ABSTRACT

Science generates both knowledge and ignorance and one of the black holes it has created systematically obscures the ways in which peasants operate within the modern world. Thus, the phenomenon of the peasant has been delegated to remote places hidden in history and the periphery. What science did was to create an image and model of the agricultural entrepreneur – a model that posits the farmer, his practices and the relations in which he is engaged as they are supposed to be (Jollivet, 2001; Ploeg, 2003a). This model – realized through extended and far-reaching processes of modernization – represented the opposite of what Shanin (1972) designated the ‘awkward’ class of peasants. It heralded ‘la fin des paysans’ (Mendras, 1967). Silvia Pérez-Vitoria (2005), in her discussion of the relations between modernization and the peasants, signals that ‘personne ne voulait les entendre; on était trop ocupés à se modernizer’ (‘nobody wanted to understand them; everybody was too busy becoming modern’).