ABSTRACT
An understanding of the nature of the peasantry remains extremely important, and needs to be clarified, for concepts used in respect of the peasantry are multiple, and contradictory. The classic capitalist model of a contractual relationship, mediated by the cash-nexus and entailing the performance of a specified number of hours of work in return for a certain wage. Peasant society, Redfield said, was a part-society; and most peasantries today, Wolf argues, are only secondary' peasantries. But even where they constitute the majority the primary' peasant societies peasants are not the people who take the important economic or political decisions at the societal level. The agencies of the state: the police, tax-collectors, and the army recruiters are there to keep the peasant majority docile and at the service of the privileged minority. One of the less valuable consequences of the Chayanovist approach is its relative neglect of the world outside the village: the societal and sectoral levels of institutionalised power.
