Remembering Peasants

Starred review from December 11, 2023
Historian Joyce (The Rule of Freedom) draws on his family’s background in Ireland to provide an insightful and evocative homage to the peasant way of life, which has been the dominant human experience for the past several millennia but is rapidly vanishing as agrarian lifestyles around the world give way to urbanization. Focusing mainly on Ireland, Italy, and Poland, Joyce depicts peasant culture from the perspective of those who lived it, meticulously detailing the houses in which peasants resided, their family norms, their work and tools, and their reverence for the land. He paints a sympathetic view of traditional societies, but also emphasizes the degree to which peasant life was one of suffering and pain; the daily work injured and wore down bodies, while fears of famine and the possibility of being conscripted to war were ever present. In poetic prose (“this way of understanding the Earth and the heavens is part of a past we have now lost, lost in less than a single lifetime, lost with barely a sign of its losing”), Joyce hauntingly conveys his perspective that the ramifications of the shift away from an agricultural way of life have been and will continue to be significant (“if we are cut off from the past, we are also cut off from ourselves”). Readers will be enthralled.

January 1, 2024
A historian laments the disappearance of rural European populations, and with it certain possibilities for people to connect with the land, the past, and each other. Considering agrarian communities in Poland, Italy, and especially his native Ireland, Joyce defines peasants not in terms of demographics or socioeconomic status, but rather culture. Living close to the earth, always laboring and often suffering, peasants "continued to live in the old order of time." Their experience was mediated by bodies, seasons, and proximity to violence, inflicted upon them by people with greater power, but also intrinsic to nature itself. In a narrative bolstered by photographs, including some from his family album, Joyce celebrates peasants' connectedness with the past, and the vibrancy of their stories, music, and religion. "I venerate the ancestors, their endurance, their survival," he says. He complains about the inadequacies of ethnographic museums and the "fantasies" of heritage tourism, and rages against the amnesia hardwired into today's "all-consuming present." The result is a loving and unconventional work of genealogy, and a melancholic elegy for bygone ways of being.

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Starred review from January 1, 2024
A British historian looks deeply into the lost past of the peasantry, people who "hope for the future but do not forget the past." For most of history, Joyce writes, most people belonged to the peasantry, the class of people who made their living from the land. They were concentrated in scattered villages that favored something approaching democratic rule, even in the face of larger, more autocratic systems. The author focuses on Ireland, Poland, and southern Italy, but he also ranges widely. One surprise is how rapidly peasant communities have declined as agriculture has become less central to national and international economies. The famed English village of Akenfield, for example, the subject of a canonical book of rural sociology, has largely been gentrified and its past commodified, although the village does have "some Polish immigrant workers, people now more likely to have been peasants than anyone in the place." Across the narrow sea, "rural Ireland has receded from people's daily awareness," with farmland now retired for leisure and tourism. Even the Mezzogiorno of Italy, considered "among the most 'backward' [areas] in Europe," has become relatively wealthy. Joyce lauds many of the habits of agricultural peoples, including economic awareness, adaptability, and generosity. For example, he notes, in rural communities, money was loaned without interest, which by definition separated peasants from capitalists; politics tended to be decentralized, resistant to central authority, and bent in many cases toward anarchism ("not surprisingly, given peasant distrust of the state"); and religious belief preserved archaic and even pre-Christian beliefs while being being marked by "its lack of dogma, its indifference to theology, its human-centered God." Why remember these peasants? As Joyce replies resoundingly, "We have a debt to those forgotten by history": a debt that this elegantly written book seeks to repay. A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.

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