Agrarian Societies: Culture, Power, History, and Development

		                                    Instructors:
		Anthropology 541a                   Arun Agrawal
		History 765a                        Robert Harms
		Political Science 779a              Michael Dove
		F&ES 730a                           Eric Worby


Fall Semester 1998
Mondays, 1:30-5:20
70 Sachem Street



	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 7         Week 1                     Robert Harms
Introduction
No Reading



September 14        Week 2                     Michael Dove
Reading Agrarian Ethnography 
The Politics of Describing the Disreputable

Readings:

	Harold C. Conklin. [1957] 1975. Hanuno'o 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: Elliot's Books.
	
	Michael R. Dove. 1983. Theories of swidden agriculture and 
	the political economy of ignorance. Agroforestry Systems
	1:85-99. (Reading packet)
	
	Michael R. Dove. In press. Kinds of fields. In Ethnographic 
	and Linguistic Essagy by Harold C. Conklin, edited by Joel
	Kuipers and Raymond McDermott. (Distributed in class in week 1)
	
	Raymond McDermott. 1997. Conklin, Joyce, and the Wannaknow. 
	American Anthropologist 99, 2:257-60. (Reading packet)


September 21        Week 3                     Robert Harms
The Material Basis of Peasant Society

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. Beyond the domestic mode of 
	production. Man 16:515-41. (Reading Packet)



September 28        Week 4                     Eric Worby
Transformations of Labor

Readings:

	Allen Isaacman. 1996. Cotton is the Mother of Poverty. 
	Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
	
	Eric Worby. 1995. What does agrarian wage labour signify? 
	Cotton, commoditisation and social form in Gokwe, Zimbabwe.
	Journal of Peasant Studies 23 (1):1-29. (Reading packet)

	Peter D. Little and Michael Watts (eds.) 1992. Living 
	Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation
	in Sub-Saharan Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pp.
	3-94. (Reading packet)
	
	Taussig, Michael. 1981. Preface to The Devil and 
	Commodity Fetishism in Latin America. Chapel Hill:
	University of North Carolina Press. Pp.3-38 (Reading packet)



October 5           Week 5                      Arun Agrawal and Eric Worby
Institutions and Power

Readings:

	(Historical Jurisprudence)
	Henry Sumner Maine. 1881. Village Communities in the 
	East and West. London: John Murray, pp. 64-128. (Reading
	packet)
	
	(Classical Political Economy)
	Karl Marx. Preface. In A Contribution to the Critique 
	of Political Economy. Moscow: International Publishers.
	(Reading packet)
	
	Karl Kautsky. [1899] 1988. The Agrarian Question. 
	London, Winchester, MA. Pp. 9-19-133-97. (Reading packet)
	
	(New Institutionalists)
	Alchian, Armen. 1950. Uncertainty, evolution and 
	economic theory. Journal of Political Economy. 58(3):
	211-21. (Reading packet)
	
	Alchian, Armen and Harold Demsetz. 1973. The property 
	rights paradigm. Journal of Economic History 33: 16-27.
	(Reading packet)
	
	Jean Ensminger, 1992. Making a Market: The 
	Institutional Transformation of an African Society.
	Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1-32. 
	(Reading packet)
	
	(Poststructuralists)
	Michel Foucault. 1982. Afterword: The subject and 
	power. In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
	Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. 
	Pp. 208-26. (Reading packet)
	
	Michel Foucault. 1977. Truth and Power. In 
	Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
	1972-77 by Michel Foucault, edited by Colin Gordon. 
	New York: Random House. Pp. 109-33. (Reading packet)



October 12          Week 6                     Robert Harms
Social Change and the Longue Duree

Readings:

	Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. 1974. The Peasants of 
	Languedoc. Translated by John Day. Urbana:University of Illinois
	Press.
	
	Robert Brenner. Agrarian class structure and economic 
	development in pre-industrial Europe, and Emmanuel Le Roy
	Ladurie, A reply to Robert Brenner. In The Brenner Debate: 
	Agrarian 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 26          Week 7                     Michael Dove
Agrarian Systems and the Global Economy
The Myths of Subsistence and Isolation

Readings:

	Michael R. Dove. The Banana Tree at the Gate: The 
	Local, Historical, and Political Ecology of commodity Production
	in Borneo (published chapters from book-in-progress).
	
	_____.1993. A revisionist view of tropical 
	deforestation and development. Environmental Conservation 20
	(1): 17-24, 56. (Reading packet)
	
	_____.1997. Political ecology of pepper in the 'Hikayat 
	Badjar': 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)
	
	_____.1994. The transition from native forest rubbers 
	to Hevea Brasiliensis (EUPHORBIACEAE) among tribal
	smallholders in Borneo. Economic Botany 48, 4:382-96. 
	(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)
	
	_____.1998. Living rubber, dead land, and persisting 
	systems in Borneo: Indigenous representations of
	sustainability. Bijdragen 154, 1:20-54. (Reading packet)
	
	_____.1993. Smallholder rubber and swidden agriculture 
	in Borneo: A sustainable adaptation to the ecology and
	economy of the tropical forest. Economic Botany 47, 
	2:136-47. (Reading packet)

	_____.1998. Representations of the 'other' by others: 
	The Ethnographic challenge posed by planters' views of
	peasants in Indonesia. In Agrarian Transformation in 
	the Indonesian Uplands edited by T. Li. London: Berg. 
	(Reading packet)



November 2          Week 8                     Eric Worby
Coding Custom

Readings:

	Max Gluckman. 1965. The Ideas in Barotse 
	Jurisprudence. Pp.75-113.
	
	Sally Falk Moore. 1991. From giving and lending to 
	selling: Property transactions reflecting historical changes
	on Kilimanjaro. In Law in Colonial Africa edited by Kristin
	Mann and Richard Roberts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Pp. 108-27. 
	(Reading packet)
	
	Mahmood Mamdani. 1996. Citizen and Subject: 
	Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.
	Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp.109-37.
	(Reading packet)
	
	E. P. Thompson. 1991. Customs in Common. London: 
	Merlin. Pp. 97-184. (Reading packet)
	
	Ajay Skaria. 1996. Writing, orality, and power in the 
	Dangs. In Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian
	History and Society, edited by Shahid Amin and Dipesh 
	Chakrabarty. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pp. 13-58. 
	(Reading packet)



November 9          Week 9                     Arun Agrawal
Common Property Resources

Readings:

	Stephen Lansing. 1991. Priests and Programmers: 
	Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali.
	Princeton: Princeton University Press.
	
	Elinor Ostrom. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: 
	Cambridge University Press. Introduction and chapter 1.
	
	Eric Worby. 1994. Splitting targets and hitting hairs: 
	Anthropological perspectives on fish culture technology
	transfer through NGOs in Bangladesh. Manuscript.
	
	Arun Agrawal.1998. Community in Conservation: Beyond 
	Enchantment and Disenchantment. Conservation and Development
	Forum Discussion Paper, Gainesville, Florida.



November 16         Week 10                    Michael Dove
Contested Interpretations of Agro-Ecological Change
Anthropogenic Grasslands and Forests

Readings:

	Michael R. Dove. 1986. The practical reason of 
	weeds in Indonesia: Peasant vs. state views of Imperata and
	Chromolaena. Human Ecology 14, 2 : 163-90. (Reading packet)
	
	James Fairhead and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the 
	African Landscape: Society and Ecology in Forest-Savanna
	Mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
	
	Donald Worster. 1990. The ecology of order and chaos. 
	Environmental History Review 14, 1/2: 1-18. (Reading packet)



November 30         Week 11                         Arun Agrawal and Eric Worby
The Projects of Development

Readings:

	James Ferguson. 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.
	
	Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard. Introduction. In 
	International Development and the Social Sciences, edited by
	Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard. Berkeley: University of
	California Press. Pp 1-41. (Reading packet)
	
	Agrawal, Arun. Poststructuralist approaches to 
	development: Some critical reflections. Peace and Change 21,
	4: 464-77. (Reading packet)
	
	K. Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agrawal. 1998. Regional 
	modernities in stories and practices of development. Mimeo.
	61 pp. (Reading packet)
	
	Stacey Leigh Pigg. 1992. Inventing social category 
	through place: Social representations and development in
	Nepal. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 34, 3: 491-513.
	
	Nanda Shrestha. 1995. On becoming a development 
	category. In Power of Development, edited by Jonathan Crush.
	London and New York: Routledge.



December 7          Week 12                        Arun Agrawal
Environmental Struggles: Dams, Rivers, and Identities

Readings:

	Amita Baviskar. 1995. In The Belly of the River: 
	Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley. New
	Delhi: Oxford University Press.