“Peasants,” in the past, have been described as “small-scale, primarily but not solely agricultural, producers who make a significant contribution to the national product of societies in which they are dominated by more powerful classes, bureaucracies, and the like.” Such a one-time portrayal  (originating from the French “paysans,” people of the land) harkens to residual assumptions as to the nature of pre-industrial European as well as colonial-era expectations with regard to rural societies.   

That dated understanding has been reconfigured, largely because of the activism and resistance of these very same agrarian, even largely subsistence, peoples of the present time, but also due to the discipline of anthropology as it has revised its insights into the relationship to its in-country hosts and long-term collaborators, speaking as they do from within their own changing rural-urban circumstances. 

Nevertheless, occupying a particular place within persistently stratified post-colonial social systems, “post peasants” lack the isolation and political autonomy more characteristic of African populations that may have long-established usufructuary access to agricultural land.  By comparison, in Asia and Central and South America, contemporary agrarian production exacerbates a host of historically expropriative socio-political and economic challenges: class and “caste” consciousness, economic dependence, nationalism, gender hierarchy and its relationship to social reproduction, as well as regionalism and the inter-ethnic tensions endemic to a global capitalist system.