(p. 13) Most of the people who have lived on this planet since the invention of agriculture have been peasants.
. . .
The cultivators, it is often assumed, are dreadfully uncultivated. And this alleged lack of sophistication has made them fair game for every kind of depredation. The food they produce has been expropriated by their overlords, by marauding armies and by totalitarian states. They have been conscripted as cannon fodder; entangled in debt and dependency as sharecroppers and serfs; starved, sometimes deliberately, in famines and prisons; forcibly converted to their masters’ religions; herded onto collective farms and slaughtered mercilessly when they revolt.
. . .
. . . very few of the countless millions who have eked a living from the land left enduring accounts of their own lives.
“This,” Joyce wrote, “is a world of a very ancient form of silence, peasant silence, something enmeshed in cultures that are largely oral in nature.”
. . .
“The wild as our sublime,” he writes, “makes no sense to the peasant.” (Joyce cites a Polish peasant interviewed in the 1960s who said, “I like it where the plain is; when I was in America I saw a mountain, and this was an awful view.”)
. . .
Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future.
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated Feb. 28, 2024, and has the title “A Love Song to His Roots.”)
The book under review above is:
Joyce, Patrick. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. New York: Scribner, 2024.