The Awkward Class: a foundation for peasant studies

ABSTRACT

Teodor Shanin's The Awkward Class helped to launch two immensely important research directions. First, resistance by Russian peasants to modernizing agricultural policies by both Tsarist and Soviet governments opened new questions about collectivization of agriculture, and made Russian history relevant to the study of ‘developing societies.’ Second, the idea of cyclical mobility of peasant households challenged the then widely held assumption that peasants were destined to disappear. Instead of explaining ‘persistence’ of peasants, Shanin explored distinct logics of peasant households and communities. This helped to define a new inter-disciplinary field called peasant studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Peasant studies
• developing societies
• cyclical mobility
• collectivization
• peasant resistance

Notes on contributor

Harriet Friedmann is at the University of Toronto. Since retiring she has been Visiting Scholar at Pufendorf Institute, Lund University, Peter Wall Institute, University of British Columbia, University of Michigan, Aix-Marseille University, Carleton University, Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, and CIRAD in Montpellier. She is co-developer of the historical food regimes approach and contributor to debates on family farming. Her recent publications focus on emergent food system governance in context of long histories of food system transformation across social/natural scales. Her current project is Global Political Ecology of Food. Friedmann is a long time Toronto Food Policy Councilor. She serves on editorial boards of food, agriculture, and global change journals and has served on several nonprofit boards, e.g. USC-Canada (Seeds of Survival projects across the world), Toronto Advisory Committee for the FAO-RUAF city-food region project, and the Toronto Seed Library. She is past Chair of the Political Economy of the World-System Research Section of the American Sociological Association, and participated in the IAASTD Global Report. She received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement award by the Canadian Association of Food Studies. www.harrietfriedmann.ca

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Journal of Peasant Studies was co-founded by Terry Byres, Charles Curwen and Teodor Shanin (Bernstein et al. 2018; Bernstein and Byres 2001: 4 n.4; Byres 1994).

2 A companion volume in a series entitled The Roots of Otherness was called Revolution as a Moment of Truth. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Bernstein, 2018)

3 Bernstein (2018) points out that Shanin drops Chayanov's producer-consumer ratio.