sobstvennost'; the peasant laboured and delivered (sdal) to the state, but
Caroline Humphrey 147
Apartment block construction could not keep pace with the massive
inflow of people. Surrounding each city were streets of 'temporary'
barracks, and more germane to our theme, large areas of log cottages
which were identical to those the former farming folk had left behind in
the villages. In Russia as a whole in the 1940s and 1950s these urban
cottages were around 38 per cent of all city dwellings; by the 1970-90s
they were still 8-10 per cent (Vishnevskii 1998: 104).
It has to be said, however, that the peasant-type cottage was never a
popular dwelling in the city. This was not just because it lacked sanita-
tion and central heating and was almost invariably distant from the
place of work. Nor was it because Soviet regulations by the 1950s or so
forbade the keeping of cattle, etc. within city boundaries. The whole aim
of moving to the city was to better one's social status, to shift if not
oneself than at least one's children upwards to the position of educated,
civilised people. To recall Sheila Fitzpatrick's idea of the 'stories' Soviet
people told themselves to make sense of their lives, the 'Out of Back-
wardness' story constructed the 'primitive' peasantry as perhaps the
most basic legacy of the past to be overcome. Quite simply, peasants
were backward compared to town-dwellers (1999: 9-10). Individual
people could take part in the Soviet achievement merely by moving to
an urban job and living in an apartment.
As I have argued in the previous section, nothing has happened in the
1990s to dislodge this story. Nevertheless, especially in the Russian
provinces, people are increasingly relying on urban farming and we
must ask how they conceive of the process. The notion of the dacha
captures the contradictions.
The word dacha comes from the verb dat' (to give) and the term
expresses the idea of an out-of-town summer house with a garden
given as a reward to selected people by the authorities. Initially limited
to Party functionaries and other elites, by the 1960s dachas came to be
given out to whole classes of state employees (see Humphrey 1997).
Except for those given out to political leaders, dachas were not set
apart but were built in picturesque places in large compounds (though
without the shops or centres of a village). Conceptually, the dacha was
contrasted with the cramped, regulated life of the city. A way of life
150 Post-Socialist Peasant?
and the owner visits by car at weekends to enjoy the fruits and give
orders.
We see from this that intensive urban farming has begun to necessi-
tate someone living at the allotment from spring to autumn. Not only is
there far more work than there used to be in the days of the 'dacha for
leisure', but travelling to and from the city is expensive and burden-
some. Furthermore, theft of produce is now common so it is necessary to
guard the plots and the stores. Reports of knifings and shootings of
potato thieves are frequent, and they are even carried out by old
women left alone to guard the crop (Beeston 1999).
Thus, contrary to the situation in more prosperous countries (Cze-
gledy, Chapter 9 this volume), dacha is now a word that Russian families
often hear with dread. Who is to go and do the backbreaking work? Who
will stay for months in a tiny, comfortless hut? Who will go to the market
to sell the produce? Most often, in my observation, it is the elderly retired
people who bear these burdens. The situation does not, on the whole,
cement family relationships but gives rise to endless complaints, espe-
cially against young able-bodied people who refuse to help. If differenti-
ation is thus happening within the household - something that is
conceptually unacceptable with regard to the 'peasant household'
(though that communalism is known to have its costs too 26 ) - it is all
the more evident between urban households, and this contradicts the
contemporary vision of peasants, that they live in egalitarian commu-
nities. For a start, the very burden of the allotment may cause families to
split, as young people in employment hive off, leaving the old generation
to subsist on its own account. Money now decides which land, how much
land, and whether hired workers can be employed on the plots. In met-
ropolitan cities, the very poorest people of all, single, elderly, un-
employed women, cannot even keep the simplest potato plot, because
they cannot afford the bus fare to go and tend to it.
Yet, however formally similar it may be, no one is identifying this
situation with the 'differentiation of the peasantry' described by Lenin.
Quite simply, as I have mentioned, people do not identify urban farming
with peasant models at all. This is a matter of aims and values, not
practical effects. Thus city officials who give out land in Ulan-Ude have
reduced the size of plots from eight to six sotok27 during the 1990s,
because they do not see the allotments as turning into farms, and there-
fore they are not prepared to battle with collectives outside the city for
extra land for city dwellers. For the same reason, regulations forbidding
the keeping of cattle within city boundaries and dacha compounds are
still in force, and plot-holders would not even try to obtain the necessary
Caroline Humphrey 153
Conclusion
This chapter has tried the method of locating contemporary ideas of 'the
peasantry' in various rural and urban situations, with the aim of thereby
elucidating the nature of present-day farming practices. 'Practices' have
been seen here as both modes of action and of thinking. They provide
the key to the understanding of the ways people constitute themselves
as subjects capable of knowing. The chapter describes the maintenance
of substantive continuities in agricultural practices from Soviet times.
Notably, the personal plots in rural collectives are still considered to be
podsobnyye (subsidiary) and continue to be maintained in this fashion,
even though most of the family income comes from them; and in the
provincial cities, the 'dad?a-apartment' duo continues to be valued,
while the mundane allotments are despised, despite the fundamental
necessity of the latter to family budgets. In both of these situations, the
'peasant way of life' appears as something that either cannot, or should
not, be emulated. The private farmer (fermer) comes closest to the idea of
the peasant, and has been designated by this term by government
reformers. However, the chapter has shown that the commercialisation
of social relations inside the ferma contradicts basic values such as love
of labour and egalitarianism attributed to peasants by contemporary
Russians (who here again are much influenced by Soviet teachings).
Actual 'peasants' in the early twentieth century may have been far
from equal, but today great offence is taken at the idea of working for
a private individual and at economic inequality more generally. There-
fore, it is widely held, farmers who employ workers, or even just buy up
most of the shares, cannot be peasants. So, taking all this together,
and notwithstanding the huge increase in subsistence farming, the
154 Post-Socialist Peasant?
practices of ordinary people in all their variety hardly ever support a self-
constitution or self-identification as peasant.
This situation contrasts interestingly with Poland. A consideration of
the difference will help us suggest some thoughts about the lack of
political activism among Russian agriculturalists despite their extraor-
dinarily adverse conditions. In Poland, small farmers are unhesitatingly
called peasants (chlopy) both by themselves and in the literature, a usage
which I follow here. 28 Polish peasants have a history of relative inde-
pendence from the socialist regime. They refused, on the whole, to be
collectivised. Thus, in the 1990s, they were considered the ideal ground
for development of independent, market-oriented, capitalist farms
(Zbierski-Salameh 1999). Now they were like Russian rural farmworkers
in one respect, they had greatly gained economically from the security
and subsidised prices of the late socialist period. And as in Russia,
though far less drastically, the Polish peasants were damaged by the
reforms: prices shifted markedly in their disfavour and they found it
difficult to obtain credits or licenses enabling them to expand produc-
tion. However, their reaction, at least according to Zbierski-Salameh
(1999), was different from what we have seen in Russia. The Polish
peasants strengthened practices of 'involution' (1999: 202), that is, reli-
ance on themselves to generate the resources for the renewal of produc-
tion cycles (unlike farmworkers of Russia who continue to rely on
collectives) and 'retreat from markets', which saw them diverting field-
crops away from commercial sales into fodder for their own livestock.
Farm sizes have fallen, as the larger, more specialised enterprises sold
land and dismissed hired workers to generate funds for the switch to
closed-cycle production. 29 In other words, the Polish peasants have
become if anything more 'peasant-like' during the 1990s.
What I would like to suggest here is that the increased autonomy of
Polish peasant farmers may be a factor in their political activism.
Zbierski-Salameh (1999: 205-10) describes how peasants blockaded
sugar-beet processing plants, went on strike against adverse milk prices,
and in 1990 dumped loads of potatoes at the Ministry of Agriculture in
Warsaw to protest against state reduction in purchases of potato flour
and starch. Of course, Polish farmers also had the political advantage
that Rural Solidarity and other organisations had been working since the
early 1980s in the countryside to challenge the socialist government. No
such organisations were present in Russia. But I would like to argue here
that the way the Russian farming people see themselves as parts of larger
wholes, as opposed to independent units, is part of the explanation for
their political passivity. For the relation between the smallholder and
Caroline Humphrey 155
Notes
1. Rural farmworkers call themselves villagers (sel'skiye), or by the name of the
place they come from ('My Torskiye' - 'We are people of Tory', and so on.).
2. Such theories would be relevant for rural people only in the case where they
penetrate, through state policies, down to administrators who propound them
locally (see Humphrey 1998: Ch. 9).
3. Koznova collected oral materials through extended, non-structured interviews
with around three hundred rural respondents in the Orlov, Nizhegorod and
Vologod Oblasts during 1993-6. The respondents had a range of occupations,
from farm directors to manual workers, and were of various ages, though most
were over thirty. Koznova acknowledges that attitudes in different parts of
Russia may vary from her findings (1997: 362). Nothing in Koznova's mater-
ials contradicts my own field materials from the Buryat Republic in 1996 (see
Humphrey 1998), but I have chosen to use her examples rather than my own
because 'the peasantry' is classically a Russian cultural idea and to introduce
Buryat data would complicate the argument.
4. The word sobstevnnost is etymologically quite similar to 'ownership', since it
relates closely with sobstevnnyi (one's own, proper, true), even though it does
not link to ideas of 'private property' that seem so inseparable from ownership
to Euro-American minds. Sobstvennost is closer to 'personal' than to 'private'
property (see Humphrey 1998).
5. 'The new, communitarian (sobornyi) "ordinary person" differed markedly from
his peasant predecessor only in external, instrumental attributes. In the Soviet
version of the future, this was first of all an industrial worker, a mechanical
detail of the steely proletarian ranks, conscious of discipline, a homogeneous
mass marching in a single human rhythm and standing above personal attach-
ments. In essence, this was the collective (obshchinnyi) peasant, but reclothed in
urban dress and with a modern education' (Vishnevskii 1998: 111-12).
156 Post-Socialist Peasant?
6. The 'peasantry' was a category not only for sociology but also in Soviet legal
and administrative practice. For example, the peasantry had a different status
in relation to taxation, army service, passports and social security from urban
workers or employees.
7. In 1987 the plots produced a quarter of all agricultural production in the
USSR, despite strict limits on their size and the number of livestock kept
privately. Between 1968 and 1988 production on the smallholding reduced
from 26 per cent to 24 per cent, with a particularly sharp drop in cattle and
poultry products. In 1986, the average collective farm family was purchasing
32 kg of meat, as opposed to 20 kg in 1981. Zemtsov attributes this situation
to the hard manual labour required on the plots, which were almost entirely
unmechanised (Zemtsov 1991: 327-8). One might also add that rural family
size was declining (Vishnevskii 1998: 138) and that young able people were
leaving the countryside. Between 1969 and 1988 the total agricultural work-
force declined from 52 to 49 million (Zemtsov 1991: 327).
8. Accountant, aged 43, in the TOO Moslovo, Orlov District, Orlov Region,
Koznova 1997: 363.
9. Panarin (1999b), on the basis of a detailed study of the village of Tory in
Tunka, Buryatia, writes that collective farmers' income did reach an optimum
in the Brezhnev-Gorbachev period. At the end of the 1980s, arable and
livestock production in the Lenin collective were both so improved that a
whole stratum of families (17.3 per cent of the total) could live almost
entirely off their wages; they did not need to keep private cattle and used
their plots only for extra vegetables. The situation was not sustainable,
however. Prosperity rested on a constant subsidised supply of fertilizers,
technology, lubricants, for example, and this whole mode of agriculture
conduced to degradation of the soil, water and wind erosion, and over-use
of pasture.
10. Even in the late 1980s, the agricultural workforce was only half the rural
population (Zemtsov 1991: 327) and the situation has undoubtedly
worsened since then as young people depart for the cities leaving an aged
population in the villages.
11. Village dwellers hold two kinds of plot. The first is the priusadebnyi uchastok, a
plot under a hectare in size immediately beside the house, used mostly for
potatoes, other vegetables, pigs and chickens, and for cattle sheds. The
second type of plot is located outside the village and consists in Buryatia of
a hay-field to provide winter fodder for cattle (in other areas of Russia this
plot might be used for other purposes). The first plots are almost never taken
away from the family living in the house even if they are formally the
property of the collective farm. The second type of plot is re-allocated fairly
frequently, and some collectives do not make them available to teachers, and
others, who live in the village but are not members of the farm.
12. They can be passed on in inheritance, as during Soviet times, but they still
cannot be sold on the open market (that is, to outsiders, Humphrey 1998: Ch. 9).
13. Land Commissions in each district have the task of deciding on allocation of
lands between collectives and other claimants, such as independent farmers
or production cooperatives.
14. The sense of alienation is not universal. Koznova also notes (1997: 378)
people who say they want to keep their shares in the collective in the hope
Caroline Humphrey 157
that the collective will become prosperous again and to preserve their sense
of common ownership (stremleniye sokhranit sobstvennost).
15. Galina Manzanova, personal communication, Ulan-Ude 1996.
16. An example is the director of a state-owned institution, a station for produ-
cing horticultural specimen plants near Ulan-Ude. Besides fields and labora-
tories, the station included housing for its workers and numerous other
buildings. The long-time director, who had numerous influential contacts
in the city, clearly felt herself to be the 'owner' in the sense outlined by
Manzanova. She gave or took away housing, and sold other buildings,
according to her own will (fieldnotes, Ulan-Ude 1996).
17. To give some idea of the numbers, in 1996 in the Karl Marx Collective Farm
in Selenga district, Buryatia, of a total of 490-500 households 320 were
members of the farm, around 70 were state employees, and the rest (around
100) were 'ballast'. Of course the proportions may be different elsewhere in
Russia, but other farms I visited in Buryatia had comparable numbers. Koz-
nova notes 'ballast' to be around 30 per cent of households in Central Russia
(1997: 378).
18. In the conditions of economic crisis, poorer shareholders may have to sell
their shares to the director for financial reasons, Koznova 1997: 378, Hum-
phrey 1998: Ch. 9.
19. In the steel-producing city Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, 'Many of the peasants
came to the site in traditional groups of migrant villagers known as artels
whose leaders were generally older peasants, men who commanded absolute
loyalty from other members and brooked no incursions into their authority/
Kotkin 1995: 88-9. The artels divided the wages amongst themselves and
maintained their own traditions. The Bolsheviks considered that they had to
'smash the artels' in order to assert their own authority (Kotkin 1995: 89).
20. Vishneveskii is here quoting Leroy-Beaulieu, who was describing Tsarist
cities, with the aim of showing that Russian cities have changed little in
this respect (1998: 104).
21. 'In many cases our workers' quarters look better than the centres of the
cities,' said Stalin with pride (quoted in Vishnevskii 1998: 104).
22. The fee is not large, since the associations are still subsidised by the govern-
ment (1996); it covers the cost of water for irrigation of the gardens.
23. Chief city architect, Ulan-Ude 1996.
24. From 1985 these plots were given out only to people with five year official
residence permits (propiski) for the city. With the crisis of the 1990s this
regulation has been relaxed, and now plots may be given out by the mayoral
office even to migrants without registration. All officially allotted land is
subject to taxation in Ulan-Ude. For this reason, many people simply appro-
priate unused land, slipping a bottle of vodka to anyone who looks as though
they might interfere.
25. In 1996, because of increasing poverty, such travellers are now few and many
of the kiosks were having to close down. The produce is sold instead at the
city market or on street-corners.
26. In the late nineteenth century, studies of Russian villagers revealed that
they thought a large patriarchal family was good for farming work, but that
for living it was anything but happy. 'Everything is unsteady, everyone
is straining at the leash, demanding their own because of the awkward
158 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Select Bibliography
Beeston, R. (1999), 'Why Russian plots lead to potato knifings', The Times, (10
Aug.) 15.
Colton, T. (1995), Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press).
Fitzpatrick, S. (1999), Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet
Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Gorshkova, M. K. Chepurenko, A. Yu. and Sheregi, F. E. (1998), (eds), Osennii krizis
1998 goda: rossiiskoye obshchestvo do i posle, (Moscow: Rossiiskii nezavisimyi
institut sotsial'nykh i natsional'nykh problem).
Humphrey, C. (1997), 'The villas of the "New Russians": a sketch of consumption
and cultural identity in post-Soviet landscapes', Focaal, 30: 31, 95-106.
(1998), Marx Went Away, But Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: Michigan Uni-
versity Press).
IDRC Report, (1993), 'Farming in the city: the rise of urban agriculture', IDRC
Reports, 21: 3, (Ottawa, Oct.).
Khandazhapova, L. M. and Manzanova, G. V. (1998), O putyakh resheniya zhi-
lishchnoi problemy v Buryatii' (unpub. manuscript).
Kotkin, S. (1995), Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press).
Koznova, I. (1997), 'Traditsiya i novatsiya v povedenii sovremennykh krest'yan'
in M. Olcott, V Tishkov and A. Malashenko (eds), Identichnost' i Konflikt v Post-
sovetskikh Gosudarsvakh (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentre Karnegi).
Meshcheryakov, A. (1999), 'Oblomki epokhi,' Otkrytaya Politika, 5-6, 75-83.
Panarin, S. (1999a), 'The Buryat village of Tory in the 1990s: social and cultural re-
adaptation in a small village community,' Inner Asia, 1: 1, 107-10.
(1999b), 'The rural economy of the Tunka Valley in a time of transition and
crisis,' (unpub.,).
Stark, D. (1996), 'Recombinant property in East European Capitalism,' American
Journal of Sociology, 101: 4, 993-1027.
Verdery, K. (1999), 'Fuzzy property: rights, power and identity in Transylvania's
decollectivisation' in M. Burawoy and K. Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition:
Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman and Little-
field).
Vishnevskii, A. G. (1998), Serp i rubV: konservativnaya modernizatsiya v SSSR
(Moscow: OGI).
Caroline Humphrey 159
'Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not
surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand in
for the experience of human communities... On the actual
settlements, which in real history have been astonishingly var-
ied, powerful feelings have gathered and have been generalised.
On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of
peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered
the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication,
light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on
the city as a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition; on the
country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.
(Williams 1973)
With these images Raymond Williams began his seminal study of The
Country and the City. He was writing about England, but many of his
more general points extend effortlessly to the rest of Europe, and prob-
ably to other regions as well. Williams shows us that the country and the
city are not merely places, or settlements for people, but are also sym-
bols and metaphors for a range of complex and often contradictory
ideas and beliefs about human nature at its most elevated and most
degenerated, and about social life which orders this nature, disciplines
it, pushes it to the heights of 'civilisation' or the depths of squalid
'backwardness'. In certain ways they are thus reminiscent of gender
imagery, with the masculine city juxtaposed to the feminine country,
or of idealised kinship and life cycles, with the childlike country poised
to develop into the adult sophistication of the city. In other contexts,
however, the country may itself stand for age-old, almost primordial
wisdom, for strength of character and body, while the city is the frivolous
160
and amoral whore, the shell of a decadent modernity which has aban-
doned the moral and practical knowledge of the old.
In Poland, both city and country as ideas or ideal types have been
harnessed to the nationalist project in various ways at various times. In
literature we find the ambivalence to which Williams refers. The coun-
tryside is the true heart of the Polish nobility during the centuries of
invasions, wars and partitions, when the state was subsumed under
Russia, Prussia and Austria, but the nation was kept alive in culture
and imagination, and embodied in the land (Polski ziemie). But the
rural is also a bleak and cruel environment, where backward peasants,
barely emerged from barbarism, are depicted in the most squalid and
brutal terms. The city is the seat of high culture, of glittering palaces and
heady and refined intelligentsia, but it too has its underside, reflected in
the squalid tenements and the heartless factories of early industrialisa-
tion, where uneducated workers moved between apathy and passivity
and radical revolutionary politics (see Milosz 1969). All of the complex-
ity of Poland's history is drawn out in these imagined worlds.
The anthropological literature tends to oppose city and country in a
rather different way. Because the tendency, historically, has been to
focus on 'the other', whether from the perspective of culture or political
economy (see Chapter 1), the countryside is generally represented as the
place of the peasantry, while the city is the home of high culture, intelli-
gentsia and bureaucracy. Perhaps because anthropologists tend to study
'down', and at least until recently most came from middle-upper class
backgrounds, or perhaps because of the entrenched belief that only the
exotic are to be studied, and only the different are exotic, peasants in the
countryside have been subjected to far more scrutiny than either land-
owning gentry or working and middle classes in the cities. This of course
gives rise to a particular view of space and place within the literature,
which tends to ignore the fact that the countryside also holds its
wealthy elites, and the city its poor and marginal groups. What I want
to suggest here is that this representation of space, place and culture
creates a dichotomy similar to that of public and private in the anthro-
pology of gender, and one which is equally limited and problematic.
Like public and private/domestic, the country and the city are powerful
and ubiquitous concepts with which to think about social organisation,
power and personhood. At least in the context of Europe, they have far-
reaching historical roots, and seem to fit easily with any number of
spatial and ideological constructs. The public/domestic dichotomy how-
ever becomes deeply problematic when, as was the case in the feminist
theories of the 1970s, it is assumed that these domains are primarily or
162 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Not only are the histories and economies of these two regions quite
different, but so also are the relations between the peasants and the city,
and the ways in which the city is understood or imagined. By looking at
stories of the past, as well as experiences and practices of the present, I
shall attempt to unravel some of the complexities of ideas about place,
country and city, and nation, which are so central to issues of identity
and difference in both rural and urban Poland, and ways in which these
have changed in the recent post-socialist period. I argue that during the
socialist period, the idea of the Polish nation, so dominant in grand
cultural narratives, was notably absent in mountain village stories;
where it was evoked it was most often as something interchangeable
with the city, political and economic power, and high culture. However,
I suggest that this is a regional rather than a rural-urban distinction. As I
go on to show in relation to the Lodz area, both nation and city are
inextricably interwoven with the stories, memories and self ascriptions
of the villagers of central Poland.
In 1977, when I first went to Poland, I stayed for a time in Krakow and
Warsaw before going to live in a small village in the foothills of the Tatra
Mountains.
In Krakow and Warsaw at that time, it was impossible to walk down
the city streets without continually encountering reminders of older
European history and culture, the Europe of Napoleon, of the Haps-
burgs, of an intellectual tradition which encompassed everything from
Copernicus to Malinowski. These layers of different times and histories
were disguised but by no means hidden by the force of the visual assault
of Soviet style slogans, architecture, monuments and built space. But the
bleakness of the contemporary space, the lack of light and colour, the
greyness of the winter streets, the shops with empty shelves and long
queues, all evoked for me, equally if not more powerfully, a Europe of
the more recent past, the place of stories I had heard in childhood
of cities during the war, the years of blackout and rationing. Memories of
war of a different kind were also reinforced at almost every street corner,
in every church, in every park, by plaques and monuments commemor-
ating the dead of World War II, proclaiming that here the Nazis shot five
members of a certain partisan troop, here a hero of the underground was
caught and killed, here a group of unknown citizens were summarily
executed. As I spent more time in the homes of friends, I realised that
the immediacy of the war was not only located in commemorative
monuments; it was also a living part of daily conversation, memories
kept alive by constant retelling. It was clear that at least in part my
friends were using the language of the German occupation and the war
164 Post-Socialist Peasant?
For the oldest, the critical war was World War I, when this part of Poland
was under Austrian rule.3 They spoke of going off to fight for Austria, of
being given a uniform and learning to read and write, a bit at least. The
war, like the coming of the railway later, opened their eyes to the world.
They had little or no idea, however, in formal political terms, what it all
was about. They had little, or no, sense of themselves as Poles. That
came later, if at all.
Then other images, again of war. I was told the story of the fortune
teller who was shot, on a hill outside the village, by the Nazis. It seemed
to me quite clear, from old records and from the inscription on the
official monument to her death, that she was executed because her
sons had joined the partisans and she was probably helping them. But
villagers say that she was killed because her fame as a fortune teller was
great. The German commandant went to her to have his cards read, and
when she predicted that he would lose the war, he shot her. Another,
more complicated and oblique story, which may well be apocryphal,
involves a group of soldiers, probably German deserters, possibly Red
Army, White Russians, or even Polish Home Army, (none of the story
tellers agreed on or were particularly interested in the details) who came
to the village to strike a deal about horses. The deal was struck, and
during some kind of altercation, the soldiers were shot and buried in the
forest. The villagers involved kept the horses and the money. Other
stories follow quickly on from these, of the village leader dealing with
Germans in one room, partisans in the other, of the in-marrying witch
who did the same, of the stupidity and brutality of the Nazi command-
ant, of black market deals and of mysterious, inexplicable loss and
suffering. What is clear through all of the narratives, and what makes
them so different from the war stories of the cities, is the relative absence
of political grand narratives. They are all in different ways about insiders
and outsiders, us and them, ourselves and strangers, or as the villagers
would say my or nasz and obey/obey ludzie: 'We' or 'ours' and 'outsiders',
'opposite people'. Here Zygmunt Bauman's eloquent opposition fits
well:
There are friends and enemies. And there are strangers... friends are
reproduced by the pragmatics of co-operation, enemies by the
pragmatics of struggle. Friends are called into being by responsibility
and moral duty... Enemies on the other hand are called into being
by renunciation of moral responsibility and moral duty... Thus
the opposition between friends and enemies is one between doing
and suffering, between being a subject and being an object of
166 Post-Socialist Peasant?
In the city accounts of war, there are friends and enemies, in precisely
Bauman's sense: I shall come back to this later. In these fragments of
stories from the mountains, on the other hand, the dangerous stranger
is a constantly looming and encroaching presence. An enemy presence
is rarely clearly identified, nor is a situation read as a meeting with an
enemy, or placed within the context of a wider political, national or
international conflict. These outsider/strangers in effect cross a symbolic
or conceptual border which is only really perceived by the insiders. And
so the situations are understood from a totally local perspective, and
outside places and political events are remapped so that local place
becomes the centre of the story, and the stranger/outsiders take their
identity only from their lack of relation to that place and those people.
There is little or no sense of nation here, of nation in Europe, or of
Europe as an entity, spatial, historical or cultural.
The stories I have sketched so far speak of an isolated and closed
community, but this is only one dimension of a far more complex series
of ways in which villagers situate themselves in relation to, and craft
their relations with, other people and other places. In other contexts,
the presence of the city (be it Warsaw, Krakow, or a regional town such as
Nowy Targ and Zakopane), in Poland, and both Europe and North
America, is strong and clearly relational. Gorale have a long-term in-
volvement in long-distance trading to the major Polish cities, and in
wage migration to other parts of Europe and more importantly to Amer-
ica (primarily the city of Chicago), dating back at least to the mid-
nineteenth century (Pine 1996, 1997, 1999). Travelling traders and
returning migrants brought back money, cultural knowledge, and new
and different kinds of expertise from the outside world. As I have argued
elsewhere (Pine 1997, 1999), this engagement with the world when
going out to it, and the simultaneous guarding of local boundaries
from penetration by this world, is characteristic of this kind of marginal
economy.
Frances Pine 167
work exchanges and more often from informal wage migrations to the
west.
In the late 1970s, when old women who encountered strangers
might see them as witches, their grandchildren were already situating
themselves easily in quite a different series of worlds simultaneously.
For instance, at a time when foreign currency was officially rigorously
controlled, even small children in the village were conversant with up
to the minute fluctuations in the black market exchange rates not
only of the dollar, but of the pound, the Deutschmark and sometimes
even the yen as well. By this time they were also identifying themselves
as Poles as well as Gorale. I would argue that this was largely a result
of the socialist project, attained in various ways: intentionally through
universal education, through work in the state sector and regular deal-
ing with the bureaucracy and general control of the state, through the
propaganda of the state media, which continually identified Poland
with the Warsaw Pact countries and juxtaposed it to the west; and
unintentionally through alternative economic practices, most notably
an informal market which took as its primary terms of reference, both
economic and cultural, western Europe and North America.
Under communism education to the age of 15 became compulsory,
and a particular national and world history was taught which, while
clearly presented in terms of class war, Soviet style, also promoted a
strong sense of Poland as a country with its own history, its own heroes
and villains, and its own place in the making of Europe. At home, village
children learned to speak in the local dialect and were told family and
regional stories and legends, often couched in terms of opposition to the
state (or in earlier times to the gentry). Once they started school, they
were taught the wider history, and taught in literary Polish. While the
oldest villagers were still more likely to identify themselves as Gorale
than as Poles, all school children could recite by heart a poem begin-
ning. 'Who am I? A small Pole. Where do I live? On Polish land.' On
finishing school, young men went away into military service, and then
usually into some sort of regular employment in the state sector; while
young women went straight from school into state sector work; usually
this work was located in Nowy Targ, the local market town. These
involvements with the state political structure and economy were gen-
erally represented as an unavoidable and encroaching evil but neverthe-
less they inscribed another layer on to villagers' awareness of themselves
as members of a nation-state comprising both towns and countryside,
and one placed politically in a wider world. With the notable exception
of state waged labour, these transformative processes were not new; as
Frances Pine 169
by the outside world, and deeply entrenched and almost reified local
practices which diminish, transform, or negate these interactions.
During the socialist period, both of these patterns intensified; as the
state became increasingly intrusive, villagers retreated further into their
local society and economy, while simultaneously denigrating practices
associated with the state, and pursuing those opposed to or outside its
reach.
Since 1989, the ways in which villagers imagine and map their world
have been reshaped and expanded again, in ways ever more rapid and
more intense. This is most apparent in connection to education and to
work. Prior to 1990 only a handful of villagers had gone to the city to
study, and of these most went for vocational training: to Lodz to learn
the textile trade, to Krakow to qualify in mechanics. It is now a common
although still not widespread practice for young women and men to go
to Warsaw or Krakow to university or college. Some return to the Pod-
hale to work as teachers or in other professions, while others remain in
the city to work, or move elsewhere. This increased mobility lessens the
conceptual distance between the village and the cities, and transforms
the city from an unknown, threatening place to one which is familiar
and manageable. Similarly, with the opening of international borders
and with increased communications and information technology, villa-
gers are becoming far more involved with other parts of Europe. Eco-
nomic migration is more extensive than before, and is spatially and
temporally more varied. During the socialist period, short-term migra-
tion, often officially arranged, was usually to Czechoslovakia and Hun-
gary. Trips to North America were allowed officially as holidays to visit
kin for a month or so but were informally extended to periods of
months and years; the holiday became two or often three moonlighting
jobs. Since the early 1990s, while migration to America remains the
most prestigious and sought after pattern, far more villagers have
become involved in migration chains to southern Europe - notably
Greece and Italy - where they work as domestic and day labourers, and
to western Europe - notably France and Germany - where they join
teams of seasonal agricultural workers from all corners of the former
socialist world. When they talk about this work, they attach little intrin-
sic value to it. On the contrary, as work they devalue it in much the same
way and with much the same language that they formerly described
their waged labour for the state. They are fully cognisant of the fact that
they are paid far lower wages than local workers and that they are often
treated extremely badly. However, when they return home, their status
increases in direct relation to the money and new cultural expertise they
Frances Pine 171
bring. If they then feed this money and cultural knowledge into a new
enterprise, they are seen to have been successful. So, for instance, a
middle-aged couple who work in Italy for a year or two, come back
and expand their house into an hotel complete with garden tables and
umbrellas, swimming pool, modified-ethnic restaurant and bar, and
email and fax facilities for national and international bookings, have
successfully crossed European cultural and economic, as well as polit-
ical, borders in two directions: they have gone to Europe, and then,
returning, brought a containable and manageable (and lucrative)
Europe back to the village.
Since the early 1990s, the main state employers in the region, small
factories, processing plants, and services, have been cut back or closed
altogether. This has not however resulted in economic decline as it has
in other areas of Poland. Rather, the Podhale seems to be booming, and
this appears to be directly linked to the decline of the state sector, and to
the opening of borders with western Europe. Old friends remain the
same, while old enemies have become employers or clients. Who are the
strangers now? They are, I would suggest, people who move into or
encroach upon local space without having any social relation or con-
nection, with no involvement in ties of responsibility and reciprocity.
And here again I think we see the rather tendentious link between
Gorale/the Podhale and the rest of Poland. It is never a given - it has
to be established. And it can be established negatively, as with the
communist state, or positively, as with tourists who come to the village
and behave properly. Poles who come from Warsaw or other cities, buy a
little strip of pasture and forest, and build a dzialka (a summer cottage)
and then drink and drive their cars very fast through the village are
labelled as obey and feature in contemporary stories of danger and en-
croachment in just the same way as do cowboy entrepreneurs from the
city or from abroad who are said to employ local people to do work, for
poor wages, which is harmful to both their own health and to the environ-
ment. These particular local stories are reminiscent of the war stories with
which I began; they emphasis the occasional trickster victory of a local
player, but more often confusion and powerlessness in the face of some-
thing outside, unknown and hence unpredictable.
I would argue that for Gorale villagers, local place is central to
belonging in both practical and symbolic terms. Space on the other
hand is a more elastic concept, expressed and understood in the light
of centuries of movement, as transhumant shepherds crossing and re-
crossing the Carpathians, later as distance traders and migrant labourers
travelling to other parts of eastern-central Europe, and as far afield as
172 Post-Socialist Peasant?
with, and then it was late - too late; it was already dark, and I pulled
my shawl over my head and ran down the streets - Oh, I ran so fast,
but listening, always listening. I heard footsteps! My heart stopped. I
pulled into a doorway and stayed so still. I held my breath. German
soldiers marched by. They were talking loudly. I tried to be like the
wall. They passed, and I waited, and then I ran, oh, how I ran, home.
That's what it was like then.
The same woman later told the story of her family's deportation: her
mother was taken away, she thought to the Ukraine, and she did not
see her again until the end of the war. She and her father and sister were
taken to Germany, as forced labourers for agriculture. In her descriptions,
again what stands out is how she felt that she and her sister were so small,
and so helpless (I think they must have been in their mid-teens, although
none of the details are very clear in these accounts). Her memories of the
labour camp revolved around hunger and fatigue, and again fear. Ger-
many seemed a distant and unfamiliar place to her, although not an
unknown one, but she also talked about returning after the war, to the
village, and feeling herself to be a stranger there as well. Similar accounts
were given to me by her friend, a very independent and strong-minded
widow in her seventies. She stayed in the village throughout the war, a
young widow with a baby living on her parents' farm and going to work,
like her friend, in a textile factory. Her stories, like those of her friend,
often evoke a strong feeling of fear and helplessness. She spoke of her
anxiety about being so young and 'not knowing anything about the
world' while still feeling responsible not only for her small child but
also for her ageing and weak parents. Again, the German presence is
threatening for two reasons: they might hurt her and her family, even
for some unknowing and unintended transgression; equally, they might
take her away, to a labour camp in France or Germany, and then who
would look after the others? Her three elder brothers were all taken to
France as forced labourers, and she only made contact with them again
after the war, when two returned to the area. In another story she
recounted going to a German office to apply for some kind of permit or
authorisation. While there she witnessed the beating of a young man
who had been rounded up for some minor transgression. She described
his mother throwing herself on the body of her unconscious son and
screaming 'Mary mother of God help me. You know how it feels. You are
also a mother. You lost your only son too. Blessed Mary, save my son.' As
she recalled the episode, she linked it explicitly to her fears for her own
son, still small then, and to her horror about what she had heard of or
174 Post-Socialist Peasant?
seen being done to the Jews in the Lodz ghetto - again her references were
all to mothers, and to the terrible suffering they endured at the loss of
their children through physical harm or deportation.
As in the Gorale stories, senses of local place, inscribed with symbols of
belonging, enduring social relations, ties of shared work and daily life, are
very strong. However, Podhale stories from this period tend to render
outsiders into strangers whose origins are not important; only their dan-
gerous or encroaching presence is registered. Similarly, story-tellers seem
to cultivate almost deliberately a sense of not understanding what was
happening in the rest of Poland, let alone the rest of Europe. In effect they
diminish or ignore the wider politics of war or occupation by reducing it to
a quite starkly local view. The Lodz region accounts, on the other hand,
clearly situate their tellers' experiences in the context of both an identified
and feared occupying presence, the source of danger to the local region,
and of deportation to other parts of Europe, or forcible disruption of the
local into a wider but threatening Europe. The city itself, its streets and
buildings, play a major part in the descriptive accounts. Both Lodz specif-
ically and Poland generally are clearly placed in a wider European context,
but a very specific one of unequal relations of power.
Like Katowice and Gdansk, and absolutely unlike the Podhale, Lodz
was known for its militant workforce during the communist period.
Partly at least this militancy was a reflection of the strength of the
relationship between the workers and the state rather than a rejection
of it, as was the more individualistic subversion carried out in the
Podhale. My own material is in keeping with various other oral accounts
and memories of the strikes and occupations: the largely female work-
force saw it as their duty to work for the nation, to feed the people, and
saw the duty of the state as lying in an obligation to protect and nurture
the mothers and children in return. When the state failed to honour its
part of the contract, as for instance when new shift hours made it
difficult for mothers of young children, or when food prices were in-
creased, the factory workers felt entitled to take action. In other ways,
however, women's memories particularly focused on their belief in
socialism, and on the associations they made between better health,
better working conditions, better childcare with the socialist state. The
stories told by village textile workers dwell not on local place and rela-
tions, as the Podhale ones do, but on relations between workers in the
factory, on travel between the village and the city, on the space and
machinery of the factory, and on the work itself. For instance, one
woman who worked an early shift talked about having to leave her
house in the village before dawn to catch the train. She described
Frances Pine 175
running as fast as she could until she reached the cemetery, and then
tiptoeing, as silently as possible, holding her breath, in case the dead
tried to stop her - then she would run again, as fast as she could, until
she reached what was clearly for her the comfort of the commuter work
train and then the lights and sociality of the factory. In a way unimagin-
able in Podhale stories, it is the city, and not the countryside, which is
the place of safety and sociality here.
When they talk about their work, the women emphasise the wide
markets they served, and how their factory (whichever one it was) pro-
vided the best shirts or coats in Poland or elsewhere. They often make
little distinction between the city and the country, moving easily be-
tween the village and Lodz and its dormer towns. With the post-socialist
restructuring, many of the women lost their jobs. Those who commuted
to work now stay in the village, while many of those who lived in the city
have been forced by economic necessity to return to their natal farms. In
the place of regular work, the city now provides for them an occasional
market for farm produce, or a place for temporary work in small private
enterprises. But the traffic is increasingly in the opposite direction, as city
women send their children to their parents' farm to ensure that they have
good food and healthy air, or return themselves for long periods to work
in the fields in exchange for food. What remains consistent is the ease of
movement, in both economic and emotional terms, between the two
spaces. The city is rarely if ever portrayed in this region as a dirty, danger-
ous or immoral place, as it often is in the Podhale.
In the central area we see a long and solid history of commitment to
and engagement with the wider economy, and with a fairly complex
and sophisticated notion of Europe and other European countries. Lodz
was the western-most border of part of the Russian Empire during the
Partition Period; during the inter-war years a number of German mag-
nates took over factories; there was a large and visible Jewish population
as well. Outsiders and insiders are rarely meaningful categories evoked
in this region and neither is difference or the unknown in itself much of
a threat. Rather the threat and the discontent come from subjugation to
specific historical and political forces, clearly recognised and identified
and relatively well understood. In this sense, space is a highly political
concept in local understanding and narrative.
I would argue that the stories of the war from each region continue to be
told both because in the sense I mentioned before they evoke senses of
176 Post-Socialist Peasant?
place, proper sociability and relationality and because they address more
problematic issues of internal boundaries and borders, power and vul-
nerability, and the danger, chaos or moral void that emerges when there
is no basis for reciprocity nor even any intimations of equality. People
shape their social worlds as much through place and space as they do
through kinship; indeed, I would argue that space and place are integral
parts of the construction of kinship and relatedness. The images of city
and countryside are often useful in our understanding of metaprocesses,
and in particular in the suggestion of a relationship both arising
from and generating acknowledged distance and inequality. However,
the balances of power shift as economies change and as political borders
are remapped - we have seen this clearly in eastern central Europe and
the rest of the former socialist world over the past decade. Eric Hirsch,
discussing Raymond Williams' famous characterisation of the country
as a place for insiders to live in versus a place for outsiders to objectify,
suggests that 'With its implications that the first are rooted in nature
while the second have an understanding based exclusively on commer-
cial/possession values... it savours of romanticism. Like "place" and
"space", notions of "inside" and "outside" are not mutually exclusive
and depend upon cultural and historical context,' (1995: 13). Podhale
villagers would I think claim a position closer to that of Williams, and
their lived experiences are historically ones of movement between cul-
tural and political maps, and crossing borders. The ways in which they
go to the city, or abroad to other parts of Europe and America, and the
ways the city, Europe and America appear within their space, are increas-
ingly complex. Factory workers and farmers from central Poland, on the
other hand, would I think be perfectly at ease discussing the changing
nature of their historical relationship of integration with the city, as well
as their integration to or exclusion from wider European markets, the
impact of the European Union on their textile industry (negative) and
the impact of the CAP (the common agricultural policy being promoted
by the European Union). However, these relationships are not easy ones,
and at the moment I would suggest that it is in areas like central Poland,
fully incorporated into the socialist political economy and in that way
very much part of the centre under that system, that are becoming the
new peripheries of European urban culture.
I am very aware that much of what I describe is equally relevant
elsewhere, and that these patterns of rural and urban engagement, of
reaching out towards entrepreneurial activities and spatial and eco-
nomic mobility, or retracting under the burden of enormous loss and
change with deindustrialisation, have clear parallels in the UK, North
Frances Pine 177
America and beyond. Poland has no more or less complexity, but there
are particular ways that the past informs the present in any culture or
place. One of the strengths of anthropology is its focus on small pro-
cesses and local practices; but I think we are all aware that the local level
is always linked not only temporally to the past, but also politically and
economically to the state and the global. Equally, as these brief glimpses
demonstrate, the city and the countryside are always linked, always
constructed in relation to each other; but the nature of the relationship
shifts at historically critical moments.
The grandmothers and grandfathers who first taught me about Gorale
culture are mostly dead now. Their memories of World War I, of the
exodus of wage migrants to Chicago, of the years of hardship as impov-
erished smallholders and day labourers, of Nazi occupation and of the
first years of communist rule, survive as faint echoes hovering behind
stories that their children and grandchildren tell. In both the Podhale
and central Poland, new stories situate and portray the past differently,
and the contemporary actors, my age-mates, and their children have an
understanding of the village and the city, of Poland and Europe which is
different from that of their parents and grandparents but, I suspect, no
less complex.
Acknowledgements
The Podhale ethnography in this chapter is based on research funded by
the SSRC between 1977-79, and by the ESRC (Grant No. R0002314)
between 1988-90. The post socialist ethnography for both central
Poland and the Podhale is based on research funded by the ESRC be-
tween 1992-95 (Grant No. R000233019). I gratefully acknowledge this
support. I would like to thank Deema Kaneff and Keith Hart for conver-
sations and comments which helped me to think about the ideas in this
paper, and both Deema Kaneff and Pam Leonard for careful, skilled and
above all patient editing.
Notes
1. The Podhale (literally 'under the pastures') is the region of south-western
Poland stretching from the foothills to the south of Krakow to the high
peaks of the Tatra mountains. The people who live in the Podhale are the
Gorale, or mountain people, highlanders.
178 Post-Socialist Peasant?
2. See also Pine 1999 for an account of this and other events in the village during
the war years.
3. The area which had been Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and
Austria-Hungary in the late eighteenth century, and was re-established as a
nation-state only after World War II, in 1918.
4. This research was conducted between 1991 and 1996. Lodz is the second
largest city in Poland, and has historically been the centre of the textile
trade. From the nineteenth century, when this area fell under Russian rule,
peasants came in to Lodz, and later to dormer towns such as Pabiance, Ale-
kandrow and Zdunsky Wola from the countryside to work in textile factories.
During my research I lived partly in Lodz itself, and partly in a small village in
the Sieradz wojawodstwa; throughout the period I conducted unstructured
interviews with unemployed female textile workers in Lodz, Aleksandow,
Lask, Zdunski Wola and Pabianece, as well as participating in and observing
daily life in the village.
Select Bibliography
Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso).
Bauman, Z. (1990), 'Modernity and ambivalence' in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global
Culture: Nationalization, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage).
Casey, E. (1996), 'How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time'
in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American
Advanced Research Seminar Series).
Collier, J. and Yanagisako, S. (1987), 'Gender and kinship: essays towards a unified
analysis' in J. Collier and S. Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship (Stanford:
Stanford University Press).
Day, S., Papataxiarchis, E. and Stewart, M. (1999), (eds), Lilies of the Field: Marginal
People Who Live for the Moment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press).
Gell, A. (1986), 'Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the
Muria Gonds' in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Goddard, V. A. (2000), (ed.), 'Introduction', Gender, Agency and Change: Anthropo-
logical Perspectives, (London: Routledge).
Hirsch, E. (1995), 'Introduction: landscape: between place and space' in E. Hirsch
and M. O'Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and
Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Howes, D. (1996), 'Commodities and cultural borders' in D. Howes (ed.), Cross
Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London: Routledge).
Humphrey, C. (1996), 'Remembering an enemy' in R. Watson (ed.), Memory,
History and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe: American School of Social
Research).
Milosz, C. (1969), The History ofPolish Literature (Berkeley: University of California
Press).
Myers, R (1991), Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics Among
Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Frances Pine 179
Pine, F. (1996), 'Naming the house and naming the land: kinship and social
groups in the Polish highlands', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2,
443-59.
(1997), 'Pilfering identity: Gorale culture in post-socialist Poland', (special
issue: 'Cultures and identities in the new Europe', ed. D. Forgacs), Paragraph, 20:
1 (March) 59-74.
(1999), 'Incorporation and exclusion in the Podhale' in S. Day, E. Papatax-
iarchis and M. Stewart (eds), Lilies of the Field: Marginal People who Live for the
Moment, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press).
Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (1974), (eds), Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford:
Stanford University Press).
Williams, R. (1973), The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus).
8
Work, Identity and Rural-Urban
Relations
Deema Kaneff
180
P. Leonard et al. (eds.), Post-Socialist Peasant?
© Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff 2002
Deema Kaneff 181
traditions for the post-18 78 Bulgarian settlers to call upon, such shared
tasks as the 'public' construction programme created a strong - perhaps
sole source of - 'community' in the village.
Importantly, much of the communal work that was carried out on the
public buildings was done without the involvement of state officials.
While the appropriate state agencies provided authorisation for the
buildings - the government in the case of the school, the higher church
order for the church - and minimal financial assistance, these village
projects were otherwise local affairs: they were organised through com-
munity initiative and construction was carried out using local resources
and labour. The relative autonomy of the community was evident not
only in the way in which institutions of local significance were founded
but also in the way they were maintained over the long term. Thus, for
example, before the socialist state was established in 1944, funds for the
heating, lighting, maintenance and cleaning of the school, as well as
the cost of furnishing it, came from property written in the name of the
school. Such school land - 45.6 hectares of fields, 4 hectares of forest
and 6 hectares of meadow - was given 'under rent' and the proceeds
used to fund the school. The chitalishte did not receive income from land
until 1939, when it was granted 2.1 hectares by the government. Until
this time, material support for the chitalishte came from individual
donations, which included money, building supplies and grain (Nay-
mov 1969: 17). Funding was also earned from local initiatives to organ-
ise entertainment projects. The proceeds of Talpian plays and other
theatrical activities were channelled into developing the chitaliste. The
library was also established through the generosity of the local inhabit-
ants who made donations of newspapers, books and journals, while
others gave cash.
The degree of autonomy evident in the establishment of the Talpian
chitalishte appears quite typical of Bulgarian villages during the earlier
part of the twentieth century, although Sanders, in his 1930s ethnog-
raphy of a village near Sofia, now an outer suburb of the city, notes a
gradual increase in the penetration of the state at the local level. During
this same period of Talpian history, 'the city' was not portrayed posi-
tively in local accounts, rather it was perceived as the source of village
misery. Education was offered as a local solution. Such views were
expressed from the earliest moments of Talpian history. For example,
in 1897, an invitation was sent out to villagers to attend the annual
general meeting of the chitalishte by individuals who 'expressed deep
concern for the social and economic position of the villagers' (Naymov
1969: 16):
184 Post-Socialist Peasant?
11.1.1897
Dear Villagers
We, as villagers, find ourselves in a bad situation. Not only bad, but
also ugly. Everyone of you now understands or at least feels the unfair-
ness which has gripped our region. Everyone sees how individuals
higher up and more powerful, unlawfully crush the rights of the
weak ordinary people and how they play with the fate of the poor
villager. We are crushed as if the whole city is upon u s . . . Why do these
big differences exist between the uneducated and educated, between
the poor and rich? Why? Should we tell you? Because we, poor villa-
gers, are both uneducated and understand little of our rights or of
other such matters... Since it is so, we must learn, we must start to
understand these processes and not take our hats off to the important
people. And where can we learn this? We'll tell you. Nowhere else
except in the chitalishte... Villagers, don't waste the 12th of this
month. After the church service, there will be a meeting... Now is
the time. Make haste! Everyone is requested to give as much support as
they can to the chitalishte, which is the real source of self-education.
(Naymov 1969: 16, my translation)
in the law courts, they must calculate things at the markets and protect
themselves from liquidators, businessmen and other exploiters' (Nay-
mov 1969: 5).
We can trace the changing nature of rural-urban relations in terms of
Talpian interactions with the state - the way Talpians perceive urban
inhabitants and 'the city' are coloured by local responses to external
political circumstances. The official accounts of local history present the
village as strongly pro-socialist and this seems a factor of central import-
ance when considering local-state relations and rural perceptions of the
urban. Thus in 1914, village officials sent a protest to the King and
Government concerning the country's involvement in World War I. As
a further display of opposition, the mayor was reported to have replaced
the portrait of the King in his office with the portraits of Marx and
Engels (Naymov 1969: 22). Talpian recollections about the period im-
mediately after World War I, however, when the Agrarian Party was in
power (1919-23), were positive. During this time, public discussions
revolved around the 'progressive' (Naymov 1969: 25) creation of a
Commission for Land to consider land reforms and the cooperative
working of the land. It was also in this period that a law was passed
making primary education compulsory (Naymov 1969: 5), a secondary
school was opened in Talpa (Naymov 1969: 23-5) and a general revival
of cultural activities occurred in the village following the return of
surviving soldiers from the war.
But if during this time there is little recorded evidence of anti-city
rhetoric, the picture was very different following 1923. Vilification of
'the city' quickly reached a new peak after the assassination of the leader
of the Agrarian Party and installation of a right-wing coalition. It
brought the socialist-oriented politics of Talpa in direct conflict with
that of the national government. One assault made by city state agents
on the village is passionately described, when on the 3 May 1923 the
village was surrounded by the army and police from the city of Veliko
Turnovo (Naymov 1969: 26). A number of houses were searched and
men arrested - communists and BZNC (Agrarian Party) party members -
the perpetrators then moved to the village library from which they
confiscated over 300 books, mostly socialist literature including works
by Marx and Engels. A portion of the books was piled high in the
chitalishte yard and burnt publicly, the other part was taken back to
the city of Turnovo, along with the arrested men. The attack on village
literature was perceived as an assault on the community, a significant
event in local history, for the library and contents had been built up
through years of concerted effort. The destruction of village property
186 Post-Socialist Peasant?
(books) which had taken the villagers so much effort to develop, and
which symbolised for them a means of freedom from their burdensome
lives, was ultimately also a deep cut into the core of village identity.
Throughout the mid-1930s and in the lead up to World War II, the
village was located in an antagonistic position with respect to the state.
The village chitalishte was the focal point of much anti-government
activity that directly conflicted with city authorities. For example,
plays with political messages were performed that led occasionally to
youths being questioned by city police. Money earned from the per-
formances and intended for donation to the partisan movement was
confiscated by officials (Naymov 1969: 30). In fact as with many other
villages in the region, Talpa became a safe haven for partisans seeking
protection from government forces less able to penetrate and root out
anti- government activists in rural settlements than in the cities. The
most famous figure to seek refuge in Talpa was Todor Zhivkov, later to
become the head of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1954) and Bulgar-
ian State (1962-89). He found sanctuary in Talpa for a period of two
years in the late 1930s. During this period he lived with his fiancee, who
was stationed in the village as a doctor. Local institutions such as the
chitalishte took a leading role in the ideological battle with the right-
wing, urban based government. In 1943 directives from the city were
once again sent, demanding the destruction of socialist literature in the
chitalishte library. This time the books were stored by the librarian in a
secret location and thus saved from another purge.
As the state gradually increased its penetration of local institutions over
the first half of the twentieth century, so urban-based policies which did
not conform to local views became more important in strengthening
Talpian opposition to 'the city'. Portrayed as a village with strong socialist
leanings, this period before the end of World War II placed the village as
much 'at war' with its own government as with foreign powers. But as we
have seen it was by no means a new tension, as from the very earliest
moments, 'the city' was seen as the repository for those who had material
and educational advantages that they used to exploit villagers. With a see-
sawing national politics, rural inhabitants found themselves at times in
unison, at other times at odds, with the state. It was in the moments of
greatest divergence that 'the city' was vilified.
in the village (even the first village priest was a socialist!) - we should
not be surprised that the post-World War II period was the one lengthy
period during which antagonisms with 'the city' were relatively weak.
Local negative connotations of city life continued, but ultimately social-
ist ideology, the driving force behind Sofian investment to improve the
standard of living in the provinces - to make rural settlements 'like
towns' - ensured that the once large discrepancies between the quality
of life in cities and villages was narrowed. The expansion of the state at
the local level, dominating local education, health as well as agricultural
production, may not have been welcomed by everyone in Talpa, but few
would deny the increases in standard of living that were associated with
this period. One elderly woman responded to my question (in 1987) of
what socialism had done for her by explaining that: 'it has brought us
electricity, running water, asphalt roads, less sickness', in short a much
better way of life.
Positive improvements in rural life were associated with changing
forms of 'work': agricultural work moved closer in significant ways to
becoming more like 'urban' work. Indeed in the context of state social-
ism - which controlled both the means and forces of production - work
became a significant 'target' for socialist transformation. The collectiv-
isation of agricultural production was a fundamental factor in this
process. The cooperative was founded on the basis of pooling joint
agricultural land and livestock. Villagers also contributed their labour
in order to build the organisation - in much the same way as had
occurred in the case of the church, school and chitalishte some sev-
enty-odd years earlier. Whether this land, livestock and labour had
been given voluntarily or not was less relevant from a Talpian perspec-
tive. The important fact was that the cooperative was established on the
basis of local contributions. Further, the institution was far more signifi-
cant to the community than simply as an organisation for agricultural
production. The collectivisation of agricultural production was per-
ceived as a fundamental factor in contributing to the overall improve-
ment in rural standards of living during the socialist period. It freed
villages from heavy physical work through the mechanisation of agri-
cultural labour and took away a lot of individual risk associated with
working the land. Moreover, collective agriculture introduced a form of
labour compatible with urban factory work and enabled villagers to
enjoy, for the first time, salaries, pensions and holidays. An increasing
number of villagers moved out of working full-time in agriculture al-
together - aided by an excellent and free nationalised educational
system. By 1986 when I first arrived in Talpa, only about one-sixth of
188 Post-Socialist Peasant?
being a 'model village' in 1987 made clear not only the acquiescence
shown by the local community to the state, but also the relative prom-
inence of Talpians in terms of their position with respect to the city. The
'model village' title was a state recognition of the decrease in differences
in lifestyle between this particular rural community and urban settle-
ments. Achievement of 'model village' status was an acknowledgement
of the hard communal work invested by Talpians in order to transform
their village into something more 'urban-like'.
Demographic changes resulting from socialist industrialisation are
also a consideration in explaining rural-urban relations during the so-
cialist period. From a pre-war total of 70 per cent of the population being
rural and 30 per cent urban, the statistics were reversed during socialism,
with only 30 per cent of the Bulgarian population living in the rural
areas. This of course has led to a situation where every villager has close
family (usually children and grandchildren) in the cities. Under such
circumstances, negative views of the city have not been so easy to
maintain. The once 'educated and rich' described in the 1897 invitation
cited above, now include Talpian children and grandchildren. Yet des-
pite the physical separation - elderly in the village, children and grand-
children in the cities - a close connection has been continued between
kin. For example, households were - and still are - largely self-sufficient
in the production of meat, fruit and vegetables. In Talpa, Maria, a 60
year-old widow, relied on her only child, her 40 year-old daughter, her
son-in-law and grandson to return (from the town of Turnovo) on
weekends as well as for longer periods during the summer months to
help in the tending of the garden. The involvement of the daughter and
her family was not only vital in the preparation of the produce; the
family was also the main recipient, benefiting from the hundreds of jars
of preserved fruit, vegetables and meats that were produced annually.
Indeed it was only on the odd occasions that Maria visited her daughter
in the city, that agricultural work was not the focus of their time
together.
Thus, during socialism, rural-urban distinctions were minimised not
only by a close local-state centre association but also through emerging
kinship connections between the two areas. Had immigrants to the
urban areas severed ties with their rural roots, then the stereotypic
images of the city could perhaps have been maintained. However this
has not happened. To the contrary, during the socialist period, as much
as now, rural and urban kin have been and are bound in a relation of
economic dependency: the fruit/vegetables and cash crop (decorative
roses) provided - and still provide - an important source of food and
190 Post-Socialist Peasant?
The height of urban-rural tensions was reached at the time that the
liquidation of the socialist agricultural cooperative took place. The Li-
quidation Council was established on the basis of policies of the anti-
communist party, the Union of Democratic Forces (henceforth, the
UDF), which during its short term in office in 1991-92 passed laws
that disallowed members of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (henceforth
to be known as the BSP, previously the Communist Party) from partici-
pating in the Council. In Talpa the Liquidation Council was comprised
of five men who fulfilled the criteria of not being BSP members (and
were thus in no way representative of the pro-socialist village) and who
all but one lived in nearby towns. Unsurprisingly these men bore the
brunt of rising antagonisms between ordinary villagers and state offi-
cials. Much as on previous occasions, the state-local tension was largely
expressed as a rural-urban split, a particularly easy association to make
given that the state-sponsored reforms were carried out by officials from
the towns. Further, Talpians re-established the cooperative working of
the land in preference to private individual farms - an act which placed
them at odds with goals upheld by the UDF. The first of the two new
private cooperatives was formed in 1992 in reaction to the liquidation of
the socialist organisation. The president, Iliev, spoke in a village meeting
of 'interfering' outsiders and promised that no one but Talpians would
be employed in the private cooperative (a promise he had to break at a
later stage). Indeed at the same meeting, he said that 'I'll kick out non-
villagers, they have no business here.' Villagers took it as an obvious
reference to the Liquidation Council members most of whom lived in
the nearby township and who by nature of their political alliances -
and participation in the liquidation of the socialist cooperative - had
become the target of local resentment. Liquidation Council members
were representatives of the new political-economic order, and village
anti-urban feelings were focused precisely on such visible figures.
Animosity spread to those in the cities to whom the village Liquid-
ation Council was responsible, in this way transferring prejudice
directed from local urban representatives in Talpa to a general dislike
of all 'city inhabitants'. This is borne out by another statement made by
Iliev, who said of Stanev, head of the Liquidation Council, that T don't
think Stanev is our problem. Firstly his directives come from there', and
he pointed to the ceiling, indicating them as coming 'from above'. This
was a significant moment. The relationship between the village and
state centre was under contention. Unlike the socialist period, the
state now was seen as something alien, distant and non-accessible.
This was echoed in the way that other local people started speaking
Deema Kaneff 193
It was during the early post-socialist period when the deep split between
'rural' and 'urban' was at its height, that academic literature and city
discourse about the Bulgarian 'peasantry' gained momentum. Urban
professionals and intellectuals put forward explanations as to why villa-
gers were 'unable to cope with the new changes'. For example, a doctor
in the township neighbouring Talpa commented to me that 'in Talpa
194 Post-Socialist Peasant?
the people are politically red, but we town doctors are supportive of the
UDF, we are contemporary people, it's the party of the contemporary
times', thus assigning a backwardness to the villagers on the basis of
their political alliance to the BSP. Such evidence was also prevalent
amongst urban intellectuals - a factor that I attribute in part to the
very different, negative, experience urban intellectuals had of socialism,
as opposed to those more positive experiences held by rural people.7
In a paper describing the political events of the early 1990s, Tzvetkov
(1992) distinguishes between the conflicting political alliances of the
rural and urban areas. He writes that support for the BSP comes from an
'elderly, less educated and politically inactive strata living in the small
towns and villages' (1992: 34). On the other hand, he describes the UDF
as being backed by the 'active part of the population' (1992: 34), namely
intellectuals, youth and industrial workers. To make sense of this view
we need contextualise the position of the author: as a historian from the
Institute of History of Bulgaria, Academy of Sciences in Sofia, who as an
activist for the UDF was clearly pursuing his own political agenda.8 The
negative ways in which Tzvetkov represented rural inhabitants were
standard, almost cliche stereotypes generated by urban intellectuals of
the early post-reform period. Like many of the historical and socio-
logical studies written during this period, Tzvetkov's work upheld a
clear political agenda, that involved presenting the villagers as ineffect-
ive and weak, unable to adapt to progressive changes initiated by the
UDF. Village opposition to the reforms was thus explained away by
representing rural Bulgarians as politically backward and conservative.
Draganova (1992), a sociologist from Sofia also highlights the political
inactivity - that is, unwillingness to participate fully in the reforms - of
the rural population and provides a clearer explanation as to the nature
of such 'inactivity'. In seeking to explain village resistance to the
changes, she blames former communist managers 'who very craftily
use their discontent and manipulate them [the villagers]... [in order]
to protect their interests and preserve their [that is, managers'] status
quo' (1992: 7). In this quote villagers are represented as passive, ineffect-
ive beings, not bright enough to see themselves being 'controlled',
puppets manipulated by the BSP.9
The problem with such urban approaches is that they give no serious
consideration to villagers' political interests or economic concerns. Ac-
tually, a review of fieldwork evidence indicates the inaccuracy of these
representations. Lack of enthusiasm for private farming had nothing to
do with rural 'inactivity'. At least in the case of Talpa, for which I feel
most qualified to speak, lack of enthusiasm for private farming was
Deema Kaneff 195
Conclusion
'Work' was a central dimension of rural Talpian identity - although by
no means the sole dimension - and one that the state has engaged with
in different ways during Talpa's history. I have suggested that in particu-
larly low points of the local-state relationship, when state policies have
diverged considerably from dominant village pro-socialist views, Tal-
pians have perceived state officials as 'attacking' local identity through
destroying the products of their labour - be it their hard work to collect
books for the library or more recently the agricultural cooperative. In
both instances these institutions - the chitalishte and state-run coopera-
tive - were seen as having particular importance to the community: the
result of village toil and the means through which villagers believed
they could be freed from their burdensome lives. To the extent that work
solidifies the community both symbolically and practically through
shared activities, then such public buildings were about creating com-
munity, part of a long tradition of local labour projects.
The rural-urban division that has grown out of post 1989 reforms -
and which is intricately connected to the withdrawal of the state from
the local level - was largely manifested in terms of anger over the
liquidation of the once state-run cooperative. Post-socialist reforms in-
volving land restitution that de-emphasised work and which necessi-
tated the liquidation of the cooperative, failed to acknowledge two
important issues: the agricultural cooperative's symbolic and practical
role in contributing to improvements in rural life over the previous 50
years, and the importance of the institution in terms of local identity,
through community work which had been invested in it. The destruc-
tion of the socialist cooperative angered villagers who saw the state
officials as directly attacking them and the institutions that they hold
Deema Kaneff 197
Notes
1. I first carried out fieldwork in Talpa in 1986 and have been returning to the
site regularly since then.
198 Post-Socialist Peasant?
2. The work (1969) was written by G. Naymov, a prominent Talpian who was
the director of the village school for periods both before and after World War
II, as well as being the head of the chitalishte for over twenty years.
3. See Pine (1996) for a Polish case.
4. See Smollet (1989: 126) for an interesting discussion on being 'treated
as quasi-kin' through inclusion in the exchange of home-preserved pro-
duce.
5. In part this reduction in gap between rural and urban areas can be explained
in terms of the origins of those people in power during the socialist period. I
find particularly enlightening a table provided by Drachkovitch (1982: 134)
that clearly identifies the family background of all east European leaders after
World War II as peasant in origin. In many senses I see the move toward
socialism after World War II a victory for rural interests. (See also Tepicht
1975.) The prominent leaders were from rural regions and their personal as
well as ideological commitment to rural areas was clear. This contrasts with
the post-1989 situation, where reforms are very much an urban-based initia-
tive.
6. See also Verdery (1999: 72) who indicates Romanian cooperatives as having a
similar importance - bound up with local notions of work.
7. I can only point to some of the reasons for this diverging experience of
socialism, by recalling the dramatic improvements in standards of living
experienced by rural inhabitants during socialism. Another factor is the
type of work: urban intellectuals experienced more directly the 'repressive'
nature of state controls because of the specific nature of their work (writing,
for example) which placed them in a position of greater 'danger' with respect
to state ideology (see Verdery 1991).
8. In fact such works are based on generalisations and abstractions, rather than
on detailed and protracted research carried out in villages. Further, the
publications take a particular political bias - pro-UDF - in part achieved
through the uncritical use of government data. This leads to sometimes
questionable conclusions. Interestingly, some of this type of work was writ-
ten for western audiences, and often financially funded by western aid
programmes (e.g. Draganova 1993).
9. Draganova's (for example, 1992) pro-UDF stance which lays blame for village
opposition at the door of powerful BSP figures, was a view also evident in a
conversation I had with a young man from town, temporarily visiting Talpa.
He told me vehemently that 'these people (the communists) are still
choking us, still poisoning us, especially here in Talpa. In the towns it's not
that bad.' As noted below, this is contrary to my own fieldwork experience
where in Talpa, at least, it was BSP leaders who discouraged villagers from
carrying out demonstrations against the government enforced liquidations
(or at least discouraged the open forms of conflict to which Draganova was
referring.)
10. I have not discussed in any detail the way in which Talpian compliance
was organised. This would require providing information about the local
administration, the relationship between the mayor, Party leaders and
cooperative leaders, data on the way in which decisions to conform with
state requirements were made and so on. Such a topic warrants a separate
paper.
Deema Kaneff 199
Select Bibliography
Creed, G. (1993), 'Rural-urban oppositions in the Bulgarian political transition',
Sudosteuropa, 6, 369-82.
Drachkovitch, M. M. (1982), (ed.), East Central Europe, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
(California: Hoover Institution Press) 134.
Draganova, M. (1992), 'The troubles and conflicts toward a new social order in
rural areas', paper presented at the 8th World Congress for Rural Sociology
(Pennsylvania State University, Aug. 11-16).
(1993), 'Auxiliary plots of rural households as a starting point towards future
family farming in Bulgaria', paper presented at 15th European Congress of
Rural Sociology (Wageningen, Holland, Aug. 2-6).
Flower, J. and Leonard, P. (1998), 'Defining cultural life in the Chinese country-
side' in E. B. Vermeer, F. N. Pieke and W. Lien Chong (eds), Cooperative and
Collective in China's Rural Development. Between State and Private Interests (New
York: M. E. Sharpe).
Kaneff, D. (1998a), 'Un jour au marche. Les modes d' echange dans la Bulgarie
rurale', Ethnologie Francaise, 28: 4, (Oct.-Dec.) 532-39.
(1998b), 'When "land" becomes "territory" : land privatisation and ethni-
city in rural Bulgaria' in S. Bridger and F. Pine (eds), Surviving Post-Socialism:
Gender, Ethnicity and Underclass in Eastern Europe and the Former USSR (London:
Routledge).
(forthcoming), Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a 'Model Bulgarian
Village (Oxford: Berghahn).
Naymov, G. T. (1969), 'Istoricheski Materiali za Chitalishtito, Ochelishteto, Cher-
kovata na Selo Talpa, Veliko Turnovosko', unpub. manuscript.
Pine, F. (1996), 'Redefining women's work in rural Poland' in R. Abrahams (ed.),
After Socialism. Land Reform and Social Change in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Ber-
ghahn Books) 133-55.
Sanders, I. T. (1949), Balkan Village (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press).
Scott, J. C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven: Yale University Press).
Smollett, E. W. (1989), The economy of jars: kindred relationships in Bulgaria: an
exploration', Ethnologia Europa, 14: 2, 125-40.
Tepicht, J. (1975), 'A project for research on the peasant revolution of our time',
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2: 3, 257-69.
Tzvetkov, P. S. (1992), The politics of transition in Bulgaria: back to the future?',
Problems of Communism, 41 (May-June) 34-43.
Verdery, K. (1991), National Ideology Under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in
Ceaue§cu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press).
(1999), 'Fuzzy property: rights, power, and identity in Transylvania's decol-
lectivization' in M. Burawoy and K. Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition. Ethnog-
raphies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield).
9
Urban Peasants in a Post-Socialist
World: Small-Scale Agriculturalists
in Hungary1
Andre Czegledy
Introduction
'There will be some hard work this weekend' (kemeny munka lesz a hit
vegen), says Bela Katona2 in a proud voice as he prepares to leave the
office on a Friday afternoon. Dressed in a business suit that befits his
professional role of senior salesman for one of Hungary's most venerable
industrial concerns, there is little indication that soon he will be occu-
pied with an agricultural plot located 25 kilometres south of Budapest.
Yet none of the friends and colleagues who know him well find his
enthusiasm at all peculiar - for so many of them are too, urban peasants
in a post-socialist world.
According to official statistics, six of every ten Hungarians - rural and
urban alike - were involved in agricultural production in 1982 (Szelenyi
1988: 31).3 What percentage of the population remains currently en-
gaged in such activities is a matter open to speculation. Such specula-
tion is, however, a substantial distraction when evaluating Hungarian
attitudes towards agriculture, in general, and small plot production, in
particular. The 1982 figures cover only those persons directly involved in
agriculture; they do not include the more infrequent, and indirect,
participation of people in agriculture-related activities of self-provision-
ing 4 nor the dense web of social relations and cultural traditions tied to
such participation.
This essay draws its ethnographic material from ongoing anthropo-
logical research conducted in Hungary since 1989, particularly material
collected in the course of three fieldtrips made in December-January of
1995, April of 1996 and July-August of 1998. It addresses historical and
200
Like the rest of Europe recovering from the devastation of World War II,
Hungary experienced a significant population flight from the country-
side to its cities in the immediate post-war era. This demographic shift
was influenced by ongoing urbanisation and encouraged by the labour
requirements of infrastructural reconstruction and industrial develop-
ment. The normal pattern of migration was, however, undercut by a
range of social dynamics, chief among them those related to the resi-
dential intransigence of families of rural commuters whom scholars
have dubbed 'peasant-workers'. In substantial respects, these figures
are the precedent counterparts to the urban peasant phenomenon to
be addressed in later parts of the discussion.
The concept of the peasant-worker received widespread attention
through the work of Ivan Szelenyi (1988).5 His research investigated
rural-urban relations from the perspective of peasants as willing - and
unwilling - actors drawn into socialist Hungary's drive to industrialisa-
tion. They were rural folk who remained grounded in traditional village
and agricultural life, who assiduously cultivated small 'household' plots
of land permitted by the state and yet were able to take advantage of the
opportunities of newly created waged labour. In the eyes of the central
planners, these opportunities were meant to transform the previously
'self-employed' peasant or small-scale farmer into a member of the new
proletariat, whether through work on a cooperative farm or an indus-
trial assembly-line.
202 Post-Socialist Peasant?
The fundamental question for the state authorities of the time was: to
what extent can a predominantly rural and agrarian society adjust to
investment discrepancies at pace, especially as these constitute radical
changes in the organisation of the agricultural sector? The major policy
components for modernising agriculture were put into place soon after
the end of World War II. They included: the nationalisation of major
enterprises and property holdings, collectivisation of agriculture, public
investment skewed towards manufacturing, and the linkage of welfare
benefits to waged labour status in the state-directed 'first' economy.
These policies forced many peasants to divide their time between official
employment (in a cooperative farm or factory) and private pursuits
geared to self-provisioning and/or additional income generation for
the household. Thus was created the peasant-worker, an amalgam of
rural identity and urban waged employment wherein individuals
shuttled between the worlds of traditional household farming and
modern industrial production.
exception was small plot agriculture of various kinds, chiefly that of the
'household plot' (hdztdji) variety. This was a parcel of land on which one
could grow produce for subsistence purposes, under a cooperative pur-
chase contract, or for market sale - without being required to enter the
public sector redistribution apparatus. Beginning in 1953, the plots were
allocated on a household basis to the members of a cooperative farm.
From 1968 onwards, adult members of a cooperative were individually
ceded household plots as a corollary of their employment.
The household plots were rarely over 2 hectares in size and, according
to Reining, 50 per cent of them were less than half a hectare (1983: 215).
Traditional staple crops were eschewed in favour of high-value produce
which could be intensively cultivated: fruit and vegetables for the most
part, although poultry, swine (and more infrequently, flowers) were also
preferred products. An important advantage of the household plot
versus other farming opportunities was the ability to manoeuvre be-
tween the public and private sector. Household plot-holders were
often able to arrange the use of cooperative machinery and discounted
seed, yet could circumvent the state's accounting and pricing apparatus
by selling their produce on the 'free market' (szabad piac) which began
to thrive during the 1970s.
The economic success of the household plots was such that by the
1980s, the image of the 'agriculturalist' among blue-collar workers was
linked to associations of affluence rather than poverty (Maday 1983:
324). It is no surprise then, that along with the household plots of rural
residents, there existed a parallel form of small-scale agriculture oper-
ated by urban-dwelling Hungarians: hobby plots.
land ended up in the hands of state and cooperative farms. Some of the
arable land remained in state ownership, but out of productive usage;
some was earmarked for non-agricultural purposes; and some passed on
to cooperatives and state farms but then leased out to institutions and
companies for various internal projects. Marginal lands deemed unfit for
large-scale cultivation but in close proximity to urban areas were often
turned over to municipal authorities for allocation to the local popula-
tion on a lease and/or purchase basis. An example of this sort of arrange-
ment is illustrated by the case of Vesbanya.
Vesbanya (a name meaning literally, 'Mine of Ves') derives its name
from the nearby market town of Ves. It is a township which occupies a
sprawl of urbanised land resting in a shallow valley to the north of
Budapest, and contains eight separate 'settlements' (telepiiles) with a
total population of some 77 200 persons. Apart from blocks of post-war
housing, a railway station, sports arena, various smaller businesses,
churches and so on, the township also includes large tracts of hobby
plot land used by the local inhabitants. Included among these tracts are
four plots tended by the Kolosvari family (to whom I will refer shortly).
Vesbanya township was originally occupied by three agricultural vil-
lages (falu), their fields, and a number of sporadic settlements. The local
economy was bolstered by - and later subordinated to - the activities of
the local coal (szen) mines whose subterranean shafts begin in the
neighbouring foothills. As the mine tunnels extended under the valley
floor their progress influenced changes in the landscape above them:
the old agricultural villages and nearby housing estates were evacuated
in the 1950s and 1960s because of the dangers of land subsidence.
The land on which the original valley villages once stood was not left
idle by the socialist authorities. Beginning in the early 1970s, the former
village areas were recycled to form several tracts of small plot land, most
of them measuring a standard 2000 square metres (0.2 hectares) in size.
Use of the hobby plots was organised through two institutions: land
transferred into the hands of the nationalised mining works was leased
to its employees; land claimed by the municipal council was made
available to local inhabitants regardless of their employment affiliation.
By 1977 - when regulations were put into effect on a nation-wide scale
to allow rural inhabitants to purchase a maximum of 0.6 hectares of
state or cooperative land deemed unsuitable for large-scale cultivation
(Swain 1985: 72) - this process of land conversion was thus well under-
way in Vesbanya.
Today, the township is representative of many areas of Hungary
developed under state socialism through accelerated industrial
206 Post-Socialist Peasant?
The current hobby plots (see Fig. 9.1) of the Kolosvari family adjoin each
other in a swathe of land containing approximately 250 plots divided
into neat rectangles. These plots comprise the fourth set in a series of
such properties worked by Attila Mor since 1968 (when he first pur-
chased a plot some 50 kilometres away in nearby Keresztkapu). The
Vesbanya plots are identical in that they all measure a standard 2000
square metres. Two of them house a one and a half storey 'cabin' (bode)
used for the storage of equipment and produce. 10 A third plot - the last
acquired by the family - contains the ruins of a similar cabin structure.
Andre Czegledy 207
Cabin Cabin
1 2
Such cabins form an integral part of small plot agriculture in that they
not only serve practical storage purposes related to small plot farming,
but also act as a site for what might be termed 'rustic hospitality': plot
neighbours (both men and women) and guests are regularly invited to
join members of the family on the patio of primarily Plot 'B'; there they
are served fruit compote and home-brewed wine/spirits from the plot
gardens, and regaled with family stories.
In contrast to the more diversified household plots of the traditional
peasantry, the Kolosvari plots presently produce only flowers and fruit,
both products for domestic consumption or for use in reciprocal gift
exchange with relatives, neighbours and friends. Some of the ten kinds
of fruit are eaten when ripe in the summer and early autumn; some are
used to make jam preserves for the children's breakfast and for trad-
itional conserves of dessert compote. The grapevines of Plot 'B' and the
11 (sour) cherry trees on Plot 'D' serve a different - and less innocent -
purpose. They provide the base material for two types of rose wine, a
sour cherry wine, sometimes fruit brandy (pdlinka), and the potent
'brandied sour cherries' (konyakos meggy) which are a Hungarian culin-
ary tradition.
208 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Unlike most of their neighbours, the Kolosvari family does not cur-
rently grow vegetables on their hobby plots. This is out of choice, an
opportunity afforded by their present level of disposable income. In
previous years and on previous hobby plots, however, vegetables were
cultivated as a form of domestic substitution for market-bought pro-
duce. Previously too, the family was involved in animal husbandry on
semi-commercial terms. At the height of this involvement, they were
raising 50 pigs, 100 geese and 150 rabbits (on two hobby plots elsewhere
in Vesbanya) as a form of supplementary income. The last of the swine
were sold in early 1995, except for two consumed by the family and
their friends in a grand feast involving a ritual pig-killing, literally
'swine-cutting' (disznovdgds), held in the same year to celebrate the
fifth anniversary of the fast-food restaurant.
Times have changed. Today, these same employees scrimp and save
whenever they can - still celebrating the Christmas season, but under
a different set of circumstances which include the fears of arbitrary
dismissal and corporate collapse in an industry which has seen the
sudden loss of state support. Since 1991, there has been a different
routine:
We start cooking the day before. On the day, we get together on the
shop floor in the early morning and finish the preparations for
the Christmas meal. We eat it in the workshop at midday. One of us
is the main chef...
On the most recent occasion (1996) that I shared this Christmas meal
with the members of the workshop, the main dish was a venison stew
(vadporkolt) of stag and rabbit, garnished with home-made flour dump-
lings and home-pickled vegetables. The venison had been shot by one of
the group and the accompanying red wine was from the hobby plot of
another. Even the ground red pepper (paprika) seasoning was made from
peppers cultivated by a colleague's relative. However proud of the meal
these men were, one of them later admitted to me that the chief reason
for celebrating 'at home' (in the factory workshop) was because: 'We
cannot allow it [to be otherwise] economically (gazdasdgilag)' - meaning
that they could not afford to celebrate in a restaurant as they used to in
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Everyone, he went on to relate to me, was
210 Post-Socialist Peasant?
worried about the state of their finances and terrified of what the future
might bring.
Hobby plots can also be an important source of family income used to
purchase goods or services in the diversified economy. This is a form of
strategic economic production: cultivation for the purposes of sale in
order to acquire the means to purchase goods or services which the
family cannot or does not produce itself. From this vantage point, the
direct parallel to innumerable anthropological analyses of the way in
which peasant family production intersects with local markets is appar-
ent without elaboration. But what if the family already has an occupa-
tional portfolio separate from agricultural production that is adequate to
purchasing on the open market any goods and services it requires -
without resorting to small plot farming?
is the one who tends 'to deal with the produce once it is out of the
ground'! 11
The Puskas plot provides soup vegetables (carrot, parsnip), walnuts
and fruit (apple, pear, plum, apricot) for the dinner table, as well as
enough grapes left over 'from the table' to make 120 litres of wine per
annum. Although regularly working an 11 hour work day (Monday to
Friday) and commuting daily between work and home for 35 minutes
(each way), Kalman nonetheless tends the plot on a daily basis: an
average of 1 hour per weekday - and a minimum of two-three hours
during weekend days. Working a second plot of land (located 160 kilo-
metres away) takes up a similar amount of time on the weekends. For
him, the answer of motivation is simple: small plot agriculture is an
opportunity to clear his head of the worries of the office, to 'divorce
[oneself] from daily pressures' (kikapcsolodds), as he puts it.
From a second and differing perspective, there is a deeply social
element to hobby plot agriculture and to self-provisioning in general.
This is because the essence of hobby plot agriculture is not the economic
rewards of the activity nor even (I would contravene Kalman) its use as
some psychological balm. Rather, the heart of hobby plot agriculture is
its nesting of social relations anchored in the prestation and consumption
of the plot produce itself. Prestation is linked to the establishment and
maintenance of reciprocal gift-giving; consumption is connected to
ideas of domestic choice and social prestige. In the rest of this section,
I will discuss the significance of particularly the latter in terms of Hun-
garian cultural life.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the social relations of hobby plot
farming is to briefly return to the case of the Kolosvari family of Vesban-
ya and the produce of their plots. According to Attila Mor, the most
important of the crops cultivated on the four plots is the combination of
grapes and sour cherries that provide the material for homemade wines
and spirits. This is a revealing point in consideration of the fact that it is
only Attila and his wife Dora - not his daughter nor her family - that
drink alcohol. This point is not to imply that Attila and his wife con-
sume all by themselves the annual output of 150 litres of wine and several
bottles of fruit brandy! The 'majority' (tbbbseg) in Attila's estimation - is
gifted to relatives, neighbours, friends, family guests, and people con-
sidered to be of current and/or potential help to the family as a whole.
The last category, composed of persons who are less than friends and
more than casual acquaintances, is familiar to anyone aware of the
construction of what Ledeneva (1996/7, 1998) terms 'influence' (Mat
in Russian) under state socialism.
212 Post-Socialist Peasant?
A final question still needs to be answered here: how do the ideas of self-
provisioning symbolically relate to the economic and cultural condi-
tions of post-socialism qua a society under tremendous internally and
externally generated pressures?
In Hungary, and throughout the state socialist countries of central/
eastern Europe, self-provisioning was an integral domestic strategy for
both rural and urban households alike.12 It remains such a strategy
today, but now a reconstituted one with new meanings embedded
within its fabric. Gone are the old associations with the 'first' versus
'second economy' dichotomy of state socialism. In their place are new
meanings of self-provisioning which stem from two primary sources.
One of these I have already discussed (the economic precariousness of
socio-economic transformation); the other involves the reaffirmation of
cultural identity linked to specific rejections of contemporary commod-
ity fetishism and the unrootedness of international capitalist produc-
tion.
The tradition of self-provisioning has much to say in response to the
commercially processed and packaged drinks and foodstuffs which have
recently flooded into the country's supermarkets, grocery stores and
corner kiosks. Some of these products are imported (primarily via Aus-
tria), but an increasing proportion are locally produced and sold under
license. Whatever the circumstances of production, the sleek and col-
ourful merchandise of the foreign food conglomerates is a far cry from
the familiar, drab products of former agro-monopolies of the socialist
period - let alone the simple agricultural produce of the local market-
place stall. Through extensive advertising campaigns, these modern
commodities promote the standard images of 'western' prosperity, eu-
phoria and leisure while simultaneously highlighting an ever-widening
spectrum of consumer choice. This spectrum is anchored by unrefined
produce of indigenous origin, on one end, and sophisticated, branded
foods with exotic flavours and foreign associations, on the other. The
latter category is but the narrow edge of a vast influx of consumer goods
in Hungary (and throughout eastern Europe) which trumpet their for-
eignness as much as any other value.
Andre Czegledy 215
Yet, however popular the new consumer products are - however high
the sales of caramel-coloured soda pop drinks and meat patty sand-
wiches - there exists a reserved mass of opinion about the limits of
such novelties. This opinion loosely incorporates an undercurrent of
cultural patriotism with respect to things of local origin; it is linked to
conservative, but broad, understandings of the place of indigenous food
and drink in local culture These understandings are dominated by a
high valuation of self-provisioned ingredients and traditional recipes
in conjunction with notions concerning the appropriateness of con-
sumption in its constituent parts. Such notions of the social valuation
of consumption are exemplified by the following episode drawn from
my fieldnotes:13
By this last reference, the general manager did not mean to imply that
the consumption of spirits (as a whole) confirmed a new level of social
interaction between us. Rather, it was the sharing of the specific brandy
that accomplished this. He judged his offering of the foreign whiskey as
but an everyday politeness appropriate for social intercourse between
businessmen and offered as the by-product of his managerial persona.
Although perhaps expensive to purchase, it was merely a 'common'
(kozonseges) product available commercially. The implication clearly
being that such a commercial product sufficed for superficial interaction
but lacked social depth - an idea consistent with analyses of mass
consumer goods as socially alienable objects of material culture (Miller
1987: 204). In contrast, the homemade brandy was a cultural extension
of himself as its agricultural progenitor: T made it [myself]', he told me.
It possessed special status through the mutual recognition of its cultural
resonance: a traditional Hungarian spirit shared between two Hungar-
ians.
216 Post-Socialist Peasant?
tions are far less prevalent in western Europe, where continued prosper-
ity and sophisticated brand consumerism have jointly displaced the
need for self-provisioning and the desire for its humble products. In
post-socialist Europe, however, the social relations of self-provisioning
still remain in full force. On the one hand, they are embedded in
dominant cultural models of domestic activity enshrining close family
ties above all else. On the other hand, they are entrenched in pervasive
customs of informal social exchange. State socialism reinforced these
traits of cultural life as a way of circumventing privations caused by
the deficiencies of the central planning apparatus, and as a way to avoid
the rigidities of bureaucratic proceduralism. They yet remain.
Consequently, the products of self-provisioning have additional mean-
ing within the framework of contemporary social discourse in eastern
Europe. They represent the valorisation of an intimacy between producer
and consumer which is of marked difference to the commoditised world
of the Euro-American model of international commerce and consump-
tion. The self-provisioning to be found in Hungary today, and through-
out eastern Europe, thus represents far more than a rejection of material
culture. It represents a rejection of the socially denuded world of mass
production itself, where the objects of sale have lost their ability to
represent anything more than simply interchangeable, economic value.
Does this mean to imply that the general manager with whom I
shared a drink considers himself an urban peasant - or any sort of
peasant at all? No. Like many urban Hungarians, especially those of
the economic elite, the prospect of such self-evaluation is far from his
mind; after all, the word 'peasant' (paraszt) remains a ubiquitously
negative colloquialism in the Hungarian language. It is variously inter-
preted as meaning a stupid, uncouth or culturally backward person.
Nonetheless, as this discussion has repeatedly demonstrated, behind
such acrimony sits a panoply of culturally rooted ideas and practices
which are closely tied to conceptions of the peasant way of life. Fore-
most among them is the tradition of self-provisioning - the fundamen-
tal economic strategy of the peasantry. As an accepted and highly valued
feature of cultural discourse, this activity remains integral to the way in
which contemporary Hungarians not only relate to each other - but
generally wish to relate to each other - in social matters of every kind. In
these terms, self-provisioning is as much a retention of indigenous
cultural mores as it is a rejection of the commodity fetishism exempli-
fied by the 'global' products of multinational conglomerates. As a con-
sequence, and in spite of the weight of media advertising which
promotes international homogeneity and less socially rooted strategies
218 Post-Socialist Peasant?
Notes
1. For their comments on ideas presented in this paper, I wish to thank Nina
Czegledy, the late Ernest Gellner, Chris Hann, Deema Kaneff, Pamela
Leonard, Melissa Medich, Veronika Monoki, Frances Pine and Jaro Stacul. I
am further indebted to Klari Kosa and the Csongradi and Mucsi families for
their help with access to the relevant data.
2. Proper names have been altered for the reason of anonymity. The reader
should note that the 'ethnographic present' of this article is 1996, although
subsequent research data has been added where deemed suitable.
3. Swain (1992: 172), citing earlier research, notes that 'By 1972... roughly one
half of the Hungarian population lived in a household where small-scale
agricultural production was undertaken.'
4. The literature on household 'self-provisioning' as Pahl (1984) calls it, is
extensive. His commentary is mainly located vis-a-vis western Europe, as is
that of Gershuny (1979, 1983) and Mingione (1983, 1984, 1989). Among
those dealing with this issue in the east European context, Pine's (1993) work
in Poland and Galasi and Sik's (1982) Hungarian analysis stand out.
5. Incidental references to peasant-workers are commonplace in the literature
on rural society in socialist Hungary (Hann 1980: 74-6; Javor 1983: 275; Bell
1984: 117 passim) and there has been interest with respect to other contexts,
for example, Germany (Franklin 1971).
6. See also Bell (1984: 298).
7. Simic makes this point for Serbia (1973: 113-15); Wedel for Poland (1986:
1001-101). Salzmann and Scheufler add an explicitly monetary dimension to
the Czech case (1986: 82). Smollett discusses an 'economy of [food] jars'
passed between kinfolk in Bulgaria (1989).
8. Foreign investment in the township began to make its mark significantly
only in 1998-2000.
9. Gergely's statement reveals a number of notional tangents, including an
appreciation for physical labour which under socialism was reinforced by
state propaganda efforts to iconify heavy industry. It is a sensibility which
Lampland (1995: 314, 353) particularly attributes to the peasantry in Hun-
gary, but which my research has found to extend into the urban realm.
10. One of the cabins has a wine cellar with a grape press.
11. The exception is wine and spirit-making, which is normally conducted by
men in Hungary. The Puskas family's internal division of labour is consistent
with this custom.
12. Elsewhere (Czegledy 1995: 71-4, 76-7), I have analysed the phenomena of
self-sufficiency in the industrial context in both socialist and post-socialist
Hungary.
13. In the Spring of 1991.
Andre Czegledy 219
Select Bibliography
Bell, P. D. (1984), Peasants in Socialist Transition: Life in a Collectivized Hungarian
Village (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Czegledy, A. P. (1995), Privatization from an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of
an International Joint Venture Community in Hungary, (Ph.D. dissertation, unpub-
lished, University of Cambridge)
Davidoff, L., L'Esperance, J. and Newby, H. (1976), 'Landscape with figures: home
and community in English society' in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), Rights and
Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Enyedi, G. (1976), (ed.), Rural Transformation in Hungary (Budapest: Akademiai).
Franklin, H. (1971), 'The peasant worker in Europe' in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants
and Peasant Societies (Penguin: Harmondsworth) 98-102.
Galasi, P. and Sik, E. (1982), 'Allocation du travail et economie socialiste: le cas de
la Hongrie', Economies etSocietes, 10, 1089-110.
Gershuny, J. I. (1979), 'The informal economy: its role in industrial society',
Futures, 2 (!) (Feb.) 3-15.
(1983), Social Innovation and the Division of Labour (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).
Goody, J. and Goody, E. (1995), 'Food and identities: changing patterns of con-
sumption in Ghana', Cambridge Anthropology, 18: 3, 1-14.
Hann, C. M. (1980), Tdzldr: A Village in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press).
Javor, K. (1983), 'Continuity and change in the social and value systems of a
northern Hungarian village' in M. Hollos and B. C. Maday (eds), New Hungarian
Peasants: An East Central European Experience with Collectivization (New York:
Columbia University Press) 273-300.
Kerblay, B. (1971), 'Chayanov and the theory of the peasantry as a specific type of
economy' in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies (Penguin: Harmonds-
worth) 150-60.
Lampland, M. (1995), The Object of Labour: Commodification in Socialist Hungary
(Chicago: Chicago University Press).
Leapman, M. (1996), 'Losing the plots', The Independent (Independent on Sunday
Magazine), (5 May) 8-10.
Ledeneva, A. V. (1996/7), 'Between gift and commodity: the phenomenon of
blaf, Cambridge Anthropology, 19: 3, 43-66.
Ledeneva, A. V. (1998), Russia's Economy of Flavours: Blot, Networking and Informal
Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lukacs, J. (1988), Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New
York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
Maday, B. C. (1983), 'The changing image of the Hungarian agriculturalist', New
Hungarian Peasants: An East Central European Experience with Collectivization
(New York: Columbia University Press) 315-29.
Markus, I. (1979), Nagykbrbs (Budapest: Szepiradalmi).
Marx, K. (1971), 'Essay on private property and communism' from 'Economic and
philosophic manuscripts', Karl Marx: Early Texts, ed. and trs. D. Mclellan
(Oxford: Blackwell).
Miller, D. (1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell).
220 Post-Socialist Peasant?
221
222 Index
Eastern Europe, 1-44 (esp. 1-6, 14-16, in Russia, 118, 122, 129-32, 140,
31-3) 153, 156 fn. 7 & 11, 157
Bulgaria, 180-99 in Hungary 202-3
Hungary, 200-20 household registration, 67, 73, 97-8,
Poland, 160-79 105, 106
economy household as unit of production, see
household, 33, 75, 96, 101, 103-4, peasant, theories of - household
106, 109, 143, 208-10; see also model; and economy - household
peasant, theories of - household Hungary, 31, 32, 200-20
model
informal (second/grey/unofficial), identity, 25-36, 39, 60-4, 66, 73-4, 91,
95-102, 105-13, 131-2, 169 138, 163
and morality 27-8, 81, 98-9, and community, 166-74, 181-97
109-13; see also market culture; and landscape, 30, 73-4, 89-90, 89,
peasant, theories of - moral 167, 171-2
economy; work - and morality; and locality, 10, 36, 160-77 (esp.
and work - and social solidarity 167-72), 182-3
wages, 129, 142, 151, 156 fn. 9, and persistence of socialist ideals, 32,
171, 172; see also work - wage 94-101, 109-13, 122, 140-2,
labour 190-3, 203-4, 214-8
see also work domestic, 212-17
environmental concerns, 28, 78, intellectual, 44-67
80-1, 90, 100, 130, 139, national, 35, 45-6, 51-3, 60-4, 66,
156, 212 130-1, 160-77, 182, 214-8
peasant, 29-35, 100-01, 104,
family, see kin; and economy - 109-10, 112-13, 119, 125,
household 129-32, 136-55, 156 fn. 6, 158
farmer I fermer, see private farming fn. 28, 162, 169, 217
Fei Xiaotong, 44, 64-5 rural/urban, 6, 9, 63, 80, 89-91,
Feng Chongyi, 54-60, 63-4 160-77, 180-97
Foster, George, 21, 64 commercial, 109, 113, 131-2
see also work
gender, 5, 10, 81, 90, 160-2, 174-5 individual subsidiary holding, see
generational relations, 5, 10 household plot
in Bulgaria, 189 industrialisation, 7, 13-14, 17, 18, 21,
in China, 49, 81, 90 48, 86, 88, 101, 148, 161, 176, 201,
in Hungary, 201, 204, 206, 216 205-6
in Poland, 168, 173-4 intellectuals, 8 , 1 0 - 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 5 - 6 , 1 8 - 3 6 ,
in Russia, 143, 152, 156 37
in Vietnam, 105 in Bulgaria, 181, 193-6, 197
Gorbachev, 2 in China, 44-72, 80
Great Leap Forward, 53, 65, 86-8, 92 in Vietnam, 100
Gudeman, Stephan, and Alberto in Russia, 138
Rivera, 24-5, 26
joint stock companies - see
hobby plots, 203-18 cooperatives
see also dachas
Hobswam, Eric, 23 Kearney, Michael, 27, 37 fn. 9, 12, 38
household plots fn. 24
Index 223