This engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling class. In consequence, popular revolts (...) against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale. (shrink)

This article analyzes how evolving pharmaceutical technology, chemical advances, and world politics created the need for an abundant and cheap supply of steroids, and how decisions made in faraway laboratories ultimately determined that a Mexican yam, barbasco, was the best possible raw material. Following this discovery, this article explores how barbasco’s exploitation impacted on the Mexican countryside and specifically the men and women hired to gather wild yams. In analyzing, for example, the peasant organizations that emerged, the use (...) of chemical terms by barely literate peasants, and the Mexican government’s political strategy to control rural unrest by controlling barbasco production one begins to understand the unexpected consequences of the global search for medicinal plants. In this particular case, the merging of science and peasant life reshuffled social hierarchies in the countryside, granted monetary value to an erstwhile ‘weed’, and gave a novel reinterpretation to laboratory knowledge and its uses. (shrink)

This contribution investigates a specific agricultural protest movement that emerged towards the end of the Second World War in Western Switzerland. In the spring of 1945, dissatisfied farmers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland founded the “Union Romande des Agriculteurs” (URA), a peasant opposition movement that struggled against both the increasing power of the state and the existing farmers’ organizations in regulating agriculture and the disintegrating impact of industrial capitalism on the livelihoods and way of life of farming (...) communities. In the fall of 1945 and 1947, the URA organized two milk delivery strikes to mobilize fellow farmers to join the URA’s resistance. They also founded their own journal, tellingly called _Le Paysan Enchâiné_ – “The Chained Peasant.” The leaders of the movement were later brought to the courts and condemned to harsh punishments for their non-compliance with the milk delivery obligations that emanated from the war economy regime and that were still in force after the war. The story of the URA’s milk delivery strikes and its suppression by the state and the official farmers’ organizations is also a story of farmers’ use of symbolic practices with which they forged their identity as an opposition movement and by which they demanded political legitimacy for their claims. By taking a closer look at the activities of this movement and investigating the performance of the URA’s protests, as well as the symbolic meanings they attached to them, this article attempts to decipher the often-intangible political symbolism and ritual character that shaped their protesting, at the crossroads of long-standing traditions of peasant resistance and the new challenges farmers were facing in the transformation of mid-20th century agriculture. (shrink)

One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. “Peasant poet” is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet’s work. To Clare’s publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in the (...) 1980s, the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare’s work as what Fredric Jameson terms “strong” political art, that is, “authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group.”3At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize its marks in Clare’s poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader’s position in it. Clare’s poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional—and essential—aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene—laborers, village artisans—were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace .4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare’s poetry—the marks of his identity as rural laborer—thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare’s editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some of Clare’s unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as “radical slang” and others as “vulgar.” The language of class risked rejection as politically subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure. 2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull and The Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin restore Clare’s original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label “peasant poet.”3. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 : 140. Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. (shrink)

The recent review of the Unrelated Live Transplant Regulatory Authority provides administrative and statistical information regarding living donor kidney transplantation in the United Kingdom.1 However, it leaves much unsaid. For example, although the report does mention the number of live kidney donations from unrelated donors that ULTRA has approved, it fails to mention that the United Kingdom has a low live kidney donation rate compared with other European countries .2 More importantly, the report does not address the fundamental question of (...) whether the legal framework underlying ULTRA is morally justified. The legal regime in the United Kingdom proceeds on the tacit assumption that genetically unrelated donors are much more vulnerable to coercion than are related donors, and hence are more in need of protective regulation. In this article, we argue that the distinction drawn in the United Kingdom between genetically related and unrelated donors is difficult to justify, that it unnecessarily discourages live organ donation, and that the law should be changed.BACKGROUNDThe Unrelated Live Transplant Regulatory Authority is a creature of the Human Organ Transplant Act , which was enacted by parliament in 1989, and which came into force, with regulations, on 1 April 1990.3–5 The Human Organ Transplant Act was enacted hastily after the General Medical Council’s inquiry into the notorious case of a British physician’s involvement in transplants involving Turkish peasants.6 Young men were inveigled by an agent to travel to London, ostensibly to take up new jobs. In fact, they were being recruited as living donors of kidneys transplanted into fee paying foreign patients. The consequent debate in the media attracted an emotional …. (shrink)

The Forestry Pilot Plan set intomotion collectively-owned and managed forestry in overforty communities in Quintana Roo, Mexico and hasshown the promise of a forestry development model thatpromotes conservation by giving local people a genuinestake in sustainable resource management. Today, thelegacy of the PPF is under great pressure. Externally,neoliberal policy reform restructures agrarianproduction in ways that favor individual overcollective management of natural resources.Internally, organizational problems createinefficiencies within both forestry ejidos(cooperative agrarian communities) and theirintermediate level forestry civil societies. Peasants'capacity to defend their (...) interests and dealeffectively with their production problems throughstrong representative organizations is beingundermined by new rules for economic associationwithin the ejidos and by the turning over of technicalservice financing to the market. Though organizationalinnovations within the ejidos hold positive potential,existing civil societies merit continued assistance askey actors promoting sustainable forestry. Studyingcommon property management regimes across multiplelevels and dimensions reveals that in Mexico, policyreform overlooks the crucial social resourcesrepresented by peasant organization, undermining thepossibility of sustainable forest management whileassigning the peasant most of the cost ofconservation. If conservation is indeed encouraged bythe genuine participation of those with a stake insustainable use of natural resources, national andinternational communities that value Mexico's tropicalforests should also invest in both social and economiccosts of conservation. (shrink)

The struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights is one of the most important social movements in Mexico. Before the 1970s, existing peasant organizations did not represent indigenous concerns. Since 1975 there has been a resurgence of indigenous movements and have raised new demands and defense of their cultural values. However, indigenous social mobilization had been laid in local and regional peasant struggles across the 1970s and 1980s. Also the indigenous movement is not homogeneous and does not (...) include all ethnic groups in the country, but it has many different expressions and encompasses different entities at local, regional and national levels. This paper aims to analyze the historical social approach and under the frame of indigenous political ecology of social movements for recognition of indigenous rights in contemporary Mexico. (shrink)

Indigenous agricultural knowledge (IAK) can be analyzed for its technical role in food production strategies, and for its role as cultural knowledge producing and reproducing mutual understanding and identity among the members of a farming group. IAK can also be approached from the perspective of critical theory, analyzing the relationship between knowledge and relations of power, with the goal of liberating indigenous farmers from forms of domination. The paper considers relationships between the different aspects of IAK, using examples of the (...) influence of non-local technologies and ideas on indigenous agricultural practices in the Ecuadorian Andes. The examples elucidate how technical change is a signifier of the changing relationship between indigenous farmers and wider society. The political implications of these changes are ambiguous, however, because the change is not necessarily one of social and cultural assimilation. As indigenous peasant organizations in Ecuador now reflect on these changes, they are connecting the questions of IAK, indigenous cultural identity and political strategy. Some organizations speak of recovering and revalorizing indigenous technologies as a tool for, and symbol of, resistance to domination by wider society. Others see selective modernization of indigenous agriculture as a necessary strategy to sustain the social and cultural cohesion of the group, even if this implies social changes. The different perspectives reflect both different conditions facing the organizations, and their varying approaches. That peasant organizations have these discussions suggests that they should constitute an important meeting point for farmers and crop researchers to discuss technology development strategies as equal partners. The organizations can provide an institutional forum in which participants reflect critically on the agrarian knowledge that they have, why they have it, and what it can contribute to future strategies of agrarian and social change. (shrink)

The transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) seeks to reestablish food sovereignty authority within national borders by removing agriculture from the WTO system. The WTO is a membership organization of participating nation-states that have agreed to abide by the rules of the WTO governance regime. Nominally, at least, changes in these governance rules must be approved by the nation-state members. This paper examines the extent to which South Korean affiliate organizations of LVC, the Korean Peasant League and (...) the Korean Women Peasants Association, have been successful in placing food sovereignty issues on the national agri-food policy agenda in South Korea that challenge the WTO’s neoliberal global governance regime for agriculture. In effect, the success of transnational movements like LVC in challenging global institutions may rest on how well their member affiliates are able to play domestic agri-food politics. (shrink)

Capitalist reforms usually drive outmigration of peasants to cities, while elders, children, and women responsible for their care are “left behind” in the countryside. The plight of these “left behind” populations is a major focus of recent agrarian studies in China. However, rural women are not merely passive victims of these transformations. Building on ethnographic research in Guangxi and Henan provinces from 2013 to 2017, and drawing on critical gender studies and feminist political ecology, I show how the food safety (...) crisis in China creates conditions for peasant women to increase control and income from organic food production, often establishing alternative food networks with the support of female scholars and NGO organizers. Thus, I shift focus of scholarship on rural women from “left behind” to leaders in struggles for justice and food sovereignty. (shrink)

Known as Associations for the Support of Peasant Agriculture (Association de Maintien de l’Agriculture Paysanne), AMAPs started to spread in France just after year 2000. These trust-based partnerships between urban consumers and farmers share some proximity with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organizations that developed in North America in the 1990s. Both organizations fight against large scale food chains and advocate for the necessity to change eating habits and mostly to switch to fresh seasonal organic products. They also (...) stress the importance of setting human direct relations between the urban and agrarian areas. As AMAPs were also recently supported by students and introduced as CSAs in several French universities, this paper, backed by ethnographical fieldwork, describes how and why students decided to run CSAs on the campus of Aix-Marseille University (AMU). Students turned themselves into shareholders in AMAPs. They started to run them and deliver weekly fresh fruits and vegetables to three different university venues in AMU. Delivery is tailored for students needs and also allows students to experience collective farming. (shrink)

Increasingly, it is accepted wisdom for agricultural scientists to get feedback from indigenous peoples—peasants—about new improved seeds and biotechnologies before their official release from the experiment station. What is not yet accepted wisdom is the importance of cognitive science to research on farmer decision making, especially of the type “Why don't they adopt.” In this paper, the impact of the cognitive revolution on models of farmer decision making is described, and decision making models before and after the cognitive revolution are (...) contrasted. An example of a decision model after the cognitive revolution is given by the Malawi farmer's decision whether to use chemical fertilizers or organic fertilizers or both. Results of testing the model show that in Malawi, smallholders' lack of capital and credit are more important factors constraining use of chemical fertilizers than are indigenous beliefs in organic fertilizers or fears of a future dependency on chemicals. (shrink)

The Cuban government has undertaken the task of transforming insect pest and weed management from conventional to organic and more sustainable approaches on a nationwide basis. This paper addresses past programs and current major areas of research and implementation as well as provides examples of programs in insect and weed management. Topics covered include the newly constructed network of Centers for the Reproduction of Entomophages and Entomopathogens (CREEs), which provide the infrastructure for the implementation of biological control on state, cooperative, (...) and private farm operations. CREE programs include the mass rearing and release of Trichogramma spp. to manage insect pests of cassava, tobacco, sugarcane, and improved pasture. The entomopathogens, Bacillus thuringiensis, Beauveria bassiana, Metarhizium anisopliae, and Verticillium lecanii, are being mass produced in the CREEs and applied to control a number of key insect pests. A traditional method employed by peasant farmers of using the predatory ant Pheidole megacephala (Fabricius) in the biological control of sweetpotato and banana insect pests has been further developed and implemented. Efforts are underway to rear nematode species that attack insect pests and identify plant extracts with insecticidal qualities as potential management tools. Weed management has moved away from dependence on herbicides and toward alternative techniques that include weed suppression based on rotation schemes, limited use of selective herbicides, and new tillage equipment and practices. (shrink)

This paper presents an oral history of farming in the Southern Yangtze Valley in China, covering the period from pre-liberation to recent market liberalization. Using the stories and observations of 31 elderly residents of a small water town, the paper describes the hard labor of traditional farming practices and the acquiescence of many when, post-liberation, they could leave farming for better-paid factory work. However, in a departure from conventional analyses, these oral histories suggest that the co-dependency culture of traditional farming (...) has broken down, and farmers are unwilling to return to the land and continue farming. The changes in knowledge cultures of local farmers in recent decades are not likely to lead to pathways to working with incoming modern “outsider farmers,” nor able to be blended with potential new “urbanite” knowledges of those who might wish to increase organic farming. The current knowledge cultures of these farmers has shifted as needed to the optimization of family unit needs, naturally leading them to urbanization and the relinquishing of their ties to the land. For cultural rather than economic reasons, these farmers see themselves as the last peasant farmers of Tianshanzhuang. (shrink)

This contribution traces the parallel development of two distinct approaches to peasant agroecological education: the peasant-to-peasant horizontal method that disseminated across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean beginning in the 1970s, and the political-agroecological training schools of combined consciousness-building and skill-formation that have been at the heart of the educational processes of member organizations of La Via Campesina since the 1990s. Applying a theoretical framework that incorporates territorial struggle, agroecology and popular education, we examine spatial and organizational aspects (...) of each of these models for peasant education and movement-building. Recognizing that the models, their respective contexts, and the dialectical relationships therein have been in constant evolution, we share findings on the movement-place as a territorial system with socio-historical subjectivity, that is, peasant movements as territorially-embedded, collective historical actors. This leads to some conclusions in moving past educational theory that has centered upon individual subjects, and approaching a conception of territory as a subject of learning processes. (shrink)

The confrontations of stakeholder visions about agriculture and food production has become a focal point in the public sphere, coinciding with a diversification of agrifood models. This study analyzes the debates stemming from the coexistence of these models, particularly during the initial term of neoliberal-centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France. Employing collective monitoring from 2017 to 2021, a corpus of 958 online news and blog articles was compiled. Using a computational analysis, we reveal the framings and controversies emerging from this (...) media discourse. The macro-structuring of discourse on model coexistence revolves around scientific, economic and political framings. Coexistence is a complex of debates based on specific frames associated with specific arenas and actor configurations: growth of organic agriculture, transformations of agrifood systems, sciences of production and impacts, livestock and meat diet controversies, agroecological innovations, CAP reform criticism, discourse of peasant agriculture and State-Profession _co-gestion_. Employing global sentiment analysis and focusing on salient controversies, namely EGAlim law, pesticide regulations, and agribashing, we show the shift from conciliation to a hardening of debates. Finally, we discuss the causes and consequences of this trend. The political will to support the transition of agriculture remains influenced by the _co-gestion_ system, an inherited configuration of decision-makers instrumental in the agricultural modernization. As a consequence, significant agricultural challenges, particularly highlighted in the scientific macro-frame, persist unresolved. This lock-in of the agrifood system is based on defensive strategies that challenge the democratic debate about food and agricultural practices. (shrink)

As world food and fuel prices threaten expanding urban populations, there is greater need for the urban poor to have access and claims over how and where food is produced and distributed. This is especially the case in marginalized urban settings where high proportions of the population are food insecure. The global movement for food sovereignty has been one attempt to reclaim rights and participation in the food system and challenge corporate food regimes. However, given its origins from the (...) class='Hi'>peasant farmers' movement, La Via Campesina, food sovereignty is often considered a rural issue when increasingly its demands for fair food systems are urban in nature. Through interviews with scholars, urban food activists, non-governmental and grassroots organizations in Oakland and New Orleans in the United States of America, we examine the extent to which food sovereignty has become embedded as a concept, strategy and practice. We consider food sovereignty alongside other dominant US social movements such as food justice, and find that while many organizations do not use the language of food sovereignty explicitly, the motives behind urban food activism are similar across movements as local actors draw on elements of each in practice. Overall, however, because of the different histories, geographic contexts, and relations to state and capital, food justice and food sovereignty differ as strategies and approaches. We conclude that the US urban food sovereignty movement is limited by neoliberal structural contexts that dampen its approach and radical framework. Similarly, we see restrictions on urban food justice movements that are also operating within a broader framework of market neoliberalism. However, we find that food justice was reported as an approach more aligned with the socio-historical context in both cities, due to its origins in broader class and race struggles. (shrink)

A sign seen in the Philosophy Department of the University of Uppsala reads: A philosopher is one who will deliver a paper on the Hangman's Paradox at a conference on capital punishment. I might take as a supporting example of this tendency to focus on the irrelevant or the inappropriate a real paper to a medico-legal conference on organ transplants which argued that it would be morally justifiable to remove a heart from a healthy would-be heart donor. There are also (...) many amusing and intelligent papers on the ‘survival lottery’—a hypothetical arrangement which would allow individuals to be seized and cannibalised for their organs. These articles are light-hearted exercises in argumentative ingenuity, harmless in themselves, but they are offered in a world in which street children in Brazil are snatched for their kidneys, Chinese political dissidents have their organs seized officially at their place of execution, and poor peasants in Turkey and India sell their own kidneys or those of their relatives, for money. At the same time, the most frequently cited paper on the fraught topic of abortion is one in which pregnancy is compared to the plight of one unwillingly or unintentionally connected to a violinist who temporarily needs the link in order to survive. (shrink)

The 1970s and 1980s meant an ethnic politicization of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, until this moment defined largely as a class-based movement of indigenous peasants. The indigenous organizations started to conceptualize indigenous peoples as nationalities with their own economic, social, cultural and legal structures and therefore with the right to autonomy and self-determination. Based on this conceptualization, the movement developed demands for a pluralist reform of state and society in order to install a plurinational state with wide degrees (...) of autonomy and participation for indigenous nationalities. A part of those demands was the double strategy to fight for legal pluralism while already installing it at the local level. Even if some degrees of legal pluralism have been recognized in Ecuador since the mid-1990s, in practice, the local de facto practice prevails until today. Another central part of the demand for plurinationality is the representation of indigenous peoples in the legislative organs of the state, developing since their first appearance in the 1940s in a complex way. This article will analyze the development of right-based demands within the discourse of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the visions of the implied state-reform and the organizational and political background and implication they have. Based on an analysis of the central texts of the indigenous organizations, conceptualizations of rights and laws and their appropriation within an autonomist discourse and a local practice will be highlighted. (shrink)

Brazil stands out at the global level for having implemented several policies intending to promote agroecology as a productive paradigm for small-holder farmers. However, the impacts of this process of institutionalization of agroecology still lack research and debates that evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. In this paper, we assess and discuss the impacts of a policy specifically focused on education in agroecology, the support to the establishment of Centers for the Study of Agroecology and Organic Production (NEAs) in more (...) than 150 higher education institutions throughout Brazil. NEAs bring together teachers, researchers, and students who engage in teaching, research, and extension activities in partnerships with peasant farmers, their organizations, and rural extension workers. The hypothesis that guides our analysis is that this support to establish NEAs allowed redistribution of symbolic power in the universities where they were established, supporting agroecology to gain greater legitimacy inside and outside the university field. Based on an in-depth study of four NEAs, performed through participant observation and documentary analysis, the NEAs are evaluated from the perspective of social fields in dispute, first in a university sphere, but also from the perspective of training people in integrative and transdisciplinary thinking that will contest the industrial-corporate food regime. Our findings suggest that the State support to university groups dedicated to the promotion of agroecology has allowed the construction of what we have named agroecological spaces, which symbolically dispute the dominant paradigms in educational institutions, supporting the constitution of material and immaterial agroecological territories. (shrink)

Book series "Ukrainska Biblioteka" is a cultural and national-educational project of the publishing concern of Ivan Tyktor "Ukrainska Pressa". It was a monthly addition to the newspaper "Nash Prapor" during 1933-1939. Generally, 80 names of these books were issued, which can be divided by the period of formation our state: the princely age, Cossacks and hetmans period, modern age. A separate unit - humour literatures and philosophical-psychological works. "Ukrainska Biblioteka" received from opponents a lot of criticism both positive and negative. (...) Many questions were caused by the rules standardization of printing whose purpose was to make the book more accessible to Ukrainian. Despite the censorship oversight, I. Tyktor was able to increased the amount of printed materials in the native language, and his publishing series found supporters among intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, peasants, young people who "required" not only popular literature, but also highly artistic works. The creative team of "Ukrainska Biblioteka" carefully selected literary novels for publication and spread works of little known writers. Most of them were first published and distributed among Ukrainian people. Ivan Tyktor published books which repeatedly won literary awards established by Galician civic organizations. These were works by H. Zhurba, Yu. Kosach, I. Olbrakht. All these novels disseminated Ukrainian diversity of our culture, helped to emerge into the treasury of human values, self-improvement, performed patriotic and educational function, helped to understand the place and role of our country in history. In this paper the author analyzes library repertoire, work of scientific and editorial team, artistic and compositional component of books and justifies their role in the national-ideological space of Ukrainian based on the literary stories, criticism reviews and notes on the pages of newspapers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

This intellectual biography provides an organic framework for understanding Antonio Gramsci’s process of intellectual development, paying close attention to the historical and intellectual contexts out of which his views emerged. The Gramsci in Notebooks cannot fully account for the young director of L’Ordine Nuovo, or for the communist leader. Gramsci’s development did not occur under conditions of intellectual inflexibility, of absence of evolution. However, there is a strong thread connecting the “political Gramsci” with Gramsci as a “cultivated man.” The Sardinian (...) intellectual’s life is marked by the drama of World War I, the first mass conflict in which the great scientific discoveries of the previous decades were applied on a large scale and in which millions of peasants and workers were slaughtered. In all of his theoretical formulations, this dual relation, which epitomizes the instrumental use of “simpletons” by ruling classes, goes beyond the military context of the trenches and becomes full-fledged in the fundamental relations of modern capitalist society. In contrast with this notion of social hierarchy, which is deemed natural and unchangeable, Gramsci constantly affirmed the need to overcome the historically determined rupture between intellectual and manual functions, due to which the existence of a priesthood or of a separate caste of specialists in politics and in knowledge is made necessary. It is not the specific professional activity (whether material or immaterial) that determines the essence of human nature: to Gramsci, “all men are philosophers.” In this passage from Notebooks, we find the condensed form of his idea of “human emancipation,” which is the historical need for an “intellectual and moral reform”: the subversion of traditional relations between rulers and ruled and the end of exploitation of man by man. (shrink)

In Haiti, as in many developing countries, the prospect of enhancing food sovereignty faces serious structural constraints. In particular, trade liberalization has deepened patterns of food import dependence and the export orientation of peasant farming. But there are also powerful cultural dimensions to food import dependence that further problematize the challenge of pro-poor agrarian change. Food cultures are sometimes underappreciated in the food sovereignty literature, which tends to assume that there will be a preference for local or ‘culturally appropriate’ (...) foods. In Haiti, historically ingrained and persistent ideologies of racism magnify class hierarchies and the common perceptions of peasants at the bottom of the social order. This paper explores the intersection of socially constructed ideologies of racism with peasant aspirations for socio-cultural mobility, drawing from 30 qualitative interviews with key informants in government, non-governmental organizations, and social movements, and 108 qualitative interviews and 216 food preference surveys that were conducted in three sites in rural Haiti between November 2010 and July 2013. The core argument is that racially-coded class hierarchies exert a powerful influence on dietary aspirations, as ‘peasant’ foods like millet, root crops and molasses bread are commonly denigrated by Haiti’s poor, including peasants themselves, while ‘elite’ and ‘foreign’ foods like white flour bread, Corn Flakes, and spaghetti get held up as superior. This suggests a need to appreciate how the cultural geographies of food interact with—and can in fact exacerbate—political and economic inequalities, which raises challenging questions for peasant movements and advocates of food sovereignty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 1 See Russell’s exposure of this derogatory contraction of “Viet Nam Cong San” (“Vietnamese Communists”) in his War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 45n. On the importance of language, cf. the legendary remark of Russell’s correspondent, Mohammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Russell attempted (...) to enlist Ali on behalf of the iwct (see the ra for their letters of 8 April, 18, 31 May, 11 Sept., 17 Oct., 15 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1967). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 31 (winter 2011–12): 167–87 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: LONDON, STOCKHOLM AND ROSKILDE Stefan Andersson [email protected] i.wintroduction T he International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) on the United States’ warfare in Vietnam was founded in 1966 through the moral outrage of the British philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell, his private secretary Ralph Schoenman, Ken Coates, Chris Farley and other people connected to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. They wanted to inform the world about the us government’s attempts to convince the Vietnamese population (who were mainly peasants) that capitalism is a better political-economical system than communism, by killing as many “Vietcong”1 and unarmed seniors, women and children as possible with regular carpet bombing, cluster and phosphorus bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and other illegal weaponry, and oTering the survivors pleasant lodgingsinwired-inhamlets far away from their homes and the graves of their ancestors. This charm oTensive went on for more than ten years, and although three times as many bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as were dropped during the whole Second World War, surprisingly enough the Vietnamese were not to be converted. In the 1960s this macabre spectacle could be watched on television all over the world, but very few protested against it. Until 1968 the majority of American January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 168 stefan andersson 2 See Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York, New American Library, 1968). He met up with Noam Chomsky, “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity” (p. 180). Both were arrested and spent a night in prison together. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 348. See also Natalie Atkin, “From Margin to Mainstream: American Peace Movements, 1950s– 1970s”, in issue “Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the usa since 1945”, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, no. 32 (2004): 175–92. 4 See May 1970: Birth of the Antiwar University (New York: PathWnder P., 1971). 5 The so-called “Chicago conspiracy trials” or “Chicago 7 trials” that followed, when sevendefendants—AbbieHoTman,JerryRubin,DavidDellinger,TomHayden,Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, showed that the us government was not going to tolerate such “unpatriotic” and “criminal ” behaviour. See James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical PaciWsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996), pp. 145–51. 6 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), and David Caute, 1968: the Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), pp. 3, 7–8, 12z–13. 7 Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963–1964”, PaciWc Historical Review 61 (1992): 69–102. citizens were for the war, although some earlier, well-attended rallies against it, like the 1967 march on the Pentagon in late October,2 might have made some think diTerently. sds (Students for a Democratic Society)3 and other antiwar organizations never became the united force that could challenge the government ’s reliance on what Nixon called the “silent majority”. It was not until the us attacked Cambodia... (shrink)

Originally created by the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, the concept of “food sovereignty” is being used with increasing frequency by agrifood activists and others in the Global North. Using the analytical lens of framing, I explore the effects of this diffusion on the transformative potential of food sovereignty. US agrifood initiatives have recently been the subject of criticism for their lack of transformative potential, whether because they offer market-based solutions rather than demanding political ones or because they (...) fail to adequately address existing social injustice. In this paper, I consider how food sovereignty measures up to this critique both as it was originally framed by Vía Campesina and as it is being reframed for the US context. First I briefly compare food sovereignty to community food security (CFS), which was developed more explicitly for the North American context and has been criticized for its lack of transformative potential. I then explore how the potential of food sovereignty has been affected as it is reframed to resonate with US audiences through an examination of its use on the web sites of US-based organizations. I find that, while some reframing of the concept to highlight consumer choice does seem to be occurring, it remains a primarily political concept. It may not, however, be fulfilling its potential for addressing social injustice in the US agrifood system because it tends to be used either in reference to international issues or, when applied to the US context, treated as a rough synonym for local control. I conclude that, if advocates can successfully guide the reframing process, food sovereignty could serve as a valuable counter-hegemonic vision to complement the more pragmatic and locally-grounded work of CFS advocates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James K. Mish'alani KAFKA: TEXT'S BODY, BODY'S TEXT LONG BEFORE it appears in its own life as a bio-anatomical object, the body itself is integrally lived; and after it makes its appearance, lying or standing there ready for scrutiny, dissection, examination, it yields itself thus in its objectivity only to kindred bodily probing, wherein the hands that search, press, palpate and die roving eyes, the patient, closeheld ear, are (...) not encountered, but lived as modes of access to their object. Generally, the lived body is for itself transcendence toward the world as that within which diings are to be met, and the world, disclosed in an implicit understanding of what things one can behave toward and how one can variously behave toward diem, thus stands in correspondence to the body. As limit, die world determines the specific ways in which things are to be dealt with. As access, the body on its side projects through the lived articulation of limbs and organs those paths toward, by and about things whereby die very complexion ofdie world is always revealed. The body is world-revelation. ] But as die presence of diings in the lighting of revelation is not uniform or indifferent, but variegated, so is die body differentiated, articulated, variously organed and limbed, outfitted, equipped, and geared. The window lets in the light ofday and opens out on scenes only for die seeing eyes of a creature of vistas and distances. The hammer, standing out toward nails and wood, as toward all that they may be nailed togedier for and all diat diey may be brought togedier from, does so only insofar as it is ready for die hand diat lifts it. The pair of shoes suited to the earth, gathering about it die doorsill to die country path, the windswept fields, sun, rain, grain, bread, evening, dawn, die hearth and floorboards by childbed or deadibed, does all this in its humble reliability for the tread of the peasant woman whose footedness releases her through it to the security of a simple world. Thejug mat comes to full presence asjug in the outpouring ofa gift 56 James K. Mish'alani57 in which, be it water or wine, earth and sky together dwell by a marriage of soil and rock to rain and sun in spring or vine — this jug does its manifold-simple gathering of the world's extremities for the hand that pours the outpour, toward the lips for whom a refreshing drink is given, or before the faces lifted up in thanks to the gods for whom a libation is poured.2 Thus are things in most essential ways rooted in the body; and as primal ground the body in turn remains matrix to the world, not an object found in it.3 Nor does the other's body appear in the manner of an object in my encounter with him or her, whose features, glances, gestures, and movements all point beyond themselves and thus turn me with them toward that which occupies them and in relation to which I must assume a specific stance if only to reject it or, deciding it does not concern me, pass it by. The other's body lights up the world for me no less than mine does, in a co-transcendence toward a common horizon of meaning consensually confirmed, and ever renewed, laying for us a shared ground of world engagement without which even error, disagreement, and dissension become impossible. As the equipment through which I ordinarily pass in my projects does not stand out as an object until it breaks or is lost, so the other's body and mine do not obtrude and call attention to themselves in pure anatomical objectivity unless a radical breakdown occurs occasioned by some such disruption as disease, death, or a chaos of incoordination. Otherwise and until then, the other and I continue to be co-workers at world-disclosure, passing through each other's attitudes and movements as through unobstructed space. The human shape that comes toward me from the opposite direction reveals that part ofmy path I have left behind. The open hand thrust out from that tattered sleeve... (shrink)

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

Essays originally published ca. 1949-1989.

Invites the reader to examine the concept of the One in several complex cultural and philosophical mileux. The uniqueness of the study is its collation of Eastern and Western sources and systems.