The peasants of Yaocun: Memories of exploitation, injustice, and liberation in a Chinese village

From Peasant Studies to Agrarian Change

“…For example, while we mentioned contributions on methodological issues of identifying and measuring peasant class differentiation, we omitted those on the intellectual and existential challenges of rural fieldwork by P.C. Joshi (1981), Thaxton (1981) and Breman (1985), and of doing oral history, in van Onselen's reflection (1993) on the research for his extraordinary life of the extraordinary South African sharecropper Kas Maine (van Onselen 1996); on the comparative method in agrarian political economy by Byres (1995); and on conceptualizing and measuring agricultural surplus, and international comparisons of real agricultural output and productivity, by Karshenas (1994Karshenas ( , 2000. Nor have we cited essays that problematized 'the village community' dear to peasant essentialism (for example, by Breman 1982, andBoomgaard 1991) or mentioned the unique account by our late comrade Arvind Das, a polymath of agrarian studies and much else, of his natal village over the three centuries of its history (Das 1987).…”