ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to synthesize what is presently known about the motivations, values, and attitudes of subsistence farmers. Although peasantry is as old as civilization itself and constitutes the bulk of the population in the underdeveloped countries and in the world, we still have much to learn about peasants, their values, problems and aspirations, the intimate details of family living, the effects upon their lives of Western technology and culture and their potential for participation and leadership in the modern world. Programs of directed social change designed to reach peasants are likely to fail unless based upon understandings of the values, attitudes, and motivations of this audience. The ten central elements in our subculture of peasantry are: mutual distrust in interpersonal relations, a lack of innovativeness, fatalism, low aspirational levels, lack of deferred gratification, limited time perspective, familism, dependency upon government authority, localiteness, and a lack of empathy.
