AGRARIAN SOCIETIES CULTURE, POWER, HISTORY, AND DEVELOPMENT Instructors: History 765a Paul Freedman Political Science 779a James Scott Anthropology 541a F&ES 730a Michael Dove Fall Semester 1999 Mondays, 1:30-5:20 70 Sachem Street READING PACKET FALL 1999 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 6 Week 1 James Scott INTRODUCTION No Reading _______________________________________________________________________ September 13 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. Michael R. Dove. In press. Kinds of fields. In Ethnographic and Linguistic Essay by Harold C. Conklin, edited by Joel Kuipers and Raymond McDermott. (Reading packet) Renato Rosaldo. 1989/1993. Subjectivity in social analysis. Chapter 8 in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. (Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ September 20 Week 3 James Scott 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. Robert McC. Netting. 1993. Smallholder, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp.1-57; 294-34. (Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ September 27 Week 4 Paul Freedman THE PEASANT IN THE MEDIEVAL SOCIAL ORDER Readings: Werner Ršsener. 1992. Peasants in the Middle Ages.University of IL Press, pp. 85-207. _______________________________________________________________________ October 4 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) E.R. Wolf. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 158-94.(Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 11 Week 6 Michael Dove and James Scott SEEDS AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE Readings: Jack Kloppenburg. 1988. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ October 18 Week 7 Paul Freedman SLAVERY AND SERFDOM Readings: M.L. Bush. 1996. Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage. Longman (Addison & Wesley) ISBN 0582291852 a. Robin Blackburn, pp. 158-80 b. Michael Bush, pp. 199-224 c. Christopher Dyer, pp. 271-95 Paul Freedman. Images of the Medieval Peasant.1999.Stanford:Stanford University Press, pp. 86-104; 239-56. _______________________________________________________________________ October 25 Week 8 Paul Freedman and James Scott PEASANT REVOLTS Readings: Paul Freedman. Images of the Medieval Peasant.1999. Stanford:Stanford University Press, pp.257-88. Werner Ršsener. 1992. Peasants in the Middle Ages. University of IL Press, pp.211-75. _______________________________________________________________________ November 1 Week 9 James Scott SUBSISTENCE, LAW, COMMON PROPERTY Readings: Steven Hahn, "Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Post-bellum South," Radical History Review, 26 (1982), pp.37-64. (Reading packet) Douglas Hay, "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, 1975), pp.189-253. (Reading Packet) Nancy Lee Peluso, "Teak and Temptation on the Extreme Periphery," in Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java, (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 201- 32. (Reading packet) E.P. Thompson, "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, 1975), pp. 255-308. (Reading Packet) _______________________________________________________________________ November 8 Week 10 Michael Dove and James Scott OFFICIAL AND VERNACULAR IDENTITIES, PEASANTS, PROLETARIANS, ETHNICS, AND CITIZENS Readings: Tania Li. 1997. Constituting tribal space: Indigenous identity and resource politics in Indonesia. Paper presented to the UC Berkeley Environmental Politics Seminar, November 1997. (Reading packet) Eugen Weber. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 3-22; 30-40; 67-114; and 241-338. (Reading Packet) Peter Sahlins. 1989. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrennes. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-24; 168-97; and 267- 98.(Reading packet) John Tehranian, James Scott, and Jeremy Mathias. 1999. The creation of legal identities, proper to the modern state: The case of the permanent patronym. Draft. (Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________ November 15 Week 11 Paul Freedman, Michael Dove, and James Scott DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE 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. _______________________________________________________________________ November 29 Week 12 James Scott HARD TIMES Readings: James Hightower. 1978. Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times. The original Hightower report, unexpurgated, of the Agribusiness Accountability Project on the failure of AmericaÕs land grant college complexes. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, pp. 1-142.(Reading packet) Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. 1993. Potatoes and knowledge. In An Anthropological Critique of Development, edited by Mark Hobart. London: Routledge, pp.209-27.(Reading packet) James Scott. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, ch. 8, ÒTaming Nature,Ó pp. 262-306.(Reading packet) _______________________________________________________________________