Peasantry

towards a multiply resistant, self-provisioning, and actively constructed distantiation

[Peasantry is] an attitude of mind: the peasantry can be defined as those for whom agriculture is a livelihood and a way of life, not a business for profit.

Elisabeth Luard, European Peasant Cookery (1986)

In peasants’ daily lives self-provisioning and resistance are closely tied together.

Douwe Van Der Ploeg, The peasantries of the twenty-first century: the commoditisation debate revisited

Everything old is new again. Peasantry, as currently understood, is not just a distantiation from the technocratic, mechanistic, scale-enlarging farming of the “green revolution”, but a returning to the philosophy of autonomy and independence as the central feature of farms and farming.