Cities, Classes, and the Social Order

Anthony Lee, Roger Sanjek

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781501713712
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities, Classes, and the Social Order brings together nine conceptual and theoretical essays by the anthropologist, Anthony Leeds (1925–1989), whose pioneering work in the anthropology of complex societies was built on formative personal and research experiences in both urban and rural settings in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and Portugal.

Leeds brought to his anthropology a simultaneous concern for science and humanism, and for explanation and interpretation. He constructed a nuanced and intricate vision of the connections among ecology, technology, history, evolution, structure, process, power, culture, social organization, and human creativity. The essays in this book draw on his approach to demarcate the role of cities in human history, the use and abuse of class analysis, the bases of power in complex societies, and an agenda for ethnographic and social-historical research in the contemporary world.

In addition to major but little-known writings and an important essay on Marx here published for the first time in English, a selection of Leeds's ethnographically and politically inspired poems are included, as are several of his professionally exhibited photographs. In addition, introductory essays by R. Timothy Sieber and Roger Sanjek chart the course of Leeds's career and the development of his theoretical viewpoint.

Classes in the Social Order

Dona Pantonilha, 1966. A matriarch of Favela Nova Brasília in Rio de Janeiro. (photo by Anthony Leeds)

[3]

Mythos and Pathos: Some Unpleasantries on Peasantries

It is essential, if one is to arrive at any clarity of view as to the nature of things, to make reasonably precise and theoretically interesting analytical distinctions—categorizations—lest all things be muddled indiscriminately and subtleties of differentiated process or meaning be lost. Further, such distinctions or categories should be theoretically relevant, that is, related to a body of theory in such a way that the distinction made reaches far beyond the mere recognition of two different attributes or two different states of a single attribute to illuminate other distinctions and an ever-broadening series of relationships asserted to exist among the categories. These asserted relationships comprise the body of theory to which the distinctions are relevant.

These tenets seem to me to be especially true when considering the concept “peasantry,” with whose multiplicity of referents social scientists in recent years have become enamored. The term has come to shade together under its umbrella everything from “true” peasants, to rural wage workers or “rural proletariat,” to “countrymen,” “tribals,” “primitives,” and, more lately still, even fishermen in an etymologically scandalous fashion (Firth 1946; Forman 1970).1 This last usage appears to have come about on the basis of the categorical characteristic proposed for peasantries of a small-scale, largely family, enterprise, involving limited but, nevertheless, significant involvement in a money economy. This is, of course, a temporocentric definition since aggregates of people, also usually designated peasants, have existed who were not involved in money economies, nor, properly, were they involved in small-scale enterprise, but rather, sociologically speaking, in corporate enterprises with individual or household responsibility, for example, medieval European and Chinese peasants. Current usage also appears to be like that of the ancient Greeks by which all the “civilized” Greek we are “farmers” (e.g., American and British), and all the rest, the “barbarian” theys, are “peasants” (e.g., French, German, Italian, Austrian, Spanish, Mexican, and even, in shaky persistence, occasionally Soviet agrarian labor). From time to time we soften the ethnocentrism and give recognition to the fact that the term is quite inappropriate by the compromise locution “peasant farmers”—a meaningless rubric applied frequently to the French agriculturalist of today.

On the other hand, some usages are so wide and all-inclusive that they are incapable of differentiating between “small producers” (Shanin’s term, 1966:245ff.) who are tribal, prestate, nonurban-oriented groups such as primitive, swidden horticulturalists whom he lumps quite incontinently with “nomadics” (“tribal-nomadic”), displaying a hopeless unawareness of economic, social, political, and ecological differentiation among “levels” of tribal peoples. Again Meillassoux’s otherwise brilliant article (1972) is talking essentially about a single subtype of hierarchically ordered tribal, nonurban-linked horticulturalists quite different from other subtypes of nonhierarchically ordered horticultural tribals (Leeds 1961c) neither of which, under any common usage of the term, falls within the analytic category of “peasants.”

In sum, the concept “peasant” has no precision whatsoever. It is used with different attributes in different situations, and in fact, is more or less uniquely defined in each ethnographic case.2 It is used to cover a multiplicity of forms of production, social organization, jural orders, and ideologies. It is used ethnocentrically and temporo-centrically. Clearly the term represents a total muddle and a permeating lack of theoretically useful distinctions. It is essentially a folk term adopted into social science usage without the necessary scientific refinement for appropriate scientific use. Indeed, the term basically has no scientific validity at all.

First, and most important, it is not scientific because it represents a search for essences. Usually implicitly, but also sometimes explicitly, the term postulates essences—or an essence—of peasants, peasantries, or the state of being a peasant (which I shall call “peasancy”).3 A search for essences has no place in science, but is the role of speculative metaphysics. Such a search is also methodologically atomistic since it asserts not only the inherentness, but also, especially, the separateness of some quality or substance of some reified thing—here, “the peasantry.” Thus, to my mind, a search for a universal definition of peasantry has no meaning because it flies in the face of experienced structure (the interrelationship of qualities and quantities), process, dynamics, conditioning variables, etc., even though, for purposes of discourse, it is often useful to delineate a sphere of discourse as a point of departure, that is, to give a heuristic or delineational definition4 to be modified during the development of the discourse.

Second, related to the search for essences is the attempt to find this essence in persons rather than in certain sociocultural orders. I refer specifically to roles as that category of events which is analytically of greatest interest here. All roles consist of culturally delineated clusters of culturally defined norms (rights, duties, prerogatives, obligations). Each cluster, by virtue of its peculiar concatenation of norms, may also be conventionally assigned secondary expectations and attributes. It is of utmost importance to what follows to recognize that the rights are over things and persons external to the holder of the rights and include the obligatory behavior of the incumbents of the alter roles (see below), that is, of others; duties are to others; prerogatives are from others. This aspect of role has always been implicit in the concept of role but has not been laid out as its theoretically most interesting aspect.5 What it means is that the very components of roles necessarily delineate sets of relationships between two or more roles in such a way that the irreducible minimum of social organization consists of two or more roles—a role and its alter(s). Roles do not exist singly and their separate analysis makes no sense. Any role can only be fully understood in terms of itself and its alter(s) and their joint or interactional requirements. In other words, one must describe a set of roles,6 that is, a social order, in order to describe any one role. The implication of this for standard treatments of “peasants” or “peasant society,” implying an isolated role called “peasant,” will be discussed below. For the present, another implication of the role concept must be pointed out; since roles are clusters of cultural norms, they cannot possibly be identical to persons even though persons may choose, be forced, or be persuaded to act in terms of these norms for some time in some place. The notions of choice, forcing, or persuasion themselves indicate the key point, here, that of the independence of persons from roles and role structures, a point which has a series of quite fundamental consequences for the entire discussion:

(1) The distinction inherently opens up questions about process, especially about movement into and out of roles (“recruitment” and “extrusion”; see Chapter 5). The question is basic, as I will show in the last section of this essay (see also the articles by Saul and Woods, and by Thorner, in Shanin, ed. 1971). It subsumes others concerning the adaptation of different kinds of agrarian exploitation systems to changing circumstances, the range of options available for persons to move through in coping with their own needs, the sloughing off, by migration, upward mobility, military service, or other means, of certain percentages of those populations designated as “peasantries,” etc.

(2) Appropriate definition of any sociological category should always be in terms of its distinctiveness in relationship to other distinguishable entities (roles, role sets, role structures), that is, always, to some extent, in terms of each other and as one of a set.

(3) The fact of the independence of role and person, since roles are not genetically but socioculturally determined, makes nonsense of Shanin’s “analytically marginal groups” (Shanin ed. 1971, section B, 15ff, 81). Indeed, as Feder’s article (1968) clearly shows and my own data below confirm, such groups are analytically central to understanding agrarian labor structures since mobility from and into a peasant role is possible. It also makes nonsensical the concept “peasant society,” a term and idea that ought to be dropped forthwith, since it becomes immediately obvious that the peasant roles, role sets, and role structures are simply alters of role sets and structures which, jointly and in interaction, constitute the society and include such role sets and structures as the state, urban economic corporations, and the like.

The fact of the possibility of such mobility in virtually all historical periods and world areas in which peasant roles and role structures—peasancies—are said to have existed raises interesting research questions as to the relative fixity of persons in roles; the constraints—a relational aspect set by the role definitions—preventing mobility out of peasant roles; pressures leading to shift in roles (Saul and Woods 1971), and so on. It also permits one to deal simply with the concurrent occupation of diverse roles by the same person in differentiated role structures (e.g., “peasant-worker” or “farmer–urban job holder”) or by the same domestic unit of production (e.g., the “peasant household” producing “subsistence” and selling on the market at the same time). In the latter case, the economic and social unit persists, but the sources of subsistence or income may be quite differentiated, for example, noncapitalist and capitalist at the same time.

In short, the distinction between persons and roles and the intellectual consequences which flow from it not only lead one away from a search for essences, but lead one toward a more complex and subtle analysis of dynamics, on one hand, and a concurrent treatment of society and its transformations in analytic and synthetic terms, a holistic principle which, philosophically and methodologically, I consider central to social science.

Third, the concept “peasant” is also unscientific since, in all the conceptions of peasancy discussed above and even among those usages which explicitly eschew the value commitments discussed below, it is built on a fundamental underlying cosmology, a teleological, unilinear progressivism which is a secularized version of Christian eschatology. This is especially marked in Shanin’s exhumation of a notion of stages (1966:245ff.; see, in this connection, Leeds 1974a, especially 445ff., 453–55, 457–59, 462–66, 471, and appendix B, 480–83) and speaking in terms of grand—and impossible—“stable” periods of history.7 The unilinearism stands out strongly. It is purely a priori and axiomatic, that is, speculatively metaphysical, and contradicts historical experience. It is closely related to, if not identical with, the developmental-ism which pervades the social sciences today.

Finally, the scientific usefulness of the concept “peasant” is frequently further enfeebled because underlying its use are a series of policy questions and commitments, governed by highly local and time-restricted interests, which guide the inquiry more than do scientific questions and scientific commitments. These policy commitments are ones devoted to the ideas of “development” (almost always considered as a Good), of the inherent betterness of capitalism or of socialism over various other forms of societal integration, or of the right, nay duty, of the “advanced” countries to give aid and comfort to the “backward” countries.

What is needed, if one is to preserve the concept “peasant” at all, is a merely heuristic delineation of types of roles, structures, or situations to which, and only to which, the term is to apply, these classes of events to be distinguished from others of a similar order by criteria which are of theoretical (not political) interest. As a rule, what I should consider to be theoretically interesting are criteria which facilitate explanation of social structures consisting of many “parts” and the dynamics of their changes and which also permit prediction of various states of the systems described (Saul and Woods 1971).

Without here entering upon a disquisition concerning societal theory, I think it true to say that the criteria which consistently appear to be most interesting with respect to the general class of roles under discussion (a class encompassing the physical producers of primary wealth other than extractive products, outside cities) include (a) organization of technology, (b) form and scale of capital, (c) linkage with other delimitable social groups or aggregates (other role sets or structures), (d) internal organization of the social units constituted by the roles, (e) jural relations to the source of the raw materials, the land, (f) jural relations to the raw materials produced, (g) control over the surplus labor value, and (h) relationship to the institutions and form of the city or city hierarchies, especially the state (which I conceive to be the political aspect of urban societies and their urban hierarchies).

It is clear from the above that, ideally, a theoretically interesting typology of the roles under discussion, in fact, involves fairly exhaustive holistic descriptions of societies as such. Likewise it must involve a sophisticated typology of whole-societal forms, also informed by interesting theory (e.g., evolutionary theory or ecological theory of large-scale societies). This entailment of exhaustive societal descriptions of whole-societal typologies runs counter to the part-oriented tendency to search for an essentialist definition of peasantries and counter to the conception of “peasant societies.”8

Barring the achievement of so sophisticated a state of organization of knowledge, preliminary meaningful classification can be done with some of the criteria listed above, as long as one does it systematically and consistently while trying to eliminate the unstated value biases mentioned before. Discussions of peasantries have suffered from the fact that, though classification has indeed often been done with some of the criteria listed, once in a while, even with a larger typology of societies in mind, they have been muddled by the value biases, the search for essences, the unilinearism, and especially the confusion between roles and persons.

Forms of Agrarian Labor and Labor Organization

For purposes of the discussion which follows I offer the following definitions of forms of agrarian labor and labor organization. The definitions are in terms of roles rather than in terms of persons. I do not claim (a) that the definitions are adequately precise, (b) that they distinguish a sufficient array of types, (c) that they are sufficiently universal, or (d) that the criteria are sufficiently justified theoretically; some seem almost entirely empirical or even intuitive. I do claim, however, that they help sharply to clarify the issues discussed above and, in each case, to delineate a societal structure and the differential dynamics in it, to describe both small- and large-scale process, and to remove many of the scales of mythos and pathos about peasants from our eyes.

“Peasantry” shall refer to persons whose occupancy of a set of roles, to be called “peasancy,” is unascribed and not s...

Table of contents

• List of Photographs
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Anthony Leeds: Life and Work
• Cities in History
• Classes in the Social Order
• Localities in Urban Systems
• Bibliography