UNDERSTANDING PEASANT SOCIETY Anothropological Perspectives

Preface

This is an anthropological approach to the understanding of peasant society. In fact the main point of anthropological investigation is the study of peasant society with its preexisting institutions moulded by and large by value orientation patterns. The anthropological exploration of the peasant society with the methodological perspectives similar to tribal study was beginning to gain momentum in late fifties and early sixties.

Anthropologists, at this stage of the metamorphosis of conceptual development, attempt to collect data on backward and transitional peasant communities using tradition-modernity continuum and encapsulation models. Mackim Marriott, Srinivas, Alavi, Fox, Mayer, Lewis, Bailey, Maloney, Bertocci, Ellickson, Nicholas, Eglar, Kapadia, Karve, to mention a few, carried forward anthropological survey of peasant societies in ‘south Asian villages.

Village studies conducted by native anthropologists received impetus from the conceptual reconstruction of phenomenal reality attempted by western think tanks. The peasant world has been depicted as a social isolate almost similar to tribalism. It operates with preexisting institutions, customs, magic, totemism, religion, scripture, rituals and other exoteric meanings and symbolic significance. Peasants as individual entities and collectivities, are a remnant of traditionalism of the remotest past even of prehistoric period with operating values like casteism, jajmani version of patron-client relationship, feudalism, kinship, fiction, primitive market, ascription, prescription, and proscription…..