ABSTRACT
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence. Eric Wolf has remarked on the tendency to endow other cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, despite real heterogeneity within cultures and, at the very least, fuzzy boundaries between them. Since Wolf s seminal article anthropologists have moved a long way from the reified notion of ‘community’ and ‘a community way of life’, by placing peasant communities in historical context and showing how their boundedness and even their apparently internal levelling processes are outcomes of external economic and political forces of exploitation and domination. Peasants rebel and things are disturbed: not just in the routine world of the provincial capital, where journalists write articles, policemen reports and lawyers briefs; but among the peasants themselves.
