Peasants and Farmers

In anticipation of starting a cob building project next week, and eventually running a cob workshop in which innocent people will come help build and pay money for me to teach them the basics, I decided it would be smart to read up on the bible of cob building: The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage (by Ianto Evans, Michael Smith, and Linda Smiley).


I'm not sure whether I forgot how good of a read it is, or whether perhaps I never understood its genius because the time when I originally read it (May) was before the point when I first touched cob and came to understand it. Either way, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in questioning why things are the way they are.

In Ianto's philosophical introduction, I am particularly drawn to these 3 paragraphs, inspired by a talk given by Chilean Ana Stern.

"Peasants, [Ana Stern] said, satisfy their own basic needs: they grow their food, build the houses they live in, often make their own clothes. Most peasants collect medicinal herbs, treat medical emergencies, supply their family entertainment. They experience fully what they do every day; they have time - they feel joy. Their culture is integral and makes sense. Farmers, by contrast, grow things to sell. With what they earn from their products, they buy their groceries, building materials, clothes, entertainment, and medical insurance. They must also buy into a system which demands that they drive to market, pay taxes, perhaps send their kids to agricultural college. Increasingly they must buy machinery, seeds, farm chemicals. Farmers have no time to directly enjoy satisfying their own needs, so they purchase their satisfactions; they buy ready-made clothing and 'convenience' foods.

I've thought a lot about Ana's presentation. Her definition shook my worldview. In her terms we are all farmers - there are few peasants in the USA. I'd always felt comfortable in the traditional villages of Africa and Latin America, and now I understood why. The parts of my own life that I truly enjoy are the peasant parts, the parts I don't pay for, the parts that I create myself. A life of working for someone else and paying for basic needs is essentially unsatisfying. Why? Because our links to Nature are severed when we live that way...

To be complete we need to have a constant awareness of our cosmic bearings, where and when we fit into nature's patterns. If you compost your excrement as the Chinese do, use your own urine for fertilized, and grow your own vegetable seeds on the plants you raise, the cycle is complete. You have inserted yourself into a completely visible ring of cause and effect. You experience the whole natural process, and the better you observe how that process works, the easier you slide into it."

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A lot of text, I realize. And I don't think much importance need be placed on the labels of "peasant" and "farmer." What's important to me is thinking about how tied into different systems we are, and how dependent many people are on actions that do not contribute directly to their happiness and/or survival.

Anyhow, there's a lot more where that came from (including a lot of practical building ideas). Pick it up for a good read.