Bringing the Moral Economy back in … to the Study of 21st‐Century Transnational Peasant Movements
Top Cited Papers
- 1 September 2005
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in American Anthropologist
- Vol. 107 (3) , 331-345
- https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.331
Abstract
James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) appeared at a time when “peasant studies” had begun to occupy an important place in the social sciences. The book's focus on Vietnam, as well as its novel argument about the causes of rural rebellion, attracted widespread attention and unleashed acerbic debates about peasants' “rationality” and the applicability of concepts from neoclassical economics to smallholding agriculturalists. In this article, I analyze E. P. Thompson's notion of “moral economy” and Scott's use of it to develop an experiential theory of exploitation. I then discuss other influences on Scott, including Karl Polanyi, A. V. Chayanov, and the Annales historians. “Moral economy” and “subsistence crisis” are concepts that Scott elaborated mainly in relation to village or national politics. In the final section of the article, I outline changes affecting peasantries in the globalization era and the continuing relevance of moral economic discourses in agriculturalists' transnational campaigns against the WTO.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- PEASANTS SPEAK - The Vía Campesina: Consolidating an International Peasant and Farm MovementThe Journal of Peasant Studies, 2002
- From Peasant Studies to Agrarian ChangeJournal of Agrarian Change, 2001
- 6. Peasant Wars in Africa: Gone With the Wind?Published by Practical Action Publishing ,2000
- New Rural Pluriactivity? Household Strategies and Rural Renewal in NorwaySociologia Ruralis, 1999
- Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food RiotCultural Anthropology, 1997
- latin american peasant studies in a “postcolonial” eraJournal of Latin American Anthropology, 1995
- Beyond agriculture? Regulating the new rural spacesJournal of Rural Studies, 1995
- On the Idea of the Moral EconomyAmerican Political Science Review, 1994
- the vicissitudes of the closed corporate peasant communityAmerican Ethnologist, 1986
- THE MORAL ECONOMY OF THE ENGLISH CROWD IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURYPast & Present, 1971