The spread of manufacture in the European countryside initiated the formation of vital and complex rural laboring groups that defy neat classification. The nature of livelihood in these rural settings furthered an integration of diverse productive involvements rather than the creation of narrow occupational niches. In the course of their labor careers, men and women moved between agrarian and industrial pursuits—weaving linen cloth, spinning silk, raising livestock, digging potatoes, tending vineyards, making bricks, mining coal, casting iron, and forging steel. In this context, livelihood was not merely an individual concern; rather, it was part of a broader household strategy, rooted in a family-based agrarian holding. The maintenance of bonds to peasant agriculture fostered familial solidarity over working-class identity. These laborers saw their destinies in the immediacy of flesh-and-blood relationships among family and kin and not in more abstract social and political identifications.

Although wage work has been present in the third world for some time, more people in that world are selling more of their labor today than ever before. Anthropologists and other social scientists have dealt with this increase in the amount of wage labor by using a variety of concepts, including urbanization, migration, and proletarianization. Recently, the concept of the peasant-wor-ker has appeared in the literature with greater frequency and a new meaning. This study examines one current use and discusses some of the problems associated with it.

Every subject of the state, Immanual Kant reasoned in a discussion of “civil equality” in 1793, “must be able to attain the social rank [Stufe eines Standes] … to which his talent, his effort, and his luck can carry him” without hindrance by any “hereditary prerogative.” A year later Kant's former disciple Johann Gottlieb Fichte likewise imagined a society in which “the choice of a Stand” would be “a choice through freedom” to which no “particular action” or “general institution” could pose a legitimate barrier. The two philosophers offered variations on the radical social principle of “careers open to talent,” extending the promise of upward mobility to talented children of the underprivileged. Proclaimed by the French National Assembly in August 1789, the principle also had a German lineage and, in the first decade of the next century, was to figure prominently in the official program for national revival in Prussia.

The historiography of agrarian Germany before 1914 is fundamentally based upon two moments (in the Weberian sense): one of a structural and the other of an institutional nature. The structural moment comprises an emphasis upon the existence and role of agrarian dualism, that is, upon a sharp contrast, emerging from the later Middle Ages onwards, in the agrarian systems found east and west of the River Elbe and its tributary the Saale, which together formed a line bisecting Germany from Hamburg to the modern Czechoslavakian frontier. The institutional moment consists of the shift from a free-trade to a protectionist policy in respect of cereals after 1879. In the words of a leading West German agrarian historian, “On 1 January 1880 … a new epoch commenced for German agricultural policy.” In addition, the adoption of a grain tariff from 1879 is generally assumed to have had a determining influence upon the subsequent development of German agriculture and, for that matter, is thought by some writers to have exerted a considerable influence upon the entire course of modern German history.

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien régime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

Kinship studies have traditionally been the core of the anthropological enterprise, but the knowledge gained in studies of indigenous kinship systems has not generally been of interest to other disciplines. This essay intends to draw attention to some of the political and social implications of patterns of kinship relations by comparing two large historical culture areas, that of the frontier region of Inner Asia, and that of the peripheral tribes of the Middle East.

Sherry Ortner's account of the development of anthropological theory is admirable both because of the complexity of her argument and because it opens up a series of interesting possibilities for theoretical self-criticism among anthropologists. In this essay, I consider a theme which is not directly addressed in Ortner's piece, but which might usefully be considered in relation to it. The theme involves the significance of place in the construction of anthropological theory in the period since World War II.