Peasants, Politics and Revolution: Pressures Toward Political and Social Change in the Third World

by Joel S. Migdal

Overview

During the last quarter century, peasant participation in politics has increased markedly in parts of Latin America and Asia. Why the poor and vulnerable peasant population has chosen to leave the confines of the village for political activity and at times for sustained revolution is the question this book explores.

The author draws on informal interviews and observation of peasants in Mexico and India and on fifty-one community studies of peasants in Asia and Latin America compiled by ethnographers in the last forty years. He suggests that severe economic crises have driven peasants to roles in the larger economy outside the village, where they are initially attracted to politics by material incentives.

Originally published in 1975.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691606385
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1789
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d)

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Peasants, Politics, and Revolution

Pressures Toward Political and Social Change in the Third World

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By Joel S. Migdal

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07567-9

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Why Peasants Change

Oxen lie listlessly in the dung and mud, and tall stalks of corn stand in the fields of Coyotopec, probably much as they grew years before. Only the occasional passing of a car on the highway dissecting the village or a radio blaring in the distance makes the bustle of far-off Mexico City seem real. The state of Oaxaca has not shared in much of the phenomenal economic growth that Mexico City and northwestern Mexico have undergone; the contrast is stark, and life in a Oaxacan village seems, on the surface, relatively undisturbed from that of centuries past.

Coyotopec never was an entirely isolated, self-sufficient village. It has long been involved in an intricate peasant marketing system that has had its focus in the nearby capital city of Oaxaca, to which, on Saturdays, the characteristic black pottery of the village has been brought, along with any corn and garden vegetables left over after subsistence needs have been met. And with the small cash earnings, minor purchases of goods from other villages or of manufactured products have been made. Some Coyotopec peasants have also traveled to other less important markets to sell or buy goods on other days of the week. The women have been the merchants, and it has been they who have set up the blanket with the family-produced goods to be sold. To the increasing number of tourists who buy at the famous Saturday market, the world of the Oaxacan peasant seems far removed from the twentieth century. Yet it is these very tourists who have ensured a certain limited degree of prosperity for the artisans of the village by buying their black pottery for decorative purposes at a time when imported manufactured goods are replacing pottery for daily use in the area.

Peasant farmers in Coyotopec feel the changes of the century. The electric light bulb hanging in their one-room houses does not always bring light because of the difficulty of keeping up with the costs, but it is as important a part of the house as the altar on the wall or the rolled-up straw mats used for sleeping. Large containers of purified water also demand an extra outlay of cash, but they have become a recognized necessity of life.

Although their farming methods do not differ significantly from those of their forefathers, Coyotopec's peasants are very much aware of new methods being used. Tractors are not a part of their personal experience; yet, they know that campesinos (peasants) in the North are able to increase their yields significantly with the machines from the United States. No longer do Coyotopec's peasants talk of the future as if it will bring an indefinite extension of the past. Change has become the norm.

Peasant farmers in Coyotopec are deeply concerned with the river that cuts through the village fields. At most times it is nothing more than a lazy stream which winds through the milpa, but during the rainy season it spills over its banks and rages downstream. Flooding can damage some of the nearby crops. More importantly when the river swells to unusual dimensions, those with fields on the other side cannot cross it to tend their crops. If such conditions last long enough, as they did prior to the previous harvest, much of the corn is ruined.

The peasants of Coyotopec have long depended upon the movements of the river. Yet they no longer view this situation as unalterable. They now believe that man can overcome the limitations of his physical environment. Man-made improvements can do away with the uncertainties of flooding. Their idea is simple: to build a footbridge over the river. They know, however, that such an undertaking is beyond the financial capabilities and engineering skills of them and their neighbors. In 1970, after much discussion, the peasants with fields across the river organized and selected a spokesman. He went to the city of Oaxaca and there submitted an official request to the government for the public construction of a footbridge. To date, all requests have resulted only in negative responses from the government.

Coyotopec's residents are certainly not the only peasants in recent years who have engaged in new kinds of political action in attempts to mold their environment. Peasants in many parts of the third world have begun to join organizations and political parties and to participate in rallies and demonstrations. Implicit in these acts is the goal of somehow changing their physical and social environment through politics, through their efforts, and through the efforts of others. No longer do most peasants' political sights stop at the village border or at the local marketing town or at the doorstep of the local landlords. Peasants are increasingly participating in a new political world. The expansion of political ties outside the village has come in the wake of a tremendous increase in economic relations with outsiders. Paul Stirling describes some of these changes for two Turkish villages.

... In general, the main change is the multiplication, for most adult villagers, of a new set of more or less impersonal social relations with employers, fellow-workers, officials, and buyers and sellers, different for each individual, all leading out of the village into national society. A generation ago, such external relations were the prerogative of village leaders, and even for them were far fewer and less impersonal.

These political and social changes in peasant life have occurred where Chinese or Bengali or Spanish is spoken; they have occurred in temperate areas and tropical areas; they have occurred among Buddhists and Christians and Muslims; they have occurred among Ceylon's Sinhalese and Mexico's Zapotec Indians. The subject of this book is when, why, and how peasants in Asia and Latin America have sought links to a new world whose boundaries are far wider than those of the village's bamboo hedge.

The question of under which conditions peasants change from a subsistence-oriented, village-based life to one involving sustained participation in outside institutions is crucial to the study of modernization. Various models have been developed by social scientists to explore this question. Yet there is a common core to much of this literature: exposure to the modern — what we shall call "culture contact" — leads people to abandon their old patterns and adopt these modern ways. Contact between the old and the new leads to the triumph of the new patterns. In recent years there has arisen a growing body of literature pointing to weaknesses in this explanation, but there has not yet been developed an inclusive explanation which overcomes these weaknesses.

This book offers a theoretical alternative to the question of why peasants abandon their old patterns. Before outlining this theoretical alternative, let us first examine an explanation of culture contact and show some of the difficulties in analysis which it raises. This chapter argues that although culture contact may be a necessary condition for change, it is far from sufficient.

Culture Contact: An Explanation

The explanation or assumption that exposure and contact are the causes of change has three components: (1) The benefits of the modern far outweigh the benefits of the traditional. (2) The individual is free from severe institutional restraints which would prevent his making an unimpeded decision. (3) Those individuals who select the new are rational and are optimizers, and those individuals who do not accept the modern fail to do so because of "wrong" or nonrational values. These components can be traced back to the early part of the century in social science literature, particularly in anthropology. In 1934, Robert Redfield wrote that local differences in Yucatan villages can be attributed to differences in degree of exposure to "civilization" — schools, roads, and economic exploitation. Almost thirty years after the writing of Redfield and Villa's study of Chan Kom, George M. Foster restated this theme, suggesting that the degree of contact with urban centers is the greatest determinant of change among peasants.

Other branches of social science have subsequently adopted the culture contact mode of analysis. In his study of traditional society, the sociologist Daniel Lerner explicated the most complete and sophisticated model of culture contact. He attempted to go beyond the mere assertion that contact leads to change, by focusing on why such change occurs. His model begins with the person who accepts change and becomes modernized, whom he calls the mobile personality. Such a person is one who has a high capacity for identification with new aspects of his environment. The question Lerner poses is how a society is able to produce many mobile personalities, the key ingredients in a modern society.

Lerner states that the answer lies in an expansion of human communication. First, this expansion of communication came through an increase in travel, but the media now obviate the need for the physical displacement associated with travel. The media accent "the psychic displacement of vicarious experience" and are, in fact, even better than travel, for exposure to them gives the person a more ordered sense of the whole. After reaching a certain threshold of urbanization, literacy, mass media, and institutions of participation, a society can provide large numbers of people in its traditional sector with exposure and contact with the new, thus converting them into mobile personalities.

This assumption that increased contact with and exposure to new patterns will lead not only to increased knowledge but also to new behavior is found in other theories as well. In political science, for example, F. Lamond Tullis has used Frank Young's information-processing theory to build a paradigm of political and social change in Peru. Tullis states that there is a direct link between the capacity of individuals to process complex information and modernization. A peasant who goes regularly to the city, he claims, probably would develop a higher "information-processing capacity" and would more quickly adopt modern ways than one who stays home.

The emphasis on culture contact as the major cause of individual and social change is probably most obvious in the large and growing body of "diffusion of innovation" literature. The underlying ingredients of modernization in this literature do not differ significantly from those of Lerner's model. Communication is the key element, and the process of change is basically one without severe discontinuities, as the term "diffusion" itself connotates: the more that differing sectors come into contact with one another, the more individuals will gain the attributes associated with change.

In short, change is most often seen in terms of incentives for the individual to adopt the new over the old. Culture contact, either personally or through media exposure, presents the individual with the ability, the empathy, the information-processing capacity, or whatever to relate personally to the alternative life-styles. He then can weigh his present patterns and commitments against the modern, and there is little doubt among most authors that he will accept the modern. The barriers to change are seen as internal to the individual — his personal orientation — and little note is given to the strength of the traditional, parochial institutions to affect radically the individual's choice.

Difficulties in the Concept of Culture Contact

Two interesting monographs are representative of numerous documented cases where there has been very high cultural contact but little abandonment of the old patterns. In the Peruvian village of Hualcan, numerous men left the village each year for temporary work outside. A large proportion of these men went to work in modern agricultural-industrial plantations on the coast of Peru, far from their Andean village. These plantations presented a world culturally distinct to these men, and some worked there for up to two months at a time. Yet, according to William W. Stein, these contacts were "acculturationally irrelevant." This is not to say that no changes in village life resulted from the plantation work. Men returned with impressive sums of cash which affected the social stratification of Hualcan. Yet, interestingly, the men did not adopt the patterns they encountered. Their clothes changed little. Their money was invested in land and fiestas, the long-accepted way to dispose of surplus.

Much the same set of events occurred among the men of Buarij, Lebanon. There, almost all the adult males left the mountainous village during the slack winter season to work elsewhere. Many of their jobs put them into contact with very different and very modern sectors in Lebanon. Although, once again, changes in village life occurred, the striking factor Anne H. Fuller discovered was the stability of attitudes, institutions, and behavior despite these early forays.

Adherents of the culture-contact explanation have often attributed such lack of change in specific instances to the people's particular values or ethos. Serious doubts must be raised about such undifferentiated concepts. For example, very near the Peruvian village of Hualcan is another Indian village called Recuayhuanca. There, too, peasants left the village during the off-season to take jobs on agricultural-industrial plantations on the coast. The results of their experience were much different from those of Hualcan's peasants, however. The young people adopted Western dress, and education went up in value. Some villagers followed their work on the plantations with temporary jobs in Lima, and almost all joined labor unions between 1945 and 1948. Many opted for permanent migration from the village, and others, while not yet able to migrate, held the goal of eventually living in Lima. If values or ethos alone explain why some reject change and others accept it, how do we account for peasants in two such similar villages (both were freeholding villages, as opposed to the nearby hacienda of Vicos) who reacted so differently to culture contact? Can we assume that value structures are so different for the two?

A further problem in regard to the reliance on the culture-contact explanation stems from the numerous cases in which individuals change some patterns and commitments and not others. Here, too, a rather extensive literature is growing which documents such cases of syncretic change and points to the weakness of the culture-contact explanation. Most notably, C. S. Whitaker has challenged the underlying hypothesis of today's student of modernization: that ultimately all non-Western peoples will either accept or reject, more or less wholesale, the kind of institutions yielded by change in the West.

An example of partial, or what Whitaker calls "dysrhythmia' change is found in the Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India, where university-educated sons still have their marriages arranged by their parents, and many return to live in the joint household. Others commute to the city to work as doctors or government clerks while their wives and children remain in the village and the joint household. In Latin America, social scientists have also noted the persistence of village-based patterns of behavior, both socially and politically, among people who have left the village to live in barrios surrounding the city.

Are these people innovators? Do they or do they not have empathy? Do they have high information-processing capacity or not? Why have they rejected many of the modern patterns they have witnessed? The questions become even sharper when we consider those (in India I interviewed several) who travel to Europe or the United States to study, yet maintain many of their old patterns and commitments.

Finally, culture contact as an explanation of change fails to take account of the differentiation between two distinct concepts in social science, social mobilization and modernization. Social mobilization is the breaking down of old social, economic, and psychological commitments; modernization is the actual adoption of new commitments and patterns, resulting in use of new levels of technology and in structural differentiation. Given the assumption that culture contact causes change, it is easy to see why this merging of the two concepts should occur, for why abandon the old (social mobilization) if not simultaneously to adopt the new?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Peasants, Politics, and Revolution by Joel S. Migdal. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• I. Introduction: Why Peasants Change, pg. 1
• II. Lord and Peasant, pg. 33
• III. The Freeholding Village, pg. 46
• IV. Mechanisms of Survival, pg. 60
• V. Villages under Stress, pg. 87
• VI. Relieving the Stress, pg. 112
• VII. Who Risks Change?, pg. 133
• VIII. Social Structure and Social Institutions, pg. 156
• IX. The New Political Community, pg. 193
• X. Peasant Revolution, pg. 226
• XI. Conclusion: The Shrinking World, pg. 257
• Appendix A. The Scale of External Relations, pg. 267
• Appendix B. A List of the Communities Used, pg. 269
• Bibliography, pg. 275
• Index, pg. 297