Abstract
Peasant households form the nuclei of peasant society. The nature of the peasant household constitutes the most significant single characteristic of the peasantry as a specific social phenomenon and gives rise to the generic features displayed by peasantries all over the world. A peasant household is characterised by the extent of integration of the peasant family’s life with its farming enterprise. The family provides the essential work team of the farm, while the farm’s activities are geared mainly to production of the basic needs of the family and the dues enforced by the holders of political and economic power. The vast diversities between and within the peasantries do not obliterate the insights of this classification.1
The peasantry, the key toward understanding of China, is a way of living.
Fei Hsiu Tung
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Notes and References
V. Mukhin, Obychnyi poryadok nasledovaniya krest’yan ( St. Petersburg, 1888 ) p. 151.
G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (London, 1932) p. 66. Until 1906 the head of the household could have a member of his household arrested, sent back to his village under escort, or flogged by simple application to the peasant court.
V. Aleksandrov, Russkie (Moscow, 1967) pp. 17–99. See also J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia (New York, 1964) ch. 20, and A. Anfimov, Krest ‘yanskoe khozyaistvo evropeiskoi Rossii’ (Moscow, 1980 ).
V. Den, Kurs ekonomischeskoi geografii (Leningrad, 1925) pp. 188 and 211.
G. Pitt-Rivers, ‘The Closed Community and its Friends’, Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, no. 16, p. 957, 1957.
See O. Khauke, Krest’yanskoe zemel’noe pravo (Moscow, 1914) pp. 83–7; I. Izgoev, Obshchinnoe pravo (St Petersburg, 1906 ) pp. 38–40.
A. Haxthousen, Studien uber die inner-Zustande, das Volksleben und insbesondere die landlichen einrichtungen Ruslands (Hannover, 1847–52) vols. 1–3.
I. Chemyshev, Agrarno-krest yanskaya politika Rossii (Petrograd, 1918 ).
A. Kaufman, Russkaya obshchina v protsese ee zarozhdeniya i rosta (Moscow, 1908). See also his Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1915 ).
R. Redfield,Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, 1956) p. 169.
E. Wolf, Is the Peasant a Class Category Separate from Bourgeois and Proletarian? (Notes for a Talk) (Binghampton, 1977 ).
A. Herzen, Izbrannye folozofskie proizvedeniya (Moscow, 1946) vol. ii, p. 253.
T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972) pt II.
A. Kroeber, Anthropology (London, 1924) p. 284; Redfield, op. cit., p. 31.
J. H. Boeke, Economics and Economic Policy of Dual Societies (New York, 1953 ).
K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Writings (Moscow, 1950 ) vol. I, p. 303.
See G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1949 ) p. 96.
Reviewed in T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972 )
A. Anfimov, Krupnoe pomeshchich’e khozyaistvo evropeiskoi rossii (Moscow, 1969) p. 375.
I. Pisarev, Narodonaselenie SSSR (Moscow, 1962) pp. 66 and 71.
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© 1985 Teodor Shanin
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Shanin, T. (1985). Russian Peasants: Household, Community and Society. In: Russia as a ‘Developing Society’. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17882-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17882-7_2
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