ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses contemporary global conditions affecting the formation of peasantlike identities and theoretical representations of modernist vision of peasant society. It outlines characteristics of postdevelopment rural society. The central theme is the failure of developmentalism and how rural society will continue to be nonmodern and at the same time be nontraditional. This postdevelopmental society will also have characteristics that differ from the classical anthropological images of the peasantry.' The chapter summarizes the basic assumptions of a theory of postdevelopment society, the seeds of which are found in the romantic currents. It argues that cognition of space occurs prior to images of time. Accordingly, time is distorted in ethnography per Fabian because the location of the other in geographic and social spaces is the primary concern. In the space of modernity, modern and traditional communities were distinct and spatially separated. In a globalized world, they interpenetrate and in doing so dissolve the distinction between them.
