[Dragaera] Fwd: Peasant fantasy

[via Dragaera]

The definition of "peasant" is complicated. It can mean any poor farmer,
but usually includes the implication of not owning the land being farmed. 
A poor farmer who owns the land might be considered a peasant if living in
a society in which the large feudal estates were never broken up (ie,
"settled the land question" as it's usually expressed).  In England,
Germany, and France, for example, the large estates were broken up, and so
the farmers are referred to as farmers, no matter how poor they happen to
be.

Poor farmers in, for example, the United States and Canada are not
considered peasants, because there was no non-land-owning peasant class in
this country for them to emerge from (there were some number of them, to
be sure, but never a social class).  Poor farmers in Mexico are considered
peasants, because of the history of peonage.

There is an implication in the term that peasants are serfs or come from a
tradition of serfdom, though this isn't always the case.  And then it gets
even more complicated, because you can have rich farmers who DO own their
land (the Russian Kulaks, for example), who are considered peasants
because they emerged from the class of feudal serfs.

> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 02:39:27PM -0500, Konrad Gaertner via Dragaera
> wrote:
>> On 10/29/2014 5:37 PM, Steve Rapaport via Dragaera wrote:
>> >Tavi in Jim Butcher's Codex Alera.
>> >
>> >And if you like, in a long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was an
>> >adopted son of two moisture farmers on Tattooine...
>
> If we're picking about what 'peasant' means, they're probably yeomen, or
> like Iowa corn farmers, vs. feudal peasants.  And I knote Luke had
> gotten a lot of pilot training with ambitions to the Imperial Academy.
>
> More broadly speaking, point.  Though we could also make a division
> between "techically peasant/farmer but leaves home and never turns back"
> (Paks never goes home, Luke's family is murdered in short order) vs. the
> rarer case of repeatedly dealing with peasant life and family, like
> Savn, or Fawn in _The Sharing Knife_.
>
> -xx- Damien X-)
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