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The Journal of Peasant Studies

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The peasant concept in anthropology

Sydel Silverman
a a

Graduate Center, City University of New York, Published online: 05 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: Sydel Silverman (1979): The peasant concept in anthropology, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 7:1, 49-69 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066157908438091

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The Peasant Concept in Anthropology

Sydel Silverman*
The development of peasant studies in anthropology (focusing primarily on the United States) is reconsidered by tracing two major approaches, one stemming from Robert Redfield, the other from Julian Steward and his students. The two approaches are based on different premises and grounded in different theories of culture. Although they have been interwoven historically, they represent different conceptions of peasantry, as well as different understandings of such notions as peasant culture, community, and tradition. As critics of anthropological insularity have often pointed out, anthropology did not invent the study of peasants. Long before Robert Redfield's first field trip to Mexico in 1926, peasants had been the concern of other scholars: historians of medieval Europe, jurists and political theorists, Russian economists and 'rural statisticians' who carried out sophisticated peasant studies on a national scale, Eastern European ethnographers of folk-life, rural sociologists stimulated by LePlay to record family budgets, and others. These scholarly traditions produced a wealth of theory and data that has been discovered by contemporary anthropology, but they do not constitute the historical background of the anthropology of peasantry. To the extent that they dealt with peasants, the point of reference of such traditions was specific peasant groups, usually the politically problematic peasantry of particular nations. The roots of the anthropological interest in peasants were elsewhere, in the comparative study of the human condition. This comparative interest led anthropologists to do field studies in settlements of small-scale agriculturalists within civilized, state societiesand sometimes to refer to their subjects as 'peasants'long before they treated peasants as an analytic category. The central issue to which the early studies were addressed was the nature of human communities; they were, first of all, village studies, and only incidentally studies of peasants. The earliest of these village descriptions, Redfield's Tepoztlan (1930), emerged out of a concern with the 'human ecology' of communities, which marked the school of urban sociology developed at the University of Chicago under the auspices of Redfield's father-in-law, Robert E. Park. During the 1930s this school, along with Robert and Helen Lynd's ground-breaking work on Middletown (1929, 1937), and W. Lloyd Warner's early initiatives stimulated a number of studies of 'communities' from metropolitan ghettoes to whole American towns and, small communities in other societies. * Graduate Center, City University of New York

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The community-study approach to settlements that would later be described as 'peasant' was the product of links between functionalist anthropology and certain trends in sociology. Radcliffe-Brown's influence was particularly marked, for his definition of 'comparative sociology' was an invitation to extend the theoretical framework of his structural-functionalism into the study of literate societies. Warner brought this approach to Harvard in 1929, developing both his long-term project on Yankee City and the social-anthropological phase of a Harvard study in Irelandthe latter continued by Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T . Kimball [Arensberg 1937; Arensberg and Kimball 1940]. At the University of Chicago, a direct link to Chicago sociology (which Redfield carried into the newly independent anthropology department) was forged by Radcliffe-Brown's sojourn there (1931-1937), followed by the appointment of Warner. Among the early 'peasant' studies that came out of Chicago are the works of Redfield and his associates in Yucatan [with A. Villa Rojas, 1934; Redfield 1941; 19S0], of Charlotte Gower Chapman in Sicily (written in 1935 and published in 1971), of John Embree in Japan [/939], and of Horace Miner in Quebec [7939]. Malinowski's role during this period was important too, both through the theoretical and methodological influence of his functionalism and through his training of such students as Fei Hsiao-Tung [1939] and Hortense Powdermaker [7939]. Note should also be taken of the extensive work done by anthropologists in rural communities of the United States during the 1930s, for the US Bureau of Agricultural Economics.' These developments were basically an extention into civilized nations of the functionalist enterprise, which both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski saw as building a universal science. Anthropological field methods could be applied to the small, bounded unit of a 'community', and the holism of Malinowski's 'culture' and Radcliffe-Brown's 'social structure' guided the inclusion of 'all the details of [the community's] life' within 'an integrated social study' (quoted from prefaces to Suye Mura by Radcliffe-Brown and by Embree). The communities studied in this periodAmerican factory towns and rural seats in the Midwest and Deep South and New England, as well as peasant villages in several countriestended to be treated as a common type. Sometimes the type was contrasted with primitive tribesmen. Sometimes, as in early Redfield, the type subsumed primitives and was contrasted with urban communities as depicted by Louis Wirth. Surprisingly little contrast was drawn among the communities, as diverse as they were. Further theoretical content was given to this work by Redfield's development of the 'folk' depiction. He, and others after him, applied the term to both societal and cultural dimensions of such communities; 'folk society' and 'folk culture' were not systematically distinguished but were used interchangeably or simply according to preference. The term 'peasant' appears frequently but casually in the rural studies done in the quarter-century after Tepoztlan. The titles of the landmark books emphasize that these are studies of 'villages' or studies of 'life in' certain kinds of places: Redfield's Tepoztlan: A Mexican Village, A Study of Folk Life; Chan Kom: A Maya Village (with Villa Rojas); and The Folk Culture of Yucatan; Arensberg's The Irish Countrymen and Family and Community in Ireland (with

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Kimball); Chapman's Milocca: A Sicilian Village; Embree's Suye Mura: A Japanese Village; Fei's Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley; Lewis's Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztldn Restudied (1951); Beals's Cherdn: A Sierra Tarascan Village (1946); Foster's Empire's Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan (1948); and so on. The villagers may or may not be described as 'peasants'; the term is rarely defined but rather is used as if it were self-explanatory, with the common dictionary meaning of rustics who work the land. Peasantry is not problematical in this literature. Thus, Suye Mura has no index listing for 'peasant' but it does for 'peasant community'. Family and Community in Ireland indexes 'peasants' with the notation, 'see farmers'. Fei never defines the 'peasant' of his title, but he does take pains to explain why he takes 'the village' as his unit of study. In a later article on peasantry and gentry in China, Fei offers a brief description of peasantry as 'a way of living, a complex of formal organization, individual behavior, and social attitudes, closely knit together for the purpose of husbanding land with simple tools and human labor' [1946:1-2]. Although the statement is phrased in general terms, he clearly has China in mind rather than a broader analytic category. Outside of anthropology, a number of studies of this period do refer to 'peasants' in their titles, such as W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki's early The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) and Doreen Warriner's The Economics of Peasant Farming (1939). Invariably, however, such works deal with particular groups of peasants, usually European. 'Peasant' is not intended as an analytic category, nor it is even taken as a term that calls for definition. Perhaps the first analytic use of the peasant concept is that of Raymond Firth in Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy (1946). Here Firth's aim is to use the term for 'a socio-economic category,' and he justifies its application to noncultivators. His explicit criteria are economic: small-scale producers with nonindustrial technology relying primarily on what they produce for their subsistence. Thus, he includes in the category small-scale producers other than cultivators who share the 'same kind of simple economic organization' [1951:87]. He adds, however,'. . . and community life,' and then goes on to talk about the 'folk' character of these communities. In a later statement about 'peasant' economics, Firth explains that he extended the term to 'other [nonagricultural] "countrymen" also, who share the social life and values of the cultivators . . . ' because 'they are part of the same social system' [1964:18]. Thus, Firth did not carry through his explicit intention to build an analytic category on the basis of specific economic criteria and instead absorbed into his category generalizations from the prevailing interest in the life and values of the 'folk'. At the same time, his unconventional extension of the term 'peasant' to nonagriculturalists limited his influence on other students of peasantry. Kroeber (1948) is usually credited with setting forth 'peasantry' as a concept for anthropology. The much-quoted reference to peasants as 'part-societies with part-cultures' appears in a section of his massive text which is entitled 'Rural and UrbanFolk and sophisticate Facets' [1948:280-86]. The peasantry are introduced in explication of the 'folk-sophisticate polarity'; peasantry

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occupy an intermediate place in it. The central concern of the discussion is the polarity. Thus, Kroeber's view of peasantry did not go beyond that of most other students of the time. It was only in the mid-1950s that the 'peasant' was established as an analytic category and a subject matter in its own right. In his 1953 The Primitive World and Its Transformations, Redfield discusses 'the p e a s a n t . . . as a human type.' (Still, this appears in a chapter called 'Later Histories of the Folk Societies,' in which he continues to talk of 'the folk society' and even 'the folk man' [1953:29,39, and passim.].) Redfield's 1954 lecture at the University of Chicago on 'The Peasant's View of the Good Life' stimulated the philosopher F. G. Friedmann to organize a continuing symposium-by-correspondence entitled 'The Peasant: A Symposium Concerning the Peasant Way and View of Life,' which began with an exchange of letters among nine scholars. In 1956 Redfield published this lecture along with three others as Peasant Society and Culture, which became a text for the anthropology of peasantry. In 1955 Eric R. Wolf published in the American Anthropologist the article 'Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion,' which begins with a section on 'The Peasant Type' that develops a definition of 'peasant' on the basis of three distinctions. From this time on, references to the 'folk' diminish and are replaced by 'peasant,' and discussions generally begin with the problem of definition and with attention to the implications of different definitions. This time also saw the beginning of a geometric growth in studies of peasants by anthropologists. Fostered by Western political interests in the rural inhabitants of the Third World and the corresponding availability of research funds, and with the impetus of modernisation and development theory, the anthropologists were soon joined by a variety of other disciplines. Theoretical as well as linguistic boundaries, however, tended to limit interdisciplinary communication among students of peasantry. It was only with the late 1960s that both linguistic and disciplinary boundaries in peasant studies effectively broke down, the result both of increased publication of translations and of the emergence of common theoretical ground among Marxist scholars and others emphasizing political-economic and historical aspects of peasantry.2 While it can be argued that there is still a distinctly anthropological approach to the study of peasants, the 'anthropology of peasantry' has given way to a more inclusive 'peasant studies.'

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Redfield
Although Robert Redfield is the formative figure in the anthropological study of peasants, he did not use the concept until it was common parlance in the 1950s. He referred to both Tepoztlan and Chan Kom as 'peasant villages,' but his key term was 'folk'speaking of 'folk life' in the book on Tepoztlan and 'folk culture' (or 'the basic folk culture') in the works on Chan Kom. Initially, his reference to 'folk' was a casual as his use of 'peasant.' As he explains after the Lewis restudy of Tepoztlan was published, he did not have a concept of folk culture or the folk-urban continuum in mind when he described Tepoztlan; this conception, he says, was developed several years later [7955:747].

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. . . I had at most in mind the simple thought that Tepoztlan was a kind of community intermediate between primitive tribal group and town or city, and that changes were occurring in Tepoztlan which moved it along a road of transition from one to the other. I think it is simply true that without benefit of any well-considered scheme of theoretical idea at all, I looked at certain aspects of Tepoztecan life because they both interested me and pleased me . . . In writing my book I emphasized these things because they came to my particular interest and taste... I was saying, 'Look! Here is an aspect of peasant life you people up there may not be thinking about'... [7955:735].
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The first monograph on Chan Kom has a brief opening discussion of 'gradients of civilization in Yucatan' [Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934:1-2] which foreshadows the folk-urban continuum. That idea is fully developed in The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941). However, Redfield had already made the 'folk' concept explicit, as indicated by comments that he presented to a seminar in 1934: . . . Whether an element of rural Mexican custom is Indian in historical origin or is Spanish . . . is never as important as is the quality of the mode of life and attendant behavior of the villages who live under such customs . . . [Indian and Spanish elements of culture combine in these villages] to form a round of life, a pattern for living that is in certain respects like all the patterns for living cut out by the cultures of nonliterate peoples everywhere, and that is in these respects different from the mode of life to be found in cities everywhere, especially in our modern Western cities. To include under one term peasant and tribal native... they and their mode of life may be denoted 'folk'... The essential contrast is then, between folk and city, between folkways and city ways... [1962:176]. Redfield's formal statement on 'the folk society and culture,' as a comparative type apart from any specific cultural setting, appeared first in 1940 appropriately enough, in a volume edited by Louis Wirth. Publication of 'The Folk Society' in the American Journal of Sociology in 1947 then stimulated a large literature (much of it critical) on folk-urban and rural-urban types and continua both in anthropology and in sociology. Later scholars would find a shift in terminology from 'folk' to 'peasant' an easy step to take; for instance, Foster commented in 1967 that when he had talked about 'folk' in his 1953 article 'What is Folk Culture?', in fact he was talking about 'peasants' [1967:4]. However, the term 'folk' addressed a specific set of interests, which are not identical to the range of interests encompassed by 'peasant' studies. Redfield's corpus of writing reveals consistent themes: recurrent references to 'life in' a place, 'the way of life,' and 'the good life'; a stress on values, meanings, and understandings; and a view of social relations primarily as a vehicle of communication of ideas. When he devotes himself specifically to social dimensions, he reveals an evaluative framework. The reader is left with no doubt about his preferences as between 'the folk society'

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and 'urbanism as a way of life,' and the social polarities in the folk-urban continuum carry explicit evaluationsclearly, organization is more valued than disorganization, sacred ways more than secular, group relationships more than individualized ones. The central interest of Redfield's work appears to be in the quality of life and the quality of human relations, as these are shaped in communities of different kinds and in different phases of the human career. This interest marks Redfield's fully developed work on 'peasants' as well as his early thoughts on the 'folk'. In his 1956 book, he adopts the term 'peasant' and accepts Wolfs criteriaagricultural producers who control their land. At the same time, Redfield's definition retains his major concerns: peasants cultivate their land 'as part of a traditional way of life' and 'look to or are influenced by gentry . . . whose way of life is like theirs but in a more civilized form" [1956a: 19-20]. Thus, the notions of 'tradition,' 'way of life,' and peasant-elite relationships seen in terms of ideational influence remain central. A better understanding of Redfield's position emerges from considering his general approach to the concept of culture. Because of the historical role of the culture concept as a unifying theme of American anthropology, different views of culture incorporate positions on major theoretical issues, including the basic issue of what is the proper subject matter of the discipline.3 Thus, the way in which an anthropologist uses the concept is apt to be diagnostic of the assumptions underlying his work. Moreover, his influence on others is likely to depend on the congruence of their positions on the issues subsumed by the culture concept. Redfield's explicit definitions of culture are quite consistent in his writings over a period of many years. In 1940 and 1941 he refers to 'an organization of conventional understandings . . . persisting through tradition' (quotations cited by Kroeber and Kluckhohn [1952:61]). In 1956 Redfield speaks of culture as 'the body of conventional meanings made known to us through acts and artifacts.' In the same piece, he defines 'a society' as 'people with common ends getting along with one another,' and goes on to talk about 'a society as people sharing convictions about the good life,' 'a plan of life,' and 'people feeling solidarity with one another' [1956b:345-48]. It is noteworthy that he moves back and forth between 'society' and 'culture' with little change of focus, as is the case in his use of 'folk society' and 'folk culture'. When definition is required, 'society' is reserved for groups of people and 'culture' for meanings, but there is a one-to-one relationship between the two concepts. The connection between society and culture is made as follows: Society operates because its members have around them a universe which to them makes sense. Moreover, this plan is not merely a pattern without moral meaning: it is a plan for right conduct, an organization of conceptions as to the good, the true, and indeed the beautiful. The body of conventional meanings... i s . . . called 'the culture' of a community... [1956b:347]. He then goes on to talk about how, over the course of human history, the 'wholeness' of cultural meanings that characterises primitive societies gives

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way. In modern urban society 'the sense of the meanings of life tends to be lost; men experience uncertainty, insecurity, and confusion.' At the same time 'the basis for the operation of society' tends to shift 'from tradition to deliberate social invention and thoughtful choice' [1956b:347-48]. In speaking specifically of peasantry, Redfield sets society and culture side by side [7956a]. Culture (which here includes great and little traditions, values, and world-views) constitutes the plan and meanings that hold society together. Society (social relationsparticularly, in this book, peasant-elite relations) gives culture a vehicle and means of communication, a 'social organization of tradition.' This view of the relationship of society and culture is congenial to a variety of theoretical approaches: those taking their point of departure from values or world-view, and those primarily interested in social relations; those that take into account many 'aspects' of society or culture without commitment to any theory as to how the various aspects are related, and those that see society or culture as systemic or integral. In other words, Redfield's views are compatible with several major approaches to the concept of culture in Anglophone anthropology. These include two kinds of holistic conceptions of culture, which I refer to as 'additive' and 'integrative,' and conceptions that restrict 'culture' to ideas and separate these from social relations. The 'additive' approach is a legacy from Tylor's definition of culture, as it was developed during the Boasian period.4 The term 'additive' is meant to describe definitions of culture that encompass a large number of aspects or components but take no position on priorities among them and do not emphasize their interconnections. For instance, Kroeber's textbook definition reads: 'Now the mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and valuesand the behaviour they induceis what constitutes culture' [1948:8]. The compromise statement that Kroeber and Kluckhonn reach after their exhaustive survey of all extant uses of the culture concept is similarly all-inclusive, covering patterns 'of and for' behaviour, symbols, and artifacts. Although they reserve 'the essential core of culture' for 'ideas and thenattached values,' they take a clear stand against causal priorities, for cultural systems are both 'products of action' and 'conditioning elements of further action' [Kroeber andKluckhohn 1952:181]. The 'integrative' approach is basically the legacy of functionalism. While the historical particularists repeated Tylor's phrase about 'that complex whole,' their emphasis lay in what the whole includedespecially belief, art, custom, and certain other of the 'capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society'rather than in the nature of the whole. In contrast. Malinowski's definition begins with 'the integral whole' (emphasis mine), and the integration of the whole is'his central concern [1944].s Not all anthropological concepts of culture, however, are holistic. Social anthropology (a British development which has been influential in the United States) represents a separation between culture-as-ideas and social structure, with the latter as the main focus of interest. The more recent growth of symbolic anthropology makes a similar separation, but culture, denned in

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terms of the-organization of meaning, takes primary place. Both these approaches analytically separate society and culture as a first step, but then place them back in relation to each other. Thus, social anthropologists typically inquire into the role of cultural symbolism in maintaining social structure. Indeed, the basic concept of social status in British anthropology contains a 'moral' dimension, and social anthropologists regularly draw on values and ideas in describing social relations. Similarly, symbolic anthropology attempts to account for social life by cultural analysis.6 These approaches, which separate but juxtapose society and culture, generally do not establish a causal order between the two but rather see them as functionally related or as two sides of a coin. On this as on other important issues, social and symbolic anthropology are actually quite close, and it is not surprising that one institution, the University of Chicago, has been the American nucleus of both traditions. Redfield's own work was shaped by the first of these traditions and was one of the forerunners of the second. Redfield's strategic role in the development of an anthropology of peasantry was due partly to historical precedence, but just as much, to the fact that he filled a theoretical vacuum. The ideas in The Folk Culture of Yucatan were a point of departure for some and a point of contention for others, but in both ways they dominated discussions of peasantry for two decades. However, long after he joined his critics in laying the folk-urban continuum to rest, his influence has continued. I have suggested that this may be due to the fact that his general views of peasant society and culture are consistent with the major approaches that have dominated anthropology. In addition, I would argue that his influence rests in his use of certain key notions: 'community', 'tradition,' and 'way of life.' These terms have been so widely adoptedand indeed they have seemed so self-evident and persuasivethat they now make up a basic vocabulary of the peasant literature, both in anthropology and outside of it. As Redfield used these terms, the entailed theoretical positions that are not at all self-evident. However, the inherent ambiguity contained in each of these terms has invited other scholarseven those who challenge Redfield's explicit theoriesto adopt his language. In the process, many of Redfield's underlying assumptions have persisted. The term 'community' is generally used in the peasant literature interchangeably with 'village' or other units of settlement. However, Redfield's usage was not casual; it formed part of a complex theory of 'a human whole' (note the subtitle of [Redfield 1955]). Anthony Leeds has aptly pointed out the difference between 'community' as a settlement and 'community' as a specification of the kinds of relationships that are assumed to exist in settlements; because the latter meaning is so enmeshed in the term, he uses only the neutral word 'locality' [Leeds 1973]. Most uses of'community' merge the two meanings and absorb Redfieldian assumptions about the nature of small communities into their reference to peasant settlements. The term 'tradition' for Redfield referred to civilizational content, that is, culture in the sense of meaning. However, 'tradition' has a broader significance in American anthropology. It has long been equated with the idea of social

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heritage in the context of the basic argument to which the culture concept was addressedgenetic versus non-genetic transmission of behaviour patterns. This notion of culture as tradition is so fundamental to anthropological thinking that other assumptions contained in the term tend not to be examined: above all, the assumption that patterns will be perpetuated unless some force acts to disrupt them, and therefore that it is the interruption rather than the 'traditional' which needs to be explained. Those who follow Redfield in stfessing the importance of 'tradition' among peasants (and among the elite who influence them) tend to see changebut not traditionas problematic, as well as to absorb Redfield's own meaning in using the termculture content and patterns of ideas. Finally, the phrase 'way of life' enjoys the same centrality to the culture concept, and therefore the same immunity from examination, as does 'tradition.' In American anthropology, the holistic property of culture is often expressed as a 'way of life.' This emphasizes the inclusion of subsistence modes as well as artistic achievement, daily routines as well as elaborate ideasin other words, the anthropologist's homely and inclusive 'culture' as distinct from the lay meaning of the word. Redfield's frequent references to 'way of life' seem straightforward, in view of this common usage. In fact, his concern was quite different; it was with way of life. In using the phrase he was placing theoretical emphasis on conventional understandings, world-views, styles of living, and, especially, the quality of life. Thus, Redfield's definition of peasantry as entailing 'a traditional way of life' is not merely a descriptive summary. Similarly, his interchangeable use of 'peasant society,' 'peasant village' and 'peasant community' [e.g. 1956a:24] is not simply imprecision of terminology. These represent loaded theoretical positions. Steward Julian Steward did not become directly involved in studies of peasants until after World War II, and this was not a major concern of his career. Nevertheless, the theoretical orientations he developed out of the study of primitive societies and out of his interests in archaeology and culture history were to exert an important influence on the field of peasant studies. Above all, Steward offered a concept of culture that contrasted with most of the prevailing views in anthropology; he saw an order of priority among the components of culture, which rested upon Jus view of cultural causality. He never developed a carefully elaborated theory of culture, arid his work reveals a good deal of inconsistency, but the main themes that mark his significance for peasant studies are present throughout his writings. Steward saw an essential distinction among the aspects, traits, or institutions of culture, which he referred to as core and secondary, or as primary and secondary. He assigned causal priority to those features 'most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements' or 'most closely involved in the utilization of environment in culturally prescribed ways' [7955:37]. What

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distinguishes Steward fronvmost of his contemporaries, as early as the 1930s, is not the particular way he defined the culture core (which shifted a good deal), but the fact that he differentiated within the cultural whole and specifically rejected attempts 'to give equal weight to all features of culture' [1949:7], Curiously, Kroeber and Kluckhohn do not treat the question of causal priority as a significant issue in the conceptualisation of culture. They assign Steward's definition of culture to their category D-II, 'Psychological Definitions, Emphasis on Learning' [7952:55], on the grounds that he had referred to 'learned modes of behavior which are socially transmitted . . . and which may be diffused.' They remark about this quote that his 'emphasis on diffusion' is 'characteristically anthropological' [Kroeber and Kluckhohn 7952:59].7 Kroeber and Kluckhohn ignore his specification that behaviour is at issue (in contrast to their own conclusion that 'the essential core of culture' consists of ideas and values). Moreover, elsewhere they repeat one of Steward's clearest statements of his position on the priorities among cultural componentsa statement that appears in italicsyet they neglect his major point. His passage [from Steward 1949:6] reads: If the more important institutions of culture can be isolated from their unique setting so as to be typed, classified, and related to recurring antecedents of functional correlates, it follows that it is possible to consider the institutions in question as the basic or constant ones, whereas the features that lend uniqueness are the secondary or variable ones. The message that Kroeber and Kluckhohn take from this is that there are few if any absolute uniformities in culture content unless one states the content in extremely general form [1952:164]. Steward's view of causal priorities within culture was based upon a 'concept and method' of cultural ecology. Robert Murphy has suggested that Steward's ecology had little to do with environment as such; rather, its main interest was in the social organization and social implications of work. The culturalecological nexus is the trinity of labour, resources, and technology, with labour being the most important element: given an environment with certain resources and given a certain technology, the implementation of this technology upon those resources involves limitations in the cycling and organisation of labor, which limitations in turn impinge upon the social system [Murphy n.d.]. Thus, in an early paper attempting to formulate 'something akin to cultural law' to explain the occurrence of band types [1936:331], Steward discusses environment only in the most general terms. His concern is with the interrelations among resources, population density, the size and composition of groups that can exist in different territories, and the organizational requirements of foodgetting with a given technologyin other words, the social consequences of different hunting-and-gathering economies. Steward did not arrive at 'laws' of social types, but what is important is where he looked for explanation: in the 'organic connection of the components of a culture and their environmental basis' [1936:344]. In a later development,

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however, in which he attempts to formulate stages in the development of civilization, he de-emphasises the environmental basis as such. He stresses instead 'basic socio-economic institutions,' which are 'adapted to the requirements of subsistence patterns established in particular environments' [1949:24]. This conception of culture is significant not only for its position on causal priorities, but also for its emphasis on the organization of social activity rather than in the normative sense of cultureabove all, in the way people interdigitate their efforts in search of livelihood [Murphy n.d.]. Steward's interest in subsistence activity, born out of his work with the Basin Plateau Shoshone, became in his paper on early civilizations a broader concept of 'basic' institutions, taking in social political, economic, and religious patterns; in his work on modern peasants, it became 'productive complexes.' Throughout, however, his point of departure remains social action, specifically action geared to subsistence requirements. Although Steward himself argued that culturalecological considerations become less important with the evolution of culture, his influence on the anthropology of complex societies lay precisely in his calling attention to the definitive role of productive arrangements. The link between Steward's work with primitive societies and his interest in modern communities is probably in his role within the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, where he was employed for over a decade [1935-46]. In 1943 he helped create the Institute in Social Anthropology, which sponsored a series of community studies in Mexico and Peru. As Steward stated it at the time, the research interest of the Institute centered upon 'broad, social science studies of selected communities which represent samples of the basic population of the country in question.' While these studies would principally concern people who are partly or wholly Indian, biologically and culturally, they would follow 'certain modern trends in the analysis of contemporary cultures, which they seek to understand in terms of the environmental, historical, and other processes that have produced their modern content and organization . . . " [1944 :ix], A major effort of the Institute was the intensive study of a particular region, the Tarascan area of Mexico, which consisted of an interdisciplinary programme as well as four community studies. Steward later referred to these studies, critically, as 'standard ethnographic descriptions' of the 'variant types of local culture,' in which each community was treated 'as if it were a locally self-contained and integrated whole' [1950:60-62], Although Steward's role in the project was only an indirect and administrative one, the Tarascan experience was for him a school for the study of regions in complex societies and a background for his subsequent Puerto Rico study. 8 When he turned his attention to complex societies, Steward was critical of monolithic views of modern nations and proposed instead a more differentiated concept of levels of sociocultural integration [1951]. In offering this concept, he was rejecting both acculturation studies, which saw a uniform tribal culture confronting a uniform national culture, and national-character studies, which assumed shared behaviour and common characteristics among the members of the nation. He argued that 'cultural and social interaction take

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place on different levels' and he identified national, community, and family levels (adding that there are other levels as well, which would be significant for certain problems). This approach effectively proposed a context for community studies, excluding the treatment of communities as microcosms of a nation and calling for separate analysis of the national level. At the same time, he devised a general framework for studying 'a national sociocultural system.' He saw such a system as composed of different kinds of interdependent parts, which need to be studied separately and then related to each other: (1) localised sociocultural subgroups or communities; (2) 'horizontal' subgroups; i.e. social, occupational, ethnic, and other special groups that cut across communities and regions, and when arranged in hierarchical relationships are known as 'classes'; and (3) formal national institutions, which constitute the binding and regulating forces of the whole [1950:140-41; 1955:64-67]. While this framework appears mechanistic today, it represents a significant advance over the Redfieldian approach to Yucatan, in which the units of analysis were whole communities and in which diversity within the region was accounted for by linear differences along a single, bipolar continuum. Steward devised this framework while designing a project to study the social anthropology of the island of Puerto Rico, which he hoped to understand 'as an entity with respect to both its internal structure and function and its external relations' [1950:127]. Because it was so complex an entity, his strategy was to record the major variations in community and regional subcultures. These subcultures, however, had to be seen as parts of an insular whole subject to influence by the various national institutions, 'and the Island as a whole had to be seen in relationship to other areas, especially the United States' [1950:129].9 Because Puerto Rico was overwhelmingly agrarian and rural, Steward decided that the project's chief task would be to study the major regional variants of the farm population. The effort to understand 'the Island as a whole rather than merely as a composite of communities and farm regions' would then be pursued through a special study of the upper class of San Juanits culture and its social, political, and economic roleon the grounds that it was the major focus of power within the island. The hypothesis that guided the selection of communities and the analysis as a whole clearly was derived from Steward's earlier thinking: . . . Principally it was assumed that, while the broad patterns of Puerto Rican life were determined by the Hispanic heritage and by the colonial position and subtropical nature of the Island, regional cultural differences resulted from adaptations of the productive complexes, that is, land use, to different local environments... The very great local differences could be explained only by cultural-ecological processesthe processes by which production, social patterns, and related modes of life are selectively borrowed from outside sources and adapted to local needs in each natural region. More concretely, it was suspected that. . . the way of life in the coffee area, the tobacco and mixed crops area, and in the several sugar areas would differ profoundly... [1955:133-34].

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The 'productive processes'land use, land ownership, organization of production, and related phenomenawere taken as primary; variations in 'the way of life' were assumed to be corollaries of these processes (1955:134). Four communities were chosen as localized (vertical) sociocultural segments of the society. Steward recognized that most Puerto Rican communities had class divisions and that there were horizontal segments other than class that cross-cut regions. However, he left it to a 'final synthesis of the insular whole' to account for these, because he thought that in Puerto Rico, 'sociocultural segments had greater local than horizontal integration.' He also intended to systematically study the national institutions, but the interdisciplinary effort that he hoped for did not materialize. The study of the San Juan upper class developed as a rather limited focus on 'the prominent families' and their Americanization. This effort perhaps suffered from the weight of Steward's initial expectation that this subculture would provide a key to the integration of the national system. While the Puerto Rico project never achieved Steward's hoped-for 'synthesis of the insular whole,' it realized Steward's theoretical framework in a more fundamental way. It used the community-study approach not merely to produce a series of well-rounded descriptions of life, but to attempt to account for social and cultural patterns in terms of productive arrangements [Stewardetal. 1956].
STEWARD'S STUDENTS

While the basic conception of the Puerto Rico project was Steward's, the fieldwork was carried out, analysed, and synthesised by the participants, separately and in communication with one another. Steward provided the initial theoretical orientation, but his studentsparticularly Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintzcarried it forward in ways that Steward himself neither antiticipated nor perhaps even fully understood. Io Steward's view of the regional subcultures as consequences of different 'productive complexes,' which he had conceived of mainly in terms of land use and the productive requirements of different crops, proved insufficient. Correspondence between Mintz and Wolf during the early months of fieldwork reveals instead a focus on what we would now call political economy: the economic and social situation of those who produce and those who live off of the crops, and the relationship of the local productive arrangements to the larger processes of colonialism and capitalist development that shaped them. They saw the significant contrasts among the regions to lie not in the character of the crops but in productive relations, and in the interplay among aspects of the labour force, resources, capital, and other factors within particular politicalhistorical contexts. Thus, Mintz expressed his concern that he could not summarily characterise his area in terms of Steward's notion of 'productive complexes;' the basic features of the area consisted not only in the dominant crops, but also in the facts of 'big-scale production, American capital, large landholdings, central-administered land, high mill grinding capacity, e t c ' A little later, Mintz drew the distinction between sugar and coffee, 'or any

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plantation crop versus any non-plantation crop within the colonial system,' by their respective roles within colonial production. Exchanges between Mintz and Wolf on the similarities and contrasts between haciendas and plantations, which continued for several years, clearly placed these forms in the context of European capitalist development and world market competition. For instance, they specifically rejected views of the hacienda as merely a prestige item oras Steward had viewed the coffee haciendaas a 'survival of old Hispanic patterns' [Steward 1950:138]. Steward has presented the regional subcultures as a synchronic typology. While he argued the importance of research on cultural history, he referred to this history only in the general terms of 'the Hispanic heritage' and 'Puerto Rico's changing colonial status,' and his main point was that history could only explain commonalities of the Island as a whole and not regional differences [Steward 1950:133-34]. In a synthesis drawn up by Wolf in 1951, however, the regional subcultures were treated as the specific outcomes of three historical stages, which were drawn with reference to the needs and policies of the colonial powers and the development of Puerto Rico as 'a capitalist, agrarian and dependent country.' Wolf thus saw Steward's synchronic typology to be, in fact, the result of historical developments interacting with specific local environments. While the treatment of history by Wolf, Mintz, and others on the project differed considerably from Steward's, it nevertheless, remained close to his basic theoretical orientation. When a draft of the chapter on the cultural history of Puerto Rico was challenged by an historian for its neglect of humanitarian sentiments and the influence of European liberalism, Wolf and Mintz reaffirmed the team's conviction that the material motive should be stressed over the ideological motive. When challenged for their emphasis on political unrest, they responded that the historian's 'picture of peace and quiet,' in which 'everything is gained by reform and legislation,' ignored the realities of conflict. During his six years at Columbia (1946-1952), Steward provided a focus for the materialist interests of a large number of students, many of them returned veterans and many of them with radical political commitments. However, the influence of these students on each other was at least as important as Steward's own influence on them. Several of Steward's students formed a group in which they discussed their developing research. Dubbing themselves the Mundial Upheaval Society, the initial group in 1950 included Mintz, Wolf, Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, Elman Service, John Murra, and Rufus Mathewson. Their interests in such problems as comparative state development, nation formation, and kinship structures in political-historical contexts were encouraged by Steward but were by no means outgrowths of his own work. In their subsequent work on peasantry, Mintz focused on other islands of the Caribbean and on plantation systems in general, while Wolf turned to fieldwork in Mexico and Europe and to comparative peasant studies. Wolfs writings trace an evolution of his materialist perspective. In the 'Types of Latin American Peasantry' article [7955], his definition of peasants uses economic

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criteria: agricultural production (differing with Firth's inclusion of noncultivators in 'peasant economy'), control of land, and production for subsistence, not reinvestment. Although he opts for an emphasis on 'structural relations' rather than culture content, he defines his subject matter as that of 'peasant part-cultures,' and he refers repeatedly to 'the culture' of 'peasant segments.' The concept of culture Wolf is using here is holistic, but one that sees a clear order of priorities among the components of culture. He justifies this order on empirical rather than theoretical grounds. In selecting out certain structural features rather than others to provide a starting point for the formulation of types we may proceed wholly on an empirical basis. The selection of primarily economic criteria would be congruent with the present interest in typologies based on economic and sociopolitical features alone. The functional implications of these features are more clearly understood at present than those of other features of culture, and their dominant role in the development of the organizational framework has been noted empirically in many studies of particular cultures [1955:454]. If peasants are segments of a larger whole, then a basic issue is how they are integrated into it. Wolfs answer is that because 'peasants function primarily within a local setting . . . the peasantry is integrated into the sociocultural whole primarily through the structure of the community... In other words, a typology of peasants must include a typology of the kinds of communities in which they live' [1955:455]. Thus Wolf, in common with other students of peasantry of the time, still retained an interest in communities and a conviction that the community was the key to understanding how peasants are integrated with the outside world. However, Wolfs approach to communities, unlike Redfield's, saw them as outcomes of larger political-historical processes. The 'closed corporate community' is not a 'way of life' but a creation of processes of colonization processes repeated in the Spanish conquest of America, the Dutch conquest of Java, the internal colonization of pre-1861 Russia, and in other cases (1955, 1957). The community is still a reference point in a 1956 paper of Wolfs, but the direction of his interest there is outward. Communities are viewed as 'the local termini of a web of group relations which extend through intermediate levels from the level of the community to that of the nation. In the community itself, these relationships may be wholly tangential to each other' [1956:1965]. In Wolfs later work, the interest in communities gives way increasingly to a concern with relations between peasants and their larger matrix, between local settings and national-level (or wider) phenomena [1959,1966b]. In his 1966 book, Wolf outlines a concept of peasants that differs from his 1955 definition. The emphasis now is on the role of the statea 'crystallization of executive power' that serves to maintain asymmetrical power relations in the social order and to guarantee claims over the cultivators' 'fund of rent' [1966a: 10-11]. On the one hand, this concept is a rejection of'the city' as the key to understanding peasantry, which still dominated the literature, a heritage

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from Redfield and those of his critics who shared his premises [e.g. Foster 1953, Sjoberg 1955]. On the other hand, Wolfs 1966 concept makes power central; economic (and ecological) processes are still very much at issue, but they are seen simultaneously as relations of power. The move towards an explicit concern with power marks the progression of Mintz's work as well. His continuing interest in plantation systems and their historical aftermaths is phrased in his most recent work as a concern with 'sugar and power.' It should be noted that this dimension is lacking in Steward no less than in Redfield. Neither of these two seminal figures pursued the political implications of his theories. Neither, indeed, went very far in studying the modern world. However, it may be suggested that Redfield's approach led in the direction of modernization theory, while Steward's led towards interests in power, political economy, and Marxist theory. That these divergent lines within the anthropology of peasantry correspond to different uses of the culture concept is pointed up by some comments made by Mintz in a paper on the problem of denning peasants [1973]. Mintz argues for developing typologies of rural socioeconomic groupings rather than abstract definitions of 'the peasantry.' In the process he takes issue with certain conceptions of culture, and thus exposes the approach to culture that he and Wolf (whom he cites) follow [1973:96-97]. First, he rejects cognitive views of culture and insists that 'what men see is at least to some degree a function of their stakes within a structure of power, wealth, status and authority.' Culture is behaviour as well as values; social position and social action have causal priority over the 'way of perceiving.' Second, he rejects assumptions of homogeneity in 'culture,' and specifically inquires into the diversity concealed by references to 'peasant culture' or the 'small community'which imply a homogeneous group carrying a homogeneous body of conventional understandings [1973:97]. Third, he criticizes notions of culture as 'blind custom' and stresses instead the element of manoeuvre, i.e. the way in which individuals manipulate and use cultural forms rather than simply 'carrying' them. Fourth, he attacks the idea of the 'traditional,' the assumption that culture is something 'surviving' or 'conserved' from the past. In contrast, his concern is with culture as historically-derived patterns of behavior. While historicity does not exclude generalisation, social and cultural patterns must be understood in the first instance as products of specific historical events and conditions. On each of these issues, there is clear contrast with Redfield's view of peasant culture, which emphasizes cognition, while rejecting priorities between social action and values; assumes an essential homogeneity of 'common understandings;' stresses culture as the property of a group, allowing little latitude to individual manipulation; and focuses on the continuity of'tradition.'
Conclusion

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These two approaches have influenced the development otf conceptions of peasantry in quite different ways, although many students have combined them. Redfield's approach has directed attention to a search for relationships

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among societal and ideational patterns that form part of coherent schemes of meaning, while Steward's has led to efforts to ground such patterns in productive systems and the relations of power within which they exist. Three specific elements in the Redfieldian approach have been so widely incorporated into definitions of peasants they they are rarely treated as issues in their own right. First, there is the assumption that peasants (or peasant societies) are characterised by certain 'cultural' attributes, in the sense of attitudes, values, and other ideological elements. The key contributions of Foster [7953], Marriott [7955], and Fallers [7967] gave these attributes a central place, and more recent efforts at definition continue to speak of 'culturally distinct characteristics' as a fundamental criterion of peasantry [e.g., Powell 1972:97]. Second, there is the assumption that peasants inhabit particular kinds of communities. For example, at the same time that Foster argues for a 'structural' definition of peasant society, he refers to peasants interchangeably with 'the village,' 'the village community,' and 'the peasant community' [Foster 1967]. Third, there is the assumption that peasants are 'traditional,' within a typological, a historical contrast between tradition and modernity. Gainst, for instance, places peasant societies on a 'continuum of modernization from a polar type of agricultural civilization to another polar type of industrial urban civilization' [Gamst 1974:3]. These Redfieldian assumptions are prominent even in the definitions of scholars who emphasize economic or political dimensions of peasantry. Thus, the sociologist Shanin proposes a definition with 'four basic facets'; along with the family farm, land husbandry as the main livelihood, and domination by outsiders, a defining feature of peasantry is 'specific traditional culture related to the way of life of small communities' [Shanin 1971:14-15]. The direction pointed to by Steward would restrict definitions of peasantry to political-economic criteria. This is not an 'occupational' approach, as it has been inaccurately characterised [Geertz 1962:3-4; Foster 1967:6; van Schendel 1976]; it is concerned not with the activity engaged in by people in order to earn their living, but with the organization of production and the nature of liens upon it. It is based on a theoretical commitment to the priority of certain aspects of culture (in the holistic sense), but it does not ruleother aspects out of study. However, rather than presupposing commonalities of worldview, settlement form, and quality of social relations among peasantsand taking these as a priori criteria for determining which cases are to be considered 'peasant'it makes the identification of such patterns the object of research. Its aim is thus to inquire into the diversity of peasant life under different conditions and different historical contingenciesa diversity that goes beyond 'traditional culture' and the 'small-community way of life.'

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1. I am grateful to Conrad M. Arensberg for clarifying for me some of the early history of community studies in the United States. 2. This trend in peasant studies is marked by the appearance in the early 1970s of two journals, both explicitly interdisciplinary and international: TheJournal of Peasant Studies and Peasant Studies Newsletter (later Peasant Studies). A contrast might also be noted between the first reader on peasants, which was made up almost entirely of contributions by American and British anthropologists and which set off its orientation as specifically noneconomic and nonhistorical [Potter, Diaz, and Foster 1967:v], and the frequency with which anthropological writing on peasants in the 1970s cites work from other disciplines and other national traditions. 3. The integrative force of the culture concept in American anthropology lies in the fact that it conveys a common body of assumptions that have imparted a unity to the discipline: assumptions about the evolutionary context of the human species, the distinction between genetic patterning and learning, the role of symbolic processes in human behavior, the relationship between the unity of the species and behavioral variability, and others. Competing and changing views of what culture 'is' overlie this common framework. In recent years, however, many American anthropologists have found the concept increasingly problematical, and some prefer not to use it at all. 4. For the changes in meaning that Boas brought to the concept, see Stocking 1966. 5. T o a degree, contemporary American anthropology can be viewed as the combination of both these legacies. The most common approach is eclectic: it is 'holistic' in a general commitment to the idea that all 'aspects' of culture should be taken into account (although not all need enter into a particular description or analysis), but the degree of integration of the cultural 'whole' is open to question. The usual procedure is to draw systemic interconnections to the extent that these can be detected; if some cultural phenomena cannot be placed in neat relation to others, they are simply described, i.e. accounted for additively. 6. Clifford Geertz, for instance, treats religious symbolism as 'a model of and 'a model for' society [1966]. 7. In fact, Steward argued repeatedly against the emphasis on diffusion by his contemporaries. He claimed that only secondary features are subject to diffusion, and moreover, that 'diffusion' actually explains nothing but must itself be accounted for. 8. This is clear from his review and critique of the Tarascan program in the Area Research volume [ 1950:57-66 ]. 9. This statement suggests that Steward was specifically concerned to relate community studies to the 'larger whole,' and that he was well aware of the significance of Puerto Rico's dependency status, two points on which the project is often criticized today. 10. Eric Wolf studied a coffee-producing community in an area of haciendas and small peasant holdings. Sidney Mintz concentrated on a rural-proletarian community in the corporateowned sugar area. The other participants included: Robert Manners, who worked in a mountain community of small farmers raising subsistence crops and tobacco; Elena Padilla Seda, who studied a government-owned, profit-sharing sugar plantation; Raymond Scheele, who did the study of the San Juan upper-class families; John Murra, who served as field director during the initial months of the fieldwork; and several field assistants from the University of Puerto Rico [see Steward et al. 1956:vii]. Manners, Mintz, Scheele, and Wolf were students of Steward's. Padilla and Murra did their graduate studies at the University of Chicago. The interpretation of Steward's role in the Puerto Rico study offered in this paper is based on unpublished materials provided by Wolf and Mintz, including correspondence among some of the project participants during and after the fieldwork period, drafts of theoretical statements, and notes on meetings of the team. This interpretation supports William Roseberry's recent analysis of The People of Puerto Rico, in which he argues that each of the participants departed from Steward's cultural ecology and moved instead toward a 'cultural historical' approach [Roseberry 1978].

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Arensberg, Conrad M. 1937. The Irish Countrymen: An Anthropological Study. New York: Macmillan. Arensberg, Conrad M., and Solon T. Kimball. 1940. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Beals, Ralph L. 1946. Chern: A Sierra Tarascan Village. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 2. Chapman, Charlotte Gower. 1971. Milocca: A Sicilian Village. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Embree, John F . 1939. Suye Mura, A Japanese Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fallers, L. A. 1961. 'Are African Cultivators To Be Called "Peasants"?' Current Anthropology 2:108-110. Fei, Hsiao-Tung. 1939. Peasant Life in China. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Fei, Hsiao-Tung. 1946. 'Peasantry and Gentry: An Interpretation of Chinese Social Structure and Its Changes'. American Journal of Sociology 52:1-17. Firth, Raymond. 1946. Malay Fisherman: Their Peasant Economy. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Firth, Raymond. 1951. Elements of Social Organization. London: Watts & Co. Firth, Raymond. 1964. 'Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies: A Viewpoint from Economic Anthropology.' In Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies. Raymond Firth and B. S. Yamey, eds. Pp. 15-34. Chicago: Aldine. Foster, George M. 1948. Empire's Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan. Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 6. Foster, George M. 1953. 'What Is Folk Culture?' American Anthropologist 55:159-173. Foster, George M. 1967. 'Introduction: What Is a Peasant?' In Peasant Society: A Reader. Jack M. Potter, May N . Diaz, and George M. Foster, eds. Pp. 2-14. Boston: Little, Brown. Gamst, Frederick. 1974. Peasants in Complex Society. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Geertz, Clifford. 1962. 'Studies in Peasant Life: Community and Society.' In Biennial Review of Anthropology 1961. Bernard Siegel, ed. Pp. 1-41. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1966. 'Religion as a Cultural System.' In Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Michael Banton, ed. Association of Social Anthropologists Monograph 3. Pp. 1-46. London: Tavistock. Kroeber, A. L. 1948. Anthropology. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kroeber, A. L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47, No. 1. Leeds, Anthony. 1973. 'Locality Power in Relation to Supralocal Power Institutions.' In Urban Anthropology. Aidan Southall, ed. Pp. 15-41. Lewis, Oscar. 1951. Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztln Restudied. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M. 1929. Middleman: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Lynd, Robert S. and Helen M. 1937. Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

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Malinowski, B. 1944. A Scientific Theory of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Marriott, McKim. 1955. 'Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization'. In Village India. McKim Marriott, ed. Pp. 171-222. American Anthropological Association Memoir 83. Miner, Horace. 1939. St. Denis: A French-Canadian Parish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mintz, Sidney. 1973. 'A Note on the Definition of Peasantries.' Journal of Peasant Studies 1:91-106. Murphy, Robert F . n.d. Julian Steward. Paper presented at the City University of New York Graduate Center in April 1976. Potter, Jack M., May N . Diaz, and George M. Foster, eds. 1967. Peasant Society: A Reader. Boston: Little, Brown.

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Beals, Pedro Carrasco, and Thomas McCorkle, eds. Institute of Social Anthropology Publication No. 1. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Steward, Julian H . 1949. 'Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations.' American Anthropologist 51:1-27. Steward, Julian H. 1950. Area Research: Theory and Practice. Social Science Research Council, Bulletin 63. New York. Steward, Julian H. 1951. 'Levels of Sociocultural Integration: An Operational Concept.' Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7:374-390. Steward, Julian H. 1955. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steward, Julian H. et al. 1956. The People of Puerto Rico. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1966. 'Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective.' American Anthropologist 68:867-882. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Schendel, Willem. 1976. 'Peasants as Cultivators? Problems of Definition.' Peasant Studies 5:16-17. Warriner, Doreen. 1939. The Economics of Peasant Farming. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1955. 'Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Definition.' American Anthropologist 57:452-471. Wolf, Eric R. 1956. 'Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico.' American Anthropologist 58:1065-1078. Wolf, Eric R. 1957. 'Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java.' Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13: 1-18. Wolf, Eric R. 1959. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1966a. Peasants Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Wolf, Eric R. 1966b. 'Kinship, Friendship, and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies.' In The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies. Michael Banton, ed. Pp. 1-22. Association of Social Anthropologists Monograph 4. London: Tavistock.

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