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Eric wolf from his pint of view culture in institutions identified peasants as closed corporate communities.

According to his point these institutions involve strong social pressure to participate in community rituals and personal recognitions and prestige for those who sponsor rituals at their own cost. Along with other customs regarding land tenure, they bound the community, making it hard for insiders to leave and outsiders to inter. These customs have important influence on economic relation of peasant community and on the way its members interact with outer world.
By peasant he means an agricultural producer in effective control of land who carries on agriculture as a means of livelihood, not as a business for profit.

I am giving some characteristics relating to his concept of closed corporate community form his study area of Mesoamerica and Central java.
In Mesoamerica, as in Central java Java, He finds such agricultural producers organized into communities

with similar characteristics. From his understanding they are similar in that they maintain a body of rights to possessions, such as land. Both put pressures on members to redistribute surpluses at their command, preferably in the operation of a religious system, and induce them to content themselves with the rewards of "shared poverty." They strive to prevent outsiders from becoming members of the community, and in placing limits on the ability of members to communicate with the larger society. In both areas they are corporate organizations, maintaining perpetuity of rights and membership; and they are closed corporations, because they limit these privileges to insiders, and discourage close participation of members in the social relations of the larger society. Outright communal tenure was once general in both areas
In both areas show strong tendencies to restrict member- ship in the community to people born and raised within the boundaries of the community. The community is territorial, not kinship-based."Rules of community endogamy further limit the immigration of new personnel. These rules are char- acteristic of Mesoamerica; they occur only

occasionally in Central Java. Membership in the community is also demonstrated by participation in religious rituals maintained by the community. In Java, each community is charged with the maintenance of proper relations with its spirits and ancestors. The rituals which serve this function cannot be carried on by the individual. Each year the land is ritually purified (slametan bresih desa), the community spirit is feasted (sedekab bum), and offerings are made to the souls of the dead (njadran). The religious official - in the past usually the chief, but nowadays more often the land supervisor and diviner of the community- is looked upon as "a personification of the spiritual relation of the people to their land." In Mesoamerica, there is no evidence of ancestor worship or propitiation as such yet each community tends to support the cult of one or more saints. The functions associated with these cults are delegated to members of the community. A man gains social prestige by occupying a series of religious offices charged with these functions; these tend

to be ranked in a prescribed ladder of achievement. Often, they carry with them a decisive voice in the political and social affairs of the community.26 Apparently only members of the community are normally admitted to such religio-political participation. In both areas, the community motivates its members to expend surpluses in the operation of a prestige economy. The prestige economy operates largely in support of the communal religious cult, and allied religious activities. In Central Java, where cattle are symbolic of land-ownership, wealth is expended conspicuously in cattle sacrifices, as well as in a large number of ritual feasts (slametans) offered by private individuals to ward off evil or difficulties, to celebrate special events in the life-cycle, to mark holidays, and to emphasize stages in the production of rice. In both areas, we not only encounter a marked tendency to exclude the out- sider as a person, but also to limit the flow of outside goods and ideas into the community. This tendency is often ascribed to "inherent peasant conservatism" or to adherence to "static needs," but may actually represent the complex interplay of many factors. Villagers are poor, and unable to buy many new goods. The goods purchased must be functional within peasant life. Peasant needs in both areas are met by marketing systems which serve only the peasantry, and which are organizationally and culturally distinct from other marketing systems within the larger societies to which they belong. They show a high proportion of dealings between primary producers and ultimate consumers. They are characterized by small purchases due to the limited amount of consumer purchasing power. In both areas, moreover, peasant communities maintain strong attitudes against accumulated wealth. In Mesoamerica, display of wealth is viewed with direct hostility. In turn, poverty is praised and resignation in the face of poverty accorded high value. We have seen how much surplus wealth is destroyed or redistributed through participation in the communal religious cult. In Java, there are similar pressures to redistribute wealth.

Closed corporate peasant communities in both areas are socially and culturally isolated from the larger society in which they exist. This general isolation of the peasant community from the larger society is, however, reinforced by the parochial, local centric attitudes of the community. In Mesoamerica, each community tends to maintain a relatively autonomous economic, social, linguistic, and politico-religious system, as well as a set of relatively exclusive customs and practices. In Java, similarly, each community is a separate sociocultural universe." Such local centrism is a form of "ignorance which performs specificable functions in social structure and action. Peasant communities in both areas thus show certain similarities. Both maintain a measure of communal jurisdiction over land. Both restrict their membership, maintain a religious system, enforce mechanisms which ensure the redistribution or destruction of surplus wealth, and uphold barriers against the entry of goods and ideas produced outside the community.43 These resemblances also mark their differences from other kinds of peasant communities.

Formation of closed corporate communities: When and Why closed corporate community emerges? According to Wolfs Closed corporate communities developed in reaction to events in the larger societyit is conditional on the relation of the local community to the larger society. He identified two major causes for what a closed community can emerge. Dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants. Closed corporate communities as the result of Internal colonization Example for the First reason from the discussion of Eric Wolf In Mesoamerica historically, the closed corporate peasant configuration in Mesoamerica is a creature of the Spanish Conquest. The new configuration was the result of serious social and cultural crises which destroyed more than three-quarters of the Indian population, and robbed it of its land and water supply. Population losses and flight prompted colonial measures leading to large-scale resettlement and concentration of population. The new Indian communities were given rights to land as local groups, not kinship-wise; political authority was placed in the hands of new local office holders and made elective. Tribute and labor services were placed on a new basis and the rapid growth of Indian comrades (sodalities) after the late sixteenth century gave to parishioners a series of organized and stable associations with which personal and communal identification might readily be made. In the two areas, then, the closed corporate peasant community is a child of conquest. The corporate peasant community is not an offspring of conquest as such, but rather of the dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants. This dualization may take place in peaceful as well as in warlike circumstances, and in metropolitan as well as in colonial countries. Both in Mesoamerica and Central Java, the conquerors occupied the land and proceeded to organize labor to produce crops and goods for sale in newly established markets. The native peasantry did not command the requisite culturally developed skills and resources to participate in the development of large-scale enterprises for profit. In both areas, therefore, the peasantry was forced to supply labor to the new enterprises, but barred from direct participation in the resultant returns. In both areas, moreover, the conquerors also seized control of large-scale trade, and deprived the native population of direct access to sources of wealth acquired through trade, such as they had commanded in the preconquest past." Yet in both areas, the peasantry - forced to work on colonist enterprises - did not become converted into a permanent labor force. The part-time laborer continued to draw the larger share of his subsistence from his own efforts on the land. From the point of view of the entrepreneurial sector, the peasant sector remained primarily a labor reserve where labor could maintain itself at no cost to the enterprises. This served to maintain the importance of land in peasant life. At the same time, and in both areas, land in the hands of the peasantry had to be limited in amount, or the peasantry would not have possessed sufficient incentive to offer its labor to the entrepreneurial sector. It is significant in this regard that the relation between peasant and entrepreneur was not "feudal." No economic, political, or legal tie bound a

particular peasant to a particular colonist. In the absence of such personal, face-to-face bonds, only changes in the general conditions underlying the entire peasant economy could assure the entrepreneurs of a sufficient seasonal supplement to their small number of resident laborer 17th. By restricting the amount of land in the hands of each Indian community to six and one-half square miles, the Crown obtained land for the settlement of Spanish colonists." A similar process of limit- ing the land frontier of the native population was introduced in Java. If access to land thus remained important to the peasantry, land itself became a scarce resource and subject to intense competition, especially when the peasant population began to grow in numbers. The social and economic dualization of post-conquest Mesoamerica and Java was also accompanied in both areas by dualization in the administrative sphere. By placing the native communities under the direct jurisdiction of a special corps of officials responsible to the home government rather than to officials set up by the colonists, the home government attempted to maintain control over the native population and to deny this control to the colonists. By granting relative autonomy to the native communities, the home government could at one and the same time ensure the maintenance of cultural barriers against colonist encroachment, while avoiding the huge cost of direct administration. It is my contention that the closed corporate peasant community in both areas represents a response to these several characteristics of the larger society. Relega- tion of the peasantry to the status of part-time laborers, providing for their own subsistence on scarce land, together with the imposition of charges levied and enforced by semi-autonomous local authorities, tends to define the common life situation which confronts the peasantry of both societies. The closed corporate peasant community is an attempt to come to grips with this situation. Its internal function, as opposed to its external function in the social, economic, and political web of the dualized society, is to equalize the life chances and life risks of its member. Example for the Second reason from the discussion of Eric Wolf In China, free buying and selling of land has been present from early times. Com- munities are not endogamous and rarely closed to outsiders, even where a single stratified "clan" or tsu held sway. Constant circulation of local landowners into the imperial bureaucracy and of officials into local communities where they acquired land prevented the formation of closed communities. Moreover, state controls maintained through control of large-scale water works heavily curtailed the autonomy of the local group. In such a society, relations between individual vil- lagers and individual government officials offered more security and promise than relations among the villagers themselves. While the closed corporate peasant community operates to diminish inequalities of risks, it can never eliminate them completely. For these reasons according to Eric wolf closed corporate peasant community developed over time

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