Van der Ploeg, Jan Douwe: The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization

摘要

In the preface to this innovative, theoretically rich and provocative new book, Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg remarks that “much attention was given to the peasantry during the grand transformations of the last two centuries, and many of the resulting theories centred on the peasant as an obstacle to change and, thus, as a social figure that should disappear or be actively removed” (xiii–xiv). A professor at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, one of the foremost centers worldwide of critical agrarian studies, Van der Ploeg contrasts “the manufactured invisibility” of peasants with the their striking “omnipresence”—there are now more peasants than ever before in history and they still constitute some two-fifths of humanity.