Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World
Patrick Joyce, Allen Lane, £25 

RARE for a book to change your self-perception; to give you not exactly a new perspective on your place in the great scheme of things, but a much richer sense of yourself there. Reading this book you realise what you have always known, though only now can recognise: you are a descendant of peasants and you carry that inheritance even as you live your urbanised, corporatised, “iron cage” life, as Max Weber described it.

In historian Patrick Joyce’s labour of love, Remembering Peasants, a wealth of cultural testimony draws the reader deep into an understanding of the difference in world view of the peasant. From “Joyce country” in the West of Ireland, through France, Italy, Poland and further east, the underlying nodes of existence from the soil are shown in the development of systems of mentality. 

Survival is the key imperative. Joyce shows how the peasant represents a history of want and exploitation, but above all the tenacity for survival. Although he warns how “there should be no idealisation of a class that has to define itself as the class of those who survive.”

From impoverishment, whether sociological – serfdom in Eastern Europe – or geographical – the flinty fields of Connemara – a shared fortitude is shown cutting across circumstance, identifying the character of the peasant. Joyce brings his historical expertise to bear in revealing aspects of that character. The Polish term for fortitude, hart ducha, “denotes strength of spirit, mastery of self, a person who will not flinch or surrender.”
 
By contrast to the derogatory stereotypes of the “thick culchie,” redneck hillbilly, the mumbling oaf, Joyce outlines a strict decorum for daily living that holds in peasant society, including “eating, walking, speaking, even dying.” What emerges is a sense of dignity and grace fundamental to peasant lifestyle, linking to moral codes and even cosmogonies.

Fundamental differences from capitalist assumptions are shown in relation to the land. Land that is viewed not as commodity but as symbolic and intimate to social existence; the connection to the land – “the primordial cell of life”, goes deep into the bone of the peasant sense of self. Individual field names, so well-known in Ireland, and even named rocks, suggest such an affinity between peasant and nature, nature and language. Joyce’s own intimacy with his family’s ancestral farm in Mayo brings the personal to the historical. 

Throughout, the reader is shown the “in-between” worlds of the peasant. The duality of highly fervent Catholics for instance, depicted in wonderful photographs by Marketa Luskacova, enacting pre-Christian rituals. I was reminded of my own devout grandmother from County Galway, sewing elaborate chasubles for the priests of her parish whilst also maintaining an unshakable belief in the fairy people – the sidhe, spirits of the natural world so endemic to peasant culture. In his detailed turning over of every aspect of peasant ontology, Joyce shows the coherent sensibilities underlying such beliefs.

Literature also is filtered through this immersion into a disappeared world. The writings of peasant poets – John Clare, Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney amongst others — layer the historical gleanings. Prose writers, particularly John Berger, who lived and worked amongst the French peasantry, reveal further estrangements between our contemporary frameworks of reality and those of the peasantry. 

The bullet of time we ride upon 24/7, hurtling forwards in the cause of efficiency and productivity — turning time into profit maximisation — is completely foreign to the cyclical sensibility of peasant time, as Joyce reveals. Return of the seasons, sunrise and sunset, moon passages, these vast movements are the intimate registers of time, knowledge of which the peasant depends upon.

It all adds to the richness of this book which contains the seeds of more books, so numerous, deep and nuanced are the major themes uncovered.

As Joyce points out early on in the book, the urban-dwelling proportion of the world’s population has increased to approaching 60 per cent today. Meanwhile the proportion of the world’s population engaged in agriculture fell from 44 per cent to 27 per cent between 1991 and 2019. That peasant knowledge has disappeared or is fast vanishing in most places is reason enough to dig down into a heritage we all share. More alarming is the catastrophic future such losses of understanding herd us toward. 

Remembering Peasants offers a guide to a long-evolved, hard-won relationship with the natural world and, crucially, with ourselves as natural beings.