Even as "peasants" have been declared obsolete by academics and politicians alike, far-reaching mobilizations in pursuit of social and economic justice have spread rapidly throughout the rural world. Across a variety of different contexts, land has remained a productive and political resource, a basis for social and cultural location in a globalizing world: antidotes to globalization are often ‘back-to-the-land” calls for a return to simpler times, rooted in the nostalgia that British Marxist historian, Raymond Williams (1973), once traced back to the beginning of the first millennia. The Zapatista uprising of southern Mexico in January, 1994, is often considered the symbolic birth of the contemporary counter-globalization movement, while the Rural Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil has been called the “most effective and important social movement today” by anti-globalization activists such as Noam Chomsky. In India, farmers’ movements have joined with environmental movements to protest the ecological damage of green revolution and free trade policies. The Chipko Movement’s successful resistance to commercial logging was initiated primarily by rural women acting to preserve the means of their subsistence – access to fuel and firewood. From modest origins in the Himalayan foothills it has now spread to threatened regions across India. New movements continue to develop, now with the direct assistance of activists from already-established movements, in countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, South Africa, the Philippines, and more. They are increasingly connected by umbrella movements such as the Via Campesina, a movement begun by the radical French cheese-maker and goat farmer, José Bové. Rural leaders and activists now attend ongoing events such as the World Social Forum held regularly in Porto Alegre in Brazil and perhaps the largest gathering of counter-globalization activists in the world.

Reminiscent of the revolutionary protests and movements that shook developing countries in the 1960s, these new social actors are situated in the “end-of-history” (Fukayama 1989) context of formal democracy and neo-liberal economic adjustment plans. Their organization and mobilization, however, have excited no comparable academic interest: in the 1960s, the realization that peasants were playing major roles in national struggles for liberation from Vietnam to China paved the way for research analyzing the “moral economy” of the peasantry (Scott 1978; Watts 1983), the circumstances under which peasants would rebel (Bates 1981; Paige 1975; Wolf 1969), the political affinities of rural producers (Shanin 1972), the relationship between the peasantry and the modern nation state (Moore Jr. 1967; Skocpol 1979) and more. Today, the surprising political presence of peasant-based movements has been remarked upon but not well understood. Key questions to be considered include: what has given rise to these different movements? Are there similar issues across regional context or very different issues playing out? Who joins these movements and why? What relationship do these movements and actors have to the state and market – to democracy and capitalism?

Case Studies and Comparative Projects: In this section of the seminar, we will analyze the rise of these new social movements as well as their relationship to broader national development trajectories. We will focus on social movements in their particular localized contexts and as part of an increasingly well-organized transnational network run through the umbrella movement, Via Campesina. For comparative purposes, we will focus on: The Rural Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, The Karnataka Farmers’ Union and the Chipko Movement in India, The Landless Farmers’ Movement in South Africa, the Black Farmers’ Association in Tillery, NC, and Via Campesina in France.

Theme leader:
Dorothy Holland, Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Anthropology, UNC Chapel Hill