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 and shame as the basis for communal regulation. Scott notes the practical consequences of a ‘bad reputation’ within a village; difficult to ‘exchange harvest labour, to borrow a draft animal, to raise a small loan, to marry their children off, to prevent petty thefts of their grain or livestock, or even to bury their dead with any dignity’. In this respect, mechanism of social control within the peasant community are ‘small-scale’, ‘face-to-face personal’; ‘Honour and shame are the constant preoccupations’ of communal peasant practice. In this light peasant practices such as gossip, as Gluckman has identified, assume the form of social control and is ‘part of the very blood and tissue’ of community ‘life’. Religion also figured centrally in the construction of reputation and was integral to peasant ‘communalism’. Burd, in particular, has notes how ‘religious denunciations’ were used by Russian peasants to reinforce community controls and advance individual interests. In addition to self-regulatory relationships the ‘commune’ has a clear influence on the forms ‘collective action’ assumed. Dyer, for example, notes how thirteenth century peasants acted on a village basis to pay lawyers to bring landlords to court. Moreover, peasant demands also show a marked focus on village organisation. For instance, 1381 rebellion demanded that there be no law but the “law of Winchester” – which meant that communities should set the watch and be responsible for their own law and order, without outside interference; while the programs and manifestos of the German Peasant War emphasise the ‘community’s demand to elect and dismiss its own pastor.
Communalism, however, has been challenged by research that characterising rural social relations, in medieval and early modern English, society as ‘individualistic’ and ‘mobile’. Macfarlane, in particular, argues ‘that the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically ‘rational’, market-oriented and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life’. Notions of community are clearly incompatible with these individualistic social-relations. Further, although, Blum and Sabean, during the 1970s, associated peasant resistance to the state with communal forms, it has can be contended that resistance relied on ‘selective incentives’. In this respect, the social action of the peasantry is related to specific individual rewards; action is evaluated according to a cost-benefit analysis not communal identity. Bates, in the context of Africa, that the concept draws on the rational-actor model making ‘community’ irrelevant; Hoffman, re-examining the case of Old Regime France, also critiques ‘community’ and anthropological perspectives; as does Root’s analysis of Burgundian peasants. Therefore, it could be argued that studies of community conceal aspects of mobility and individualism within certain peasant societies.
However, both ‘community’ and ‘rationalist’ models of peasant behaviour are misleading, owing to their sidelining of class-relationships. Community as an analytical framework does not take account of the long-term unequal structuring of material resources constituting a peasant society. How resources are allocated through specific forms of surplus extraction and how this process creates particular forms of social groupings is a crucial blind-spot in community studies. Ghose, for instance, argues that analysis of ‘agrarian systems’ should be centred on the ‘sphere of relationships between the labouring class and the non-labouring recipients of a share of the produce of the land’. In this respect, the peasant’s position relative to the means of production generates, as Wolf notes, networks of ‘strategic relationships’. It is these ‘strategic relationships’ embedded within sets of differential power-relationships which undermine scholarly notion of ‘community’. Hilton, for example, has argued that the medieval village is more accurately understood has been constituted around antagonistic class-relationships than communal forms. Further, pledging has often been pointed to as evidence of communal forms, however, Pimsler and Smith have noted how ‘pledging’ involved asymmetrical relationships. In this respect, the dynamics of ‘class’ differentials in undermining ‘community’. Pledging was not a sign of ‘communal’ solidarity but a relationship of power. Pimsler, in particular, notes the lack of reciprocal pledging between peasants and suggests that it cannot be understood as a reflection of village communalism. Similarly, Postles uses Bourdieu concept of ‘symbolic capital’ to suggest that ‘pledging’ was a form of social control. In this respect, ‘pledging’ could have been an institutional device whereby elites controlled an increasingly mobile rural population. Indeed, Postles argues that ‘pledging helped to distinguish core from periphery and to confirm hegemony; it was a nonaffective institutional arrangement designed for control. Thus, the concept of ‘class’ is useful, to an extent, in understanding how relationships of power were constituted through access to material resources; a process ignored by the concept of ‘community’.
However, Marxist notions of class stratification are not necessarily wholly incompatible with notions of communalism. Many accounts of communalism maintain a place for class-analysis within community structures. For instance, Scott’s notion of the ‘moral-economy’, while drawing on ‘normative’ and ‘cultural’ notions, is also structured through relationships of material power and resource allocation. Similarly, Sabean views ‘community’ as structured through unequal relationships of power (Herrshaft). However, both ‘class-analysis’ and ‘communalism’ fails to adequately conceptualize internal power-differentials. In particular, the role of gender in structuring social relationships and forms of power has been sidelined by community studies. The concept of ‘patriarchy’ is deployed by a number of scholars to understand the experience and power-relationships between peasant ‘women’ and ‘men. In the context of Russia scholars Cathy Frierson, Beatrice Farnsworth, Lynne Viola, and Christine Worobec point to the significance of family and gender relations in composing rural community. Similarly, Rigby’s, deployment of ‘closure theory’, goes someway to integrating analyses of class and gender with community structures. Structural inequality is configured both horizontally and vertically. Closure is simply the act of mobilization of power for ‘distributive struggle’ and by various social groups, on lines of class, status and gender. However, the concept of ‘patriarchy’ is poorly defined and seems to suggest an essentialist, ahistoric analysis which is insensitive to the range of experiences of women of different cultures, classes and ethnicities. Studies of ‘communalism’ and of ‘class-analysis’, to be convincing, need to pay more attention to how inequalities such as gender are produced and reproduced; the insights of post-structuralism might be of use in this context. For instance, Cecily Forde-Jones, draws on post-structuralism and post-colonial perspectives, to analyse the inter-relationships between ‘class’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’ in constituting and regulating the identities of rural Barbadian white women, in the seventeenth-century. Communalism does not offer an adequate basis on which to analyse these inter-relationships of power, that are key to understanding peasants ‘identity’ and ‘experience’.
Thus, ‘communality’ is a useful, if limited tool of analysis. Anthropological notions of peasant communities shaped by specific normative notions, such as the ‘moral-economy’ have proved fruitful research tools. Moreover, ‘community’ illuminates, to an extent, peasant social relationships and consciousnesses. Communal studies are most convincing when they point to how relationships of power are structured through communal forms. However, the concept of ‘community’ seems to mislead in its characterisation of the peasantry as immobile and autonomous. Moreover, the ‘communalism’ misleads in its tendency to ignore pivots of internal differentiation, such as gender and class. Marxist notions of ‘class-analysis’ continue to have relevance. In particular, how material resources are distributed and allocated create long-term inequality that crystallizes in ‘class-form’; the peasantry should at least, in part, be understood in terms of exactions of surplus labour. However, both Marxism and ‘communalism’ are misleading in their failure to adequately conceptualize forms of gender and race inequality. The concept of ‘patriarchy’ is useful as a focus on gender stratification in peasant society, but is deeply problematic. Rigby’s development of ‘closure theory’ represents a corrective step, but fails to draw attention to recent trends in ‘gender-studies’ that might be more helpful.
P. Schofield, Peasant and community in Medieval England 1200-1500 (Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2003) P. 5
James C. Scott “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition” Theory and Society (Summer, 1977), : 5
F. G. Bailey, “Gifts and Poison’ in Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation (Oxford, 1971) p. 2
M. Rubin, ‘Small groups: identity and solidarity in the late Middle Ages’ in J. Kermode (ed.) Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth Century England (Stroud, 1991), p. 134
P. Blickle, The Revolution of 1525 : the German Peasants’ War from a new perspective (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, c1981) p. 36-7
J. Burds, Peasant Dreams & Market Politics; Labour Migration and the Russian Village 1861-1905, (Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, c1998) p. 2
Hoffmann, however, notes the continued relevance of ‘communal’ ties for migratory peasants in the urban context. D. Hoffmann, Peasant metropolis : social identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994)
A. DeWindt, Land and People, in Holywell-cum-Needingworth (1252-1457). (Toronto, 1971) p. 242-250
R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975) pp. 37-53
Olson treatment of the ‘court-roll’s is problematic. In particular, she asserts that the court rolls represent the “minutes of the proceedings of the courts, that they contain a “chronicle of all that happens in the court” (p. 12). Other researchers have questioned the significance of court-rolls. In particular, court-rolls are brief and inadequate accounts of more lengthy pleadings. Although, valuable court-rolls cannot adequately reflect the total experience’s of the peasantry. .S. Olson, A Chronicle of All That Happens: Voices from the Village Court in Medieval England (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996)
However, Olson does note that ‘communalism’ was eroded in the post-Black Death environment by an increasingly individualism. In contrast, Dyer argues that the ‘communal’ structures were strengthened in this period. Ibid, p. 161; , p. 429
Robin Briggs, Communiites of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford, 1989) p. 3. On the critical role of a bad reputation (‘ill fame’) leading to prosecution for witchcraft in early modern Europe, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 526-34
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp.527-530
J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, (London : Yale University, 1992) p. 131
J. G. Peristiany, (ed), Honour and Shame: the Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago, 1965) p. II
M. Gluckman, , , (Jun., 1963), p 308
Burd, Peasant Dreams & Market Politics; Labour Migration and the Russian Village 1861-1905 p. 201
Chris Dyer, Rise and decline of the village community, p. 412-19
C. Dyer, “The Social and Economic Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381” in the English Rising of 1381 ed. R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (Cambridge, 1984) pp. 9 -42;
P. Laslett, Family Life and Illict Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977) pp. 50-101. P. Clark, “Migration in England during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries”, Past and Present, no. 83 (May 1979) p. 57-90. K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (London, 1979) pp. 74-82
A. Macfarlane,, Origins of English individualism : the family, property and social transition (Oxford : Blackwell, 1978) p. 163
J. Blum, ‘The internal structure and politics of the European village community’ Journal of Modern History, XLIIII (1971) 541-76; David Sabean, ‘The Communal basis of pre-1800 rising in Western Europe’, Comparative Politics, VIII (1976), 355-64
R.H. Bates, Conventional Orthodoxies in the Study of Agrarian Change, World Politics 36 (January 1984) pp.234-254; P. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: the French countryside, 1450-1815 (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1996) ; Hilton R. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) .
K. Ghose, Agrarian reform in contemporary developing countries, (London, Croom Helm, 1983) p.8
E. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (California, 1982) p. xiii
R.H. Hilton Class conflict and the crisis of feudalism : essays in medieval social history (London, etc., Verso, 1990)
Martin Pimsler, “Solidarity in the Medieval Village? Personal Pledging at Elton, Huntingdonshire’ Journal of British Studies, XVII (1977), 1-11. Richard M. Smith, “Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth Century Suffolk Community” Journal of Family History, IV (1979), 219-246; idem”Modernisation and the Corporate Medieval Village Community: Some Sceptical Reflections” in Alan R.H. Baker and D. Gregory (eds), Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, 1984), 140-245
D. Postles, Personal Pledging: Medieval “Reciprocity” or “Symbolic Capital”? Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxvi: 3 (Winter, 1996) 419-435
J. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in southeast Asia (New Haven, etc., Yale U.P., 1976)
D. Sabean Power in the blood : popular culture and village discourse in early modern Germany (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Patriarchy refers to social relationships that subordinate the interests of ‘women’. The concept is vague. It has been used by radical feminists to mean the appropriation of women’s sexuality and bodies, often through violence. Sexual practice is seen to be socially constructed around male notions of desire, not women’s (Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, (1976); Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution, (1971)). Dual systems analysis attempts to combine both radical and Marxist feminism, but varies over whether patriarchy and capitalism are viewed as separate systems or as fused (C. Middleton ‘Peasants patriarchy and the feudal mode of production in England’ Sociological Review, 29, no. 1 (1981) pp. 105-54). The concept has been criticised for ignoring ‘racial’ differences (B. Hooks, (.
See Farnsworth (ed), Russian Peasant Women,(New York : Oxford University Press, 1992) ; C. D. Worobec, ‘Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and Patriarchy’ in E. Kinston-Mann & T. Mixter (ed) Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia 1800-1921 (Princeton University Press, 1991)
Cecily Forde-Jones, ‘Mapping Racial Boundaries: Gender, Race and Poor Relief in Barbadian Plantations Society’, Journal of Women’s History 10, no.3 (1998)pp. 9–31
Both Sabean and Scott provide good accounts of how inequality is embedded in ‘communal’ structures. J. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in southeast Asia (New Haven, etc., Yale U.P., 1976); D. Sabean Power in the blood : popular culture and village discourse in early modern Germany (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984)