Is it misleading to speak of the ‘peasant community’?

Community studies point to forms of peasant organisation; self-regulation, mutual support, resistance, ceremony, collective piety, but it also implies remoteness, insularity and shared assumptions. In this respect, communalism is frequently associated with specific ‘cultural’ or ‘normative’ peasant values, which can be distinguished from Marxian categories of analysis.  As Scott notes ‘the proletariat has to create its class subculture in a new environment while the peasantry, like traditional artisans, inherits a far greater residue of custom, community, and values which influence its behaviour’.  It will be argued that ‘communalism’ provides a useful conceptual tool for understanding how peasant communities had ‘agency’ in producing and reproducing social relationships.  In particular, how the self-activity and self-regulation of the peasants provides a challenge to approaches emphasising their passivity and domination.  The concept of ‘communalism’ also suggests a more flexible and accommodating understanding of social- relationships than in presented in frameworks of class-analysis.  Anthropologist Bailey note that ‘the small politics of everyone’s everyday life is about reputations; about what it mean to ‘have a good name’; about being socially bankrupted; about gossip and insult and ‘one-upmanship’; in short, about the rules of how to play ‘the social game’. However, it will be suggested that the concept of ‘community’ is limited and has a tendency to ‘obscure rather than reveal’’. For instance, internal conflict and difference are frequently over-looked in characterising peasant relationships as ‘communal’.  In this manner Marxian notions of ‘class’ should not be discarded.   Rigby offers an approach based on ‘closure theory’ that borrows from both Marxist and Weberian functionalism. In this case processes of exclusion and inclusion form the basis of community and also raise issues of ‘gender’.  In particular, does the concept of ‘community’ adequate conceptualize the gendered power-relationships embedded in peasant society?

A number of scholars have found the concept of community useful.  In particular, Blickle argues the concept of ‘community’ or ‘communalism’ was a useful paradigm for understating of the ‘typology’ of early modern Europe: forming a ‘universal historical category’. Blickle’s scholarship challenged the suggestion that German history was characterised by ‘authoritarian’ or ‘hierarchical’ social relationships.  In late rural medieval Germany the ‘commune’ acted as the primary locus for both urban and rural social organisation. Burds identifies similar roles for the Russian ‘community’ or mir, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia: 1) functioned as an extension of the state apparatus, collection of taxes and obligations; 2) organization based around kinship, religious, economic and cultural bonds protecting the interest of villagers from external actors and processes; 3) mediator between communal resources and outsider agents; 4) commune was also a safety net.  In this respect, the ‘commune’ is understood as a semi-autonomous administrative and regulatory body constituted through the self-activity of the peasants.

The concept of ‘community’ has been used to understand forms of peasant consciousness and specifically rural social relationships.  DeWindt’s study of Holywell-cum-Needingworth (a manor of Ramsey Abbey) suggested that personal pledging was, in part, responsible and symbolic of pre-plague village solidarity and community. In this respect, pledging effectively eased the vertical ties of domination creating a communal space. The majority of pledging was extra-familial pointing to ties of communal co-operation in the village prior to the middle of the fourteenth century. Despite disagreement with DeWindt on a number of topics, Dyer notes that the social divisions in the village cannot be regarded as sharply stratified into classes.  In comparison with the distance between the upper ranks of peasants and the lords, the disparities among the villagers seem of less significance.  Likewise, Olson’s reconstruction, from village court rolls, of the peasant world of two Huntingonshire villages, (c 1280 to c. 1460) argues for the primacy of ‘communal’ relationships.   By deploying techniques from Clifford Geertz she notes that peasant community was not simply subordinated to the lord but was active and at least in part constructed from the grass-roots. Indeed, the lord’s court, in fact, played a passive role with little “power to coerce”. Office holding peasants were not simply dominated by powerful village families but was dispersed and more representative of the ‘collective voice of the village’. In this respect, ‘communalism’ is a useful concept in showing both the ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-activity’ of peasant experience.  

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The concept of ‘community’ opens up particular ways of viewing power-relationships within the village. Indeed, forms of ‘communal’ social control and regulation have frequently been ignored by such approaches as class-analysis.  Numerous studies in Western Europe have emphasized “the crucial role of the village community in regulating the identification and persecution of…deviants”.  .  In comparative studies of village life historians have consistently noted “the tyranny of local opinion and the lack of tolerance displayed toward nonconformity and social deviation” the high value set on social conformity by this tightly-knit, intolerant world”.  Anthropologists have identified factors such as repudiation, honour ...

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