Anthropology 541a Instructors: Michael Dove History 765a Robert Harms Political Science 779a James Scott F&ES 730a Mondays, 1:30-5:20 Fall Semester 2000 70 Sachem Street Fall 2000 AGRARIAN SOCIETIES CULTURE, POWER, HISTORY, AND DEVELOPMENT This seminar presents a multi-disciplinary perspective on the modern transformation of the countryside of the world. The rise of a capitalist mode of production as the engine of a world economy, the emergence of a contentious international polity of nation-states, and the propagation of rationalizing religions and standardizing education are three distinct yet intersecting processes in the modern transformation of the world since the 1500s. These processes have not been inevitable, nor irreversible, nor complete. However, they have been compelling, in so far as they have come to frame both our acceptance of and resistance to the modern order in which we find ourselves. "Peasant studies" is a rubric for the loosely-bounded, interdisciplinary exploration of the initial modernization of the European countryside and the subsequent engagement and ongoing incorporation of the countryside of Asia, Africa, and the Americas into this modern order. At its most precocious, it tries to comprehend the intrusive thrusts of nation-state formation, capitalist production, and the rationalization of belief into the most distant agrarian regions of the world. At its most instructive, it insists that people everywhere have confronted those forces with their particular histories and distinctive, local configurations of environment, society, and culture. Everywhere, the encounters of old and new ways of viewing the world and organizing activities have been fitful and frightful, always metamorphic, but never uniform. Animating peasant studies has been the concern to demonstrate the varied ways in which peasants have shared in the making of the modern world that has in turn transformed their lives. We intend this to be an introductory seminar. That is, we assume you may be ignorant of much of the basic literature. We also assume that you work hard and learn fast. Although the varying backgrounds of students and faculty require us to be somewhat eclectic, we hope that the seminar will prove foundational in an interdisciplinary sense for subsequent work on agrarian issues in any discipline. We encourage you, in your writing and discussion, to make vigorous efforts to be understood across disciplinary boundaries. Seminar meetings combine lectures and discussions. We expect regular attendance; please notify us in advance if you are unable to come to a session. We regard participation in discussions to be a gauge of students' completion and comprehension of the assigned readings. We will evaluate your performance in the seminar on the basis of this participation and on the quality and timeliness of the writing assignments. Beginning in the third week, designated students will be asked to take formal responsibility for organizing the discussion of the readings. Such responsibility will be shared as equitably as possible. As far as writing assignments are concerned, there are two. First, students are required to submit short (3 page) essays on THREE weekly themes/readings of their choice. They may want to link these essays to themes for which they have some responsibility in organizing the discussion. A second paper is due at the end of the course. This may be either a research paper on a topic related to the course concerns or a theoretical discussion or synthesis of some of the analytical readings we have covered. In either case, it should be negotiated with one of the instructors. All assigned readings for the seminar are on reserve at the Social Science or Cross Campus Libraries. Copies of all assigned books are available for purchase at Book Haven. In addition, we have placed a collection of all assigned articles on file at the office of the Program on Agrarian Studies Office (room 201 at 89 Trumbull Street). Students may choose to have a copy of this file made for their purchase and use. COURSE SYLLABUS September 11 Week 1 James Scott Introduction No Reading September 18 Week 2 Michael Dove Reading Agrarian Ethnography The Politics of Describing the Disreputable Readings: Harold C. Conklin. [1957] 1975. HanunoÕo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines. Orig. published by the Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome. Reprint, Northford, CT: ElliotÕs Books. (Book Haven) J.S. Otto and N.E. Anderson. 1982. ÒSlash-and-Burn Cultivation in the Highlands South:A Problem in Comparative Agricultural History,Ó Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24, pp.131-17. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ September 25 Week 3 Robert Harms and Michael Dove Chayanov and the Theory of Peasant Economy Readings: A.V. Chayanov. 1986. The Theory of Peasant Economy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. xi-xxiii, 1-24, 35-117. Donald Donham. 1981. ÒBeyond the Domestic Mode of Production,Ó MAN, 16, pp.515-41, (Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 2 Week 4 Agrarian Change and la Longue DurŽe Readings: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. 1974. The Peasants of Languedoc, translated by John Day. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Book Haven) Robert Brenner, ÒAgrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- Industrial Europe,Ó AND Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ÒA Reply to Robert Brenner,Ó in The Brenner Debate: Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, edited by T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, pp. 10-63, 101-6. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 9 Week 5 Michael Dove Agrarian Systems and the Global Economy Readings: Michael R. Dove. 1997. Political ecology of pepper in the ÔHikyat BanjarÕ: The historiography of commodity production in a Bornean kingdom. In Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia, edited by P. Boomgaard, et al. Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal, Land-en Volkenkunde, pp. 341-77. (Reading packet) _____. 1996. Rice-eating rubber and people-eating governments: Peasant versus state critiques of rubber development in colonial Indonesia. Ethnohistory 43, 1:33- 63. (Reading packet) _____. 1993. A revisionist view of tropical deforestation and development. Environmental Conservation 20 (1): 17-24, 56. (Reading packet) Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill (eds. and translators), Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chi. (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences) Introduction, pp.1-39 (Reading Packet) Oliver W. Wolters. 1967. Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srivijay. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, chapters 7 and 8, pp.95-127. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 16 Week 6 James Scott The Politics, Economics, and Culture of Revolution: Mexico Readings: John Womack, Jr. 1969. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Alfred Knopf. (Book Haven) _______________________________________________________________________ October 23 Week 7 James Scott and Robert Harms Religion and Rebellion: Millenarian Movements and Cargo Cults Readings: Michael Adas. 1979. Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest against the European Colonial Order. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 30 Week 8 Michael Dove and James Scott Depicting the Rural Poor in the American South Readings: James Agee and Walker Evans.1966/1939. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. New York: Ballantine Books, pp. ix-xx, 7-15, 105-10, 111-97, 199-229. (Book Haven) Readings: Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson. 1989. And their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. xv-xxiii, 3-68. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ November 6 Week 9 Robert Harms Colonialism and Agrarian Change Readings: Thomas Spear. 1997. Mountain Farmers: The Moral Economies of Land and Agricultural Development in Arusha and Meru. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Book Haven) _______________________________________________________________________ November 13 Week 10 Michael Dove, Robert Harms, and James Scott Views from the Margin Readings: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the Way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Book Haven) _______________________________________________________________________ November 27 Week 11 James Scott Subsistence, Law, Common Property Readings: Steven Hahn. 1982. "Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Post-bellum South," Radical History Review, 26, pp.37- 64. (Reading packet) Douglas Hay. 1975. "Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase," in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Douglas Hay, et al. New York: Pantheon, pp.189-253. (Reading Packet) Nancy Lee Peluso. 1992. "Teak and Temptation on the Extreme Periphery," in Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java. Berkeley, pp. 201-32. (Reading packet) E.P. Thompson. 1975. "The Crime of Anonymity," and a selection from the appendices, in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. by Douglas Hay, et al. New York: Pantheon, pp.255-308. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ December 4 Week 12 Michael Dove, Robert Harms, and James Scott Development Discourse Readings: James Ferguson. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Preface, pp. 1-80, 135-66, 194-226, 251-88. _______________________________________________________________________ ANNOUNCING A CONTEST Prize: 1 free meal after an Agrarian Studies Colloquium Be the first to name the author of any one of the first three poems. Name the rebellion from which the text of the anonymous letter (4) comes. A correct answer for any one of the four selections wins a prize. 1. When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm The bracken made their bed, And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies said. Tom's hand was strong to the plough Elizabeth's lips were red, And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies said. Year in year out they worked While the pines grew overhead, And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies said. But all the beautiful crops soon went To the mortgage-man instead, And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies said. Elizabeth is dead now (it's years ago) Old Tom went light in the head; And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies said. The farm's still there. Mortgage corporations Couldn't give it away. And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle The magpies say. 2. Flee the seat in the shade and staying in bed until dawn during the season of reaping when the sun is withering the flesh. This is the time to be hastening and bringing your harvest home, rising at daybreak, that you may have sufficient to live on. For Dawn rightfully claims as her own a third of the day's work; Dawn gives a man a start on the road and a start on his work, Dawn that brightly arising stirs up many a man to go on his way and sets the yoke upon many an ox team. But when you see the scolymus flowering and hear the cicada sing in the tree, sending its beautiful, vibrating song pulsing from under its wings in the season of scorching-hot summer, then you will find that she-goats are fattest, wine most delicious, women most desirous of love but men most enfeebled, for now the dogstar Sirios parches their heads and their knees, and in the heat their skin becomes dry. Then would I have a shady retreat in the cool of the rocks, and Bibline wine with mild-leavened bread and milk of goats that are starting to go dry, and meat of cow that has fed in the woods, one never in calf, and that of the newborn kid. And then would I drink of the red wine, as I relax in the shade, my appetite sated completely, turning my face to enjoy the cooling breezes of Zephyros, and would pour from a clear and ever free-flowing stream three parts of water to mix for my drink with one part of wine. But as soon as the strength of Orion arises, you should urge your slaves to thresh the holy grain of Demeter on a spot well swept by the wind, well leveled for threshing. Then you should measure it off well into your jars. But when you've got your supply all safely stored on your homestead within doors, find as hired laborers to help you a man without home and a woman, one without child, I advise you, for one with a child is a burden. 3. SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow. 4. A PROCLAMATION OF BLOOD AND FIRE! To all Churches, States and People, on the Sea Sand O Remember Samson sent 300 foxes with firebrands into the Philistine's corn fields, because they robbed him of his natural rights, and God declares Samson more justifiable than them - so now the Gentiles and Heathen starve the poor, why marvel ye if every man turns after Samson, `for these are the days of vengeance, when all shall be fulfilled' under MAHERSHALALHASHBAZ, Sec., and JESUS CHRIST CHOLERA, BLOOD, FIRE, and Co. Extra Executors, Earthquakes, Panics and Col, Witnesses.