Empirical Evaluation of Theories of Peasantry

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  • Leopold Pospíšil

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3716

Abstrakt

Like other social sciences, anthropology has theorized about peasantry and its basic concepts in many ways, most of which contradict each other. Shanin viewed them as fitting four major categories. First, the European authors have presented peasantry as an earlier cultural tradition which lags behind modern socio-economic development. For Marx, peasantry meant a class of producers formerly exploited by elite of the pre-capitalist society, which presently represents a leftover from the preceding evolutionary societal stage (1975: 3). Authors of the third category, like Chayanov, regarded peasantry as a special type of mode of production. Finally, DurkHeim and his anthropological followers like Kroeber claimed peasantry to be a structural component of civilization, in Kroeber’s terms, a “part society” (1948: 284).

Biografie autora

Leopold Pospíšil

legal anthropologist, professor emeritus of anthropology and curator emeritus of the Peabody Museum at Yale University. He studied law at Charles University in Prague, sociology and philosophy at Willamette University in Oregon and anthropology at the University of Oregon and Yale University. He delved into the cultures of the Nunamuit Eskimos in Alaska, the Hopi Indians in Arizona and the Kapauku in New Guinea, and common law among Tyrolean peasants (in the Obernberg valley, not far from Brenner). He is the author of circa 20 books, e.g., Kapauku Papuans and their Law (1958), Kapauku Papuan Economy (1963), Anthropology of Law: A comparative theory (1971), The Ethnology of Law (1997) – and has lectured in more than 50 universities around the world. He took part in the anti-Nazi resistance. On March 13, 1948, he left Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak authorities condemned him three times in his absence.

Stahování

Publikováno

2008-07-01

Jak citovat

Pospíšil, L. (2008). Empirical Evaluation of Theories of Peasantry. Lidé města, 10(2), 192-203. https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3716

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