Afterword. Europe’s Guinea Pigs: Globalizing the Agricultural History of Southeastern Europe
Journal Title: Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review - Year 2014, Vol 19, Issue 19
Abstract
One of the most remarkable features of the peasantry is its resilience to obituaries. In South-Eastern Europe, the peasants survived Marxist analysts who laid out that the peasants were oppressed and should thus join forces with the proletariat. They survived a comprehensive transformation of markets and modes of production that changed virtually all parameters of agriculture, save for a few biological fundamentals. They persisted through Communist social engineering. They even survived historians such as Eric Hobsbawm who presented the death of peasantry as a fait accompli. It is no coincidence that the academic study of peasants ended up in the hands of anthropologists, whose core competence is to make sense of behaviour that nobody else understands. After some two centuries of industrial-capitalist modernity, the peasants are still out there, ready to outlive concepts and categories as they may come to them.
Authors and Affiliations
Frank Uekotter
Keywords
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