ABSTRACT
Theda Skocpol has explored the autonomy and solidarity of peasantries in both France and Russia in her comparative work. The valley’s Quechua-speaking peasantry came into close social and cultural contact with the mestizos and the gente decente in the market towns, where the peasantry sold their goods, including crafts and textiles. Peasantries typically have damaged lives but some autonomy when living in, or forced into, agriculturally undesirable frontier areas as squatters or even as bandits. The damaged patron-client relationship, distinctively, produces discontented peasants completely lacking in both autonomy and solidarity, and provides the structurally opposite form to the peasant communities given such prominence in Skocpol’s work. If mobilization is, however unlikely, wedded to autonomous and solidary insurrectionary activity, it should be understood as accentuating features already present in social structure, rather than breathing life into revolutionary movements.
