Peasants, academics, populists: Forward to the past?

Traced here is the way peasant economy/culture has been reconceptualized in academic studies over the past three decades. The pre-war image of innate family farmers as embodiments of national identity, a populist discourse mobilized by the political right in Europe and Asia, was replaced by modernization theory during the post-war era. The object was to promote economic development, thereby challenging populist images of unchanging and unchangeable rural ‘otherness’. With the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, however, there has been an academic resurgence of agrarian populist interpretations and a consequent return to pre-war concepts of peasant economy/culture.