From Peasant Boom to Bust

In the later twentieth century, peasants were a subject of great scholarly interest. The heyday of peasant wars, national developmental projects, and agrarian reform in the Global South formed the historical backdrop for what the geographer Michael Watts termed an academic “peasant studies boom” of the 1970s. Two 1966 publications had a major part in initiating this boom: the anthropologist Eric Wolf’s small book Peasants, and the translation of Russian economist Alexander Chayanov’s works into English, both of which invested the subject of peasants with a new importance by departing from the then-reigning view that peasants would inevitably abandon their stubbornly traditional behavior as society modernized. Academics like Wolf produced and inspired a body of influential and Marxism-inflected literature analyzing the peasant experience.

However, as peasants drastically declined as a percentage of the population even in rather poor countries, the significance of studying peasants also receded. In previous centuries, socialists intensely debated the “Agrarian Question” of how capitalism was transforming the countryside and the attendant political consequences. In the present century, questions are more likely to be raised about whether such issues have any substantial economic or political relevance.

Writing on peasants continues today, but under conditions of reduced political resonance and more narrow academic specialization. Joyce characterizes this post-boom literature as “for most people either too expensive to access or too specialist and abstruse for all but the most patient and dedicated of readers.” The achievement of Joyce’s book is to revive the subject of peasants in an accessible manner, escaping the relatively restrictive confines of contemporary literature on peasants while incorporating some of its findings and insights into the narrative.

The Vanishing Peasant

The disappearance of the European peasantry has been so complete that it is astonishing to note how recent this transformation has been. Even at the midpoint of the twentieth century, major portions of the workforce in many European nations still labored on the land. To take the three countries that Joyce primarily focuses on in his book as examples: The share of the labor force working in agriculture in 1950 in Ireland, Italy, and Poland was 37 percent, 33 percent, and 57 percent, respectively. Today less than 5 percent of the labor force in Ireland and Italy works in agriculture, as does less than 10 percent of the labor force in Poland.

The more industrialized countries of Europe had smaller shares of their labor forces in agriculture, but even there the peasantry held out against deagrarianization for longer than is usually appreciated. France, for instance, had 23 percent of its labor force in agriculture in 1950. (The only countries in Europe that had less than 10 percent of their labor force in agriculture in 1950 were the United Kingdom and Belgium.)

Joyce ruminates on these statistics in the opening chapter, “The Vanishing,” as they form the essential backdrop to the narrative that follows. At this late date, Joyce is willing to declare a fatality: “Perhaps the ‘death’ of the European peasantry has been exaggerated. Nonetheless, in Europe an ending is everywhere clear, and it is not melodramatic to call this death.”

Although any periodization could be contested, Joyce seems to think the 1970s marked a critical historical break between peasant Europe and modernity. Driving this transformation was the “Third Agricultural Revolution” of farm mechanization, crop standardization, and increasing land and capital concentration. Joyce also sees from this time forward a willingness to disregard the peasant past, manifesting in various ways, including changing naming customs in Ireland:

Part of what names are is the history of the peasant family, the names binding the generations, making past and present one, the matronymics and patronymics stones set in a ground now scarcely visible any longer. Now it is Emilys, Sophies and Emmas, Jacks, Jameses. . . . Poor Paddy and Mick have had their day.

From History to Tourism

Joyce follows his introductory chapter with one addressing the vexed question of defining what exactly a peasant is, reserving some space to examine the etymology of cognate terms for “peasant” in various European languages. (Helpfully, he rejects the notion that one should shun use of the “peasant” label on account of its modern-day pejorative connotations as “at bottom absurd.”) Joyce also deals with the political economy of peasant life. He reviews the factors affecting peasant survival — markets, land tenure, field organization, nature, serfdom, and so forth — with an eye toward the diversity of European peasant experience.

Remembering Peasants also takes up more cultural-anthropological topics. Joyce covers peasant housing, taking the reader through both their layout and the common accoutrements that peasants maintained inside; customs of christening, marriage, and burial are then examined, before plunging into a discussion of peasant cosmology and folklore. Then Joyce turns to the cults, pilgrimages, and other customs that typify the rather syncretic religious practices of European peasants.

A highlight of the book is the chapter on suffering, which steels the reader against any inclination to romanticize peasant life. A peasant’s reality was divided between periods of the “ordinary, everyday suffering” of agricultural drudgery and the “extraordinary suffering” of famine, war, and natural disaster. Mistreatment by social superiors was routine, and peasants sometimes turned on each other in peasant feuds — the author details one such case in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, the “Maamtrasna Murders,” which claimed the lives of a family of Joyces. Whatever motivated the attackers, who included other Joyces — retaliation for sheep-thieving and revenge for informing to police are both possibilities — the resultant botched criminal proceedings scarcely produced anything resembling justice.

Joyce concludes the book with three chapters on remembrance: How are peasants recalled, and how should they be? The author is disdainful of “heritage tourism,” even if he dwells perhaps longer than advisable on its inauthenticity. Joyce finishes on a museum tour through Europe, reflecting on the adequacy of various exhibitions of peasant history.

The Personal in the Historical

A character introduced early in the book is the author’s cousin Seán Joyce (1941–2002), whose lifespan Joyce believes to be coincident with the end of peasant Europe. A photograph of this peasant cousin from 1972 kneeling on the rocky summit of the Irish mountain Croagh Patrick alongside two other men draws the reader into this unfamiliar environment. Leaning against a walking stick fashioned with his own calloused hands, Seán casts his steely gaze beyond the photographer and into the distance. These men, Joyce muses, “have become as monuments to the vanishing of peasant Europe.”

Photography is frequently used to great effect in the book to dramatize the peasant world. One striking image shows an Upper Silesian peasant family asking for a blessing at the beginning of the harvest. The father, scythe in hand and doffing his cap, reverentially kneels before the first sheaf of the season, a cross of grain placed upon it. Other photographs, cribbed from the collection of the Krakow Ethnographic Museum, show Polish peasants in their best dress confidently posing in front of their wood and thatch houses. The haunting final photograph of the book, of the Polish peasant girl Czesława Kwoka clad in an Auschwitz concentration-camp uniform, is a reminder of the tragic fate of much of the European peasantry in the various horrors of the twentieth century.

Joyce draws from the rare literature that peasants themselves authored whenever possible.  The works penned by the French peasant Émile Guillaumin and Polish peasant Jan Słomka are invoked frequently; these accounts are supplemented with references from well-worn tomes of peasant study, such as Oskar Kolberg’s works on Polish folklore and William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, alongside more recent literature like Pierre Bourdieu’s The Bachelors’ Ball. Joyce also discusses fictional accounts of peasant life, with the works of John Berger making the most prominent appearance.

Postmodernism and the Peasantry

Rural history is a novel topic for Joyce, whose main body of work concerns the social history of modern urban Britain. Joyce is also a veteran of the disputes of decades past regarding the various “turns” in historical writing, in which he featured as an advocate of a postmodern perspective. Although Remembering Peasants is primarily a work of description, rather than an explicit advancement of any kind of theoretical viewpoint, the influence of postmodernism can be seen lurking in the background.

One way this influences the text is the author’s selection of and attitude toward sources. As suggested above, the works drawn from most frequently are predominantly concerned with culture. Joyce rather unfairly pans Blum’s more materialist work, because it supposedly “suffers from the not unusual (and always irritating) espousal of the idea of the ‘backward’ peasant.” Seminal works on peasants from Marxist writers, such as V. I.  Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia (commonly considered to have pioneered a countervailing perspective to Chayanov on peasant political economy) and Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question (a classic consideration of the political implications of agrarian change) go unmentioned. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are only invoked for their remarks purportedly disparaging peasants; the latter’s many historical writings on peasants (The Peasant War in Germany, “On the History of Prussian Peasants,” and so on) are apparently not worthy of inclusion.

One downside of Joyce’s overly descriptive approach is that the issue of why peasants have vanished from the European countryside is never straightforwardly addressed. One obvious answer could be that as capitalism has spread all over Europe it has, in one way or another, made subsistence farming untenable there. Capitalism does not go unmentioned in the text, and there are some gestures to its transformative properties in the prologue, but it does not feature as a driving force shaping the epochal changes Joyce describes.

Instead, another culprit is identified for peasants’ subordinate position in society: time. “What is behind the curse? Time itself has a lot to do with the answer.” The scientific revolution ensured that “circular conceptions of time were replaced by ideas of time as linear,” and therefore “progressive, linear time ran roughshod over older ways of conceiving and living time,” claiming the peasants as victims. “Historical writing itself,” Joyce avers, “was a cause and a product of these new conceptions of time.” The notion that the written word, through introducing new ideas about the passage of time, was itself responsible for peasants’ misfortunes is to invest an inordinate amount of power in the strength of ideas alone.

A recurring theme in Joyce’s book is the neo-populist notion that peasants form a separate society, were “outside history,” and “could not partake of the history that was the hallmark of modernity.” Perhaps he could have taken a page from one Marxian work he does seem to appreciate, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, to entertain the opposing perspective: that no human group truly stands apart from the rest of society.  The above is hardly an exhaustive catalog of all of the postmodern tropes that seep into the narrative (his recurrent invocation of “bodies” is another), but they are replete throughout the text, marring an otherwise illuminating work.

Readers who seek a more theoretically satisfying treatment of the peasantry, then, might be advised to look elsewhere. Still, Remembering Peasants has some notable virtues. Mixing history, personal memoir, and anthropology, it is a suitable reminder of an experience that has completely disappeared from the European landscape. It underscores the possibility of dramatic social change, as the modal form of human existence for millennia has become — historically quite recently — extinct in high-income countries. To the extent that Joyce has prompted readers to remember these basic facts of history, all too frequently forgotten, he has performed a service.

The last line of the introductory essay of Blum’s Our Forgotten Past, incidentally, could perhaps serve as an endorsement of Joyce’s work: “[The agrarian] past is where the roots of our civilization and our own roots lie, and the more we know about those roots the more we know about ourselves.”