The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant

Abstract

Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the post-colonial world, “the peasant” is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction, a category of human being has become a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly journals, and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. “What are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico really like?” the anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the field. “For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion of others) have searched for answers [to this question] …. living with villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior, describing their findings in books and articles.” At first they called their research the study of “folk” societies, Foster says, but after World War II scholars “came to realize that ‘peasant’ is a more appropriate term, and thus was born the new subfield of ‘peasant studies’.”