From the very beginning of the world, men were quite dependent on the natural resources to meet their basic needs. The word peasant comes from 15th-century French paisant, meaning one from the pays, the countryside or region. The peasant exists in a world before the modern division of labour.
Definition of Peasants:
A peasant is a group who
lead their life through agricultural production, which is related to natural
resources. They know the only means of production is how to cultivate their
land to meet their basic needs. Some definitions of peasant are given below.
Shanin (1998) “ Small agricultural producers, who, with the help of
simple equipment and the labor of their families, produce mostly for their own
consumption, directly or indirectly, and for the fulfillment of obligations to
holders of political and economic power.”
Eric Wolf (1966) “Peasants are farmers who grow crops and raise
livestock in rural areas, but who, unlike commercial American farmers, are more
concerned with satisfying the needs of the households than with obtaining a
profit.”
Oportunities and Challenges for Women Entrepreneurs in Jessore’s Handicraft Business
Features / Characteristics of Peasants:
According to Shanin, there
are four basic characteristics of peasants. They are
- A family firm is the major economic unit around which
production, labour, and consumption are organized.
- Land husbandry is the main activity, combined with
minimum specialization and family training for tasks.
- There is a particular peasant way of life based on the
local village community, which covers most areas of social life and
culture, and which differs from those of other social groupings.
- Peasants are politically, economically, and socially
subordinated to non-peasant groups against whom they have devised various
methods of resistance, rebellion, or revolt.
There are two further
subsidiary facets:
- A specific social dynamic involving a cyclical change
over generations, which irons out inequalities over time via land division
and the rise and fall of the availability of family labor through the
domestic cycle.
- Especially in the contemporary world, a common pattern
of structural change, during which peasants enter market relationships,
often through the influence of outside bodies and incorporation of
politics.
According to Foster, the
main characteristics of the peasants are given below.
- The peasants themselves are the communities.
- Their relationship with the more complex components of
their greater societies is symbiotic and spatial-temporal.
- They are in a subordinate economic position to urban
clusters.
So, from the above
discussion, peasants are those who live in a village and engage in small-scale
production for their own consumption.
