ABSTRACT
We should begin by studying peasant culture and its relevance to us: to deny it is to perpetuate Croce’s attitude,1 which relegates it to ‘folklore’. It’s also a mistake to deny it because capitalism has taken advantage of it and made it commercial: what goes unnoticed is that the bourgeoisie has ‘picked up’ only its surface aspects. Without plumbing the depths of this culture, or even when it does, it talks about an archaic peasant ‘pre-culture’, a mythical culture of the people’s religious spirit, seen as an object of archaeological research.
