Peasant Studies: Subsistence, Justice, and Precarity

“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work. Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.

PEASANT STUDIES AS A KEY DIRECTION OF AGRARIAN SOCIOLOGY

The article analyzes approaches to understanding the role of the peasantry as the basis of the Russian nation and culture and a special social community. The ideas of M. M. Kovalevsky, S. N. Yuzhakov, P. A. Sorokin, A.V. Chayanov and T. Shanin are presented. The conclusion is made about the relevance and methodological value of the approaches of representatives of Russian sociology to this issue. The article states that today, among the priority areas of agricultural sociology, the most popular is the study of family farming as a subject of the informal economy sector of the production of environmentally friendly products for the population interested in the development of bio-agriculture and innovative food networks that reduce the distance between food producers and consumers. It is this urgency of the problem that makes peasant studies the most promising direction of agrarian sociology. Taking into account the practical significance of this problem, relying on methodological approaches and developments of domestic and foreign sociologists, the research group of the Ural Agrarian University, based on the network interaction of universities of the Ural region and India, developed a program of initiative cross-cultural sociological research on the topic "Culture of farm labor", the purpose of which is to analyze the value bases of economic behavior of representatives of this social group for designing an effective agricultural policy.

¿Antropoceno o Capitaloceno? Más allá de los términos

En este artículo abordamos dos enfoques sobre la catástrofe ambiental: el Antropoceno y el Capitaloceno. Primero, establecemos una relación entre la sobreexplotación de la naturaleza y la concepción moderna de sujeto des-incorporado que concibe la naturaleza como recurso. En seguida, señalamos la utilidad del término Antropoceno para enfatizar cómo la actividad humana es responsable por el cambio climático y el calentamiento global. En tercer lugar, señalamos las limitaciones del término, en tanto no distingue entre diferentes contextos socio-económicos y culturales y su relación con la naturaleza. En la cuarta parte exponemos las principales tesis del Capitaloceno, según el cual un argumento sobre la responsabilidad humana del calentamiento global retira la responsabilidad de estos procesos a formas muy específicas de explotación, producción, consumo y deshecho, a saber, las del capitalismo. Palabras Clave Antropoceno y Capitaloceno, sujeto moderno, catástrofe ambiental, límites planetarios, producción y explotación. Referencias Bernal, John D. (1986), La ciencia en la historia, México, Ed. Nueva Imagen/UNAM. Bernal Pérez, Javier Rolando (2016), Propuesta de un marco axiológico para la evaluación de un desarrollo tecnológico. El proyecto del tren de alta velocidad México-Querétaro, Tesis presentada para obtener el título de doctor por la Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña. Boulding, Kenneth E. (1966), “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”, en H. Jarrett (ed.), Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, Baltimore, Resources for the Future/Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 3-14. Crutzen, Paul J. (2002), “Geology of Mankind”, Revista Nature, Vol. 415. Descartes, René (2011), en Descartes, Madrid, Ed. Gredos. Ehrlich, Paul, John Holdren (1971), “Impacto of population growth”, Science, New Series, Vol. 171, No. 3977, pp. 1212-1217. Fuller, Steve (2018), “What can philosophy teach us about the Post-Truth condition”, en Peters, et al (eds.), Post-Truth, Fake News: viral modernity and higher education, Singapur, Ed. Springer. Haraway, Donna (2016), Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene, EUA, Duke University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2002), Lecciones sobre la historia de la filosofía, vol. III, México, Ed. FCE. Heidegger, Martin (2001), “La época de la imagen del mundo”, en Caminos de Bosque, España, Alianza Editorial. Manzo, Silvia (2001), “Algo nuevo bajo el sol : el método inductivo y la historia del conocimiento en la gran restauración de Francis Bacon”, Revista latinoamericana de filosofía, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 227-254. Marx, Karl (1988), “Prólogo a ‘Contribución a la Crítica de la Economía Política’”, en Contribución a la Crítica de la Economía Política, México D. F., Ediciones Quinto Sol. Meadows, D. H., D. L. Meadows, Randers, J., W. Behrens III (1972), The Limits to Growth, Nueva York, Universe Books. Moore, Jason (2017-1), “The Capitalocene: Part I: on the natura and origins of our acological crisis”, The Journal of Peasant Studies. Moore, Jason (2017-2), “The Capitalocene: Part II: accumulation by appropriation an the centrality of unpaid work/energy””, The Journal of Peasant Studies. Parakkal, Varkey (2018), “From Malthus to Thanos : The Problem with ‘Thinning the Herd’”, Ramjas Reading Room. Recuperado de https://ramjasreadingroom.wordpress.com/2018/11/22/from-malthus-to-thanos-the-problem-with-thinning-the-herd/ el 30 de septiembre de 2020. Radowitz, Jon Von (2017), “Stephen Hawking says we must colonise other planets to ensure human survival”, Independent. Recuperado de https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-colonise-other-planets-ensure-human-survival-a7746016.html el 28 de spetiembre de 2020. Raworth, Kate (2012), A safe and just space for humanity: can we live within the doughnut?, Oxfam Discussion Papers. Röckstrom, Johan, et al (2009), “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity”, Ecology and Society, Vol. 14, No. 2. Sandel, Michael (1998), Liberalism and the limits of justice, EUA, Cambridge University Press. Stephen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen y John McNeil (2011), “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 369, No. 1938. Taylor, Charles (2001), Sources of teh Self. The making of the modern identity, EUA, Harvard University Press. Vallaeys, François (1996), “Las deconstrucciones del sujeto cartesiano”, Areté, Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 309-318. WWF (2018), Living Planet Report - 2018: Aiming Higher, Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds), WWF, Gland, Switzerland.

Soviet Rural Family in Foreign Historiography: Lines of Research and Interpretation Approaches

This review article analyses approaches to the study of the rural family of the Soviet period that have taken shape in foreign (mainly Western) historiography between the 1960s and the present. The rural family was in the focus of social and political transformations of the twentieth century, suffered a severe deformation as a result of world and civil wars, as well as the urbanisation process, which took on a forced character under the influence of state policy measures. The article is intended to help bring together the methodological and thematic positions of Russian and foreign researchers in considering the phenomenon of the rural family. The study of the Soviet rural family, usually in a wider thematic context, began in line with the “anthropological” turn at the turn of the 1970s. At the suggestion of T. Shanin, family households entered the focus of the emerging peasant studies. Methodological preferences, as well as the relatively small number of available primary statistics, determined the limited interest of Western authors in the historical and demographic study of the Soviet rural family. In the 1980s and 1990s, within the framework of the revisionist paradigm, the rural family was studied mainly as an object of influence from the authorities (radical projects of the 1920s, collectivisation, and measures to strengthen the family in the 1930s). “Feminist” historiography was especially active in this field. In the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, time came for balanced characteristics, quite free from politicised assessments. There was an opportunity to consider the Soviet family and family policy in a global context. The post-war period in the development of the rural family is represented in foreign works rather poorly. In general, Western authors managed to capture the directions of evolution and the new quality of the rural family, which have become apparent in the later Soviet decades.

Teodor Shanin in Textbooks, Monographs and Essays: Reviewing the Scholar’s Major Works

This review describes and analyzes the main scientific works of the remarkable BritishRussian sociologist Teodor Shanin (1930–2020). The suggestion is to divide Shanin’s rich intellectual heritage into three main genres: anthologies, monographs, and essays. The review begins with the genre of anthologies, understood in the broadest sense of the word: from a collection of modern scientific articles to collections of excerpts from classical works. In this genre, T. Shanin acted as the head of research projects, the author of editorial introductions and the scientific articles themselves in anthologies devoted to models of scientific knowledge of the world, peasants and peasant communities, developing countries, Marxist theory in connection with the development of Russia, types of informal-expolar economies, reflexive peasant studies, methods of qualitative research, interdisciplinary research of generations. Shanin’s books, written in the genre of authentic scientific monographs, on the social mobility of the Russian peasantry at the beginning of the 20th century, the two-volume “Russia as a Developing Society” and the collection of his selected scientific articles titled “Defining Peasants” are examined. In conclusion, it is noted that Teodor Shanin was a bright and sharp essayist who left a number of remarkable articles in the essay genre, namely in the later period of his life — when he was living and working in post-Soviet Russia. The defining feature of Shanin as a writing scientist was his ability to think in terms of original models in a wide interdisciplinary context.