Pleasantry & Agriculture

In general structure, each theorists sees peasant communities as a cultural form that resist trends and leads socioeconomic homogenity.


Eric Wolf: "Closed Corporate Community"

A community that strongly emphasizes community identity and discourages outsiders from settling there by restricting land use to village members and prohibiting the sale or lease of property to outsides.

Peasant communities are corporate organizations.


George Foster: "the image of limited good"

Cognitive orientation: unverbalized, implicit expression of their understanding of the rules of the game of living. So, according to this, the amount of good luck, money, honor, love etc... available is held to be finite, thus every time one person profits, another loses.

This philosophy thends to display strong levels of equality among members and to be strongly resistant to social change.


Chayanov's theory:

According to his theory peasant households will tend to produce only the amount of food that they need to survive.