Peasants on jabel

Mon, 11 May 2026 06:47:22 -0400

Traditional Irish prayer quoted in Remembering Peasants:

With the powers that were granted to Patrick I bank this fire.
May the angels keep it in, no enemy scatter it.
May God be the roof of our house.
For all within
And all without,
Christ’s sword on the door
Till tomorrow’s light.

A culture of centers

Mon, 11 May 2026 06:15:40 -0400

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:

[In Irish houses of the old style] it is bad manners to knock and for the host to keep you waiting at the door. You go into the house to the fire, the fire the centre of the hearth, the hearth the centre of the kitchen, the kitchen of the house, the house of the farm (‘the home place’), and so onwards goes what Glassie calls a culture of centres, one around which cyclical time revolves. Only illness brings you into the bedrooms in daylight, and being confined to ‘the room’ for any reason is ‘like walking the road on your lone’. ‘It put me in that much despair, I could go up into the room,’ one woman says to Glassie. One should stay by the fire, ‘in company’.

The peasant home

Fri, 08 May 2026 06:43:03 -0400

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:

The dwelling is also a constitutive part of the relationship between past and present generations, between the living and the dead. Something handed on, or hoped to be handed on, something to be received. When the dead have a foundational role in human life, as is the case with peasants, then the house takes on a cosmological significance. But the house remains eminently material at the same time. There is also that other house, the one where the dead dwell, the graveyard. So, the place of burial is yet another dwelling place in the peasant village, one always of the greatest importance. The word human comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth or ground. We are made from the earth to which we will return. The place of inhumation is, or at least was, as surely as the dwelling house, an indication of the sense of having a place in the world, of taking possession of a place and securing it as one’s own.

There is a story by Pirandello in which he refers to a Sicilian baron who refused to let the peasants bury their dead on his land, because he knew that if they did they would come to regard it as their own by natural right - to regard it as their house. The peasants who oppose him, even though the land is in the baron’s ownership, in fact regard the land as already theirs, the dead needing to be buried on ‘our land,’ so that the living can be near them in order that they may be watched over and cared for. In times not so far in the past, where land was owned the custom was that the dead be buried there and not in a cemetery. At the same time as the living watch over the dead, the dead watch over and care for the living; in Corsican culture the dead elders of the house retain in death the authority they once possessed in life.

A land full of people

Wed, 06 May 2026 06:44:48 -0400

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:

The means of survival is land. Peasants do not see land like we do. We see land in terms of ‘nature’ , something separated from the artificiality of humankind’s creations, or, if these creations are included, then the natural, the supernatural and the unnatural are distinguished one from another. ‘Nature' does not convey peasant reality, though we like to think it does. It is for peasants a semantically empty category, and there is little iconic or verbal representation of it in what records peasants have left (although educated peasants writing for an audience of non-peasants do embrace the idea sometimes). From the point of view of the vast majority of peasants, there are, on the other hand, meadows, a river, the sky. For peasants the land is useless without their own work upon it, it will not be domesticated, ‘It will not open and it will not close', as is said in Poland. Marcin Brocki cites peasant words collected by the anthropologist Jacek Olędzki in the Poland of the 1960s: ‘I like it where the plain is; when I was in America I saw a mountain, and this was an awful view. And when it’s flat wherever you look, so that you could roll an apple, that is beautiful. Where you are perfectly flat, a lake, that’s beautiful. And when there are mountains, sands, forests, you don’t even want to come back.’ There is fear and even hatred of the wild, so unlike our veneration of wildness and the wilderness. The wild as our sublime makes no sense to the peasant.

The ideal of “nature” as a landscape untouched by humans is a legacy of twentieth century environmentalism that is best left behind. For one thing, what we have often thought to be “untamed wilderness” was, in fact, a vast garden tended by generations of native peoples. The Amazon, for example.

Another reason to leave that ideal behind is that ecological thinking desperately needs an animist turn. I am truly thankful for every effort to preserve land from development. The Sycamore Land Trust does work like this locally and I’ve walked their trails enough over the years to see the great value in it. At the same time, that cannot be the only strategy. We need to bring in something of that peasant view of the land as the locus of work. We need a land that is thoroughly peopled with human and non-human persons, working together in mutual flourishing.

“We do not easily remember peasants”

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:46:19 -0400

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:

We do not easily remember peasants. The realities of their lives are a dim presence in the historical record. We catch only glimpses in the great obscurity that is the centuries-old peasant past of Europe. The first is from the Poland of a century ago:

Every field knows its owner, the Earth is indignant at every crime committed on its face. The moon watches and prayers are still said to it. The stars answer a woman or man who knows the right way to ask them. Nothing bad should be said near water. The wind listens and talks. … While animals do not know as much as man they know things he does not, the properties of plants and substances for instance, which are shown to men by animals. Some animals understand and condemn the immoral acts of man, the bee will never stay with the thief, the stork and the swallow leave a farm when an evil deed has been committed there. … The lark, which soars so high, is the favorite bird of the Angels; during a storm they hold it in their hands, and when, with every lightning flash the heaven opens, it is allowed to look in.

This way of understanding the Earth and the heavens is part of a past we have now lost, lost in less than a single lifetime, lost with barely a sign of its loss in a present that is obsessed with itself.

(In case you’re wondering, the quote within the quote is from Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.)

New, old word: hearth-fasted

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:34:10 -0400

Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age:

The free play of patriarchy within the household is arguably conditioned by the free play of patriarchy outside it. At the extreme, this involves a kind of untrammelled and predatory male collective violence - essentially the Viking problem of a heroic-styled warrior culture or of what’s sometimes termed ‘masterless men’.

Many societies have recognized the dangers of this and sought ways to counter it. For example, Anglo-Saxon England emphasized ‘hearth-fasting’ men - linking them to a home and hearth, to the possibilities of local status and livelihood. In Edo Japan, the wakamono-gumi associations of young, unmarried peasant men mobilized them as nightwatchmen, firefighters and festival organizers, and linked them into wider local knowledges and systems. Age-set systems and initiation rituals have served similar functions in many societies. The emphasis is less on the man being the master of the household, and more on making the household the master of the man.

But - as demonstrated by Melissa Kearney’s work, mentioned earlier - we’re not doing a particularly great job of this in contemporary liberal-modernist society. Education, employment and financial systems almost seem set up to fail and marginalize many young men, especially from low-income families. The erosion of kith, kinship and positive local associational possibilities adds to the risk they’ll turn to misogynistic and violent ideologies to make sense of their situations. Models of society based on making widespread the possibility for men to become kith-and-kin connected, livelihood-making householders rather than atomized, internet-connected consumers of masculinist self-images adrift in a hostile job market can mitigate against this. Something to aim for, perhaps, in a postliberal dark-age future?

That second paragraph in the original text includes a reference to Azby Brown’s Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture and Design (2022) and Rosamund Faith’s The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (2020).

I love that phrase: hearth-fasted. Fixed to a hearth.

I haven’t read the book but based on what I can find online, a hearth-fasted man was a freeman in Pre-Norman England with social standing, public duties, and reciprocal responsibilities with neighbors. They were not dependents.

“Domesticated” is a word that comes to mind here, though that clearly has a negative connotation. A domesticated man is one that has been beaten down, reduced, “whipped.” That idea has roots in a sexism that sees women as shrews and marriage as a power struggle.

”Hearth-fasted”, on the other hand, is a man in service to his household. (Obviously I’m riffing on the language here, making no comment about actual pre-Norman history about which I know nothing.)

It feels something like “yeoman”, “citizen”, and (a word from my childhood that I rarely hear anymore) “family man.” Definitely a word I’ll be keeping in my back pocket, both because it is pleasing language and because it represents something deeply important to me.

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:18:00 -0400

Happen Films is a great New Zealand documentary film company. Their latest is “The New Peasants,” which follows a family living mostly outside the money economy. Worth watching. The opening of the film, where they imagine their peasant ancestors, is something I’ve been thinking about lately.

Ancestor shrine

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 14:30:19 -0400

I’ve moved my ancestor shrine back downstairs where it can be in a more actively used part of the house. Left to right:

A bell used by my maternal grandfather to start Sunday School, which he oversaw for 30+ years.
Picture of my dad holding a fish, standing next to the 1977 GMC Caballero which passed from my uncle to my grandfather to my dad to me, until I decided it was a bit too cumbersome for an heirloom and sold it. I have better pictures of my dad but he loved fishing so this feels more appropriate.
My dad’s Thompson Chain Reference Bible, with some laminated family obituaries laying on top.
In my mind, anytime pictures of known ancestors are set out, the unknown ancestors are honored implicitly. Nevertheless, I put my (perhaps German) peasant couple on the shelf to more explicitly stand in for unknown ancestors.
Bibles of my maternal grandmother and paternal great-grandmother, plus the latter’s glasses.
My maternal grandparents, who died when I was ten. They are some of those rare people that seem to be universally regarded as something like saints.

New folks in the house

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

Rachel and I are too cheap to be collectors. One exception to this general rule is that we have amassed a collection of statues, typically of the gods. Gives the place a certain air, you understand. Lets visitors know what we’re about.

Recently I started looking for a sort of farmerish, gnomish figure to put on our mantle. Silly gnome statues are plentiful but we didn’t want any part of that mess. I was looking for something handmade, unique if possible, and not expensive (see “cheap” above). I found this guy and snapped him up.

I’m no expert so it’s possible this is manufactured and I was fooled into thinking it’s handmade. There’s no date on him but there is this mark on the bottom.

In the course of looking, I came across some other statues that were of the rural sort. Two pairs of farmers/peasants grabbed my attention. One was listed as being Bavarian. Since I have German ancestors and this pair was smiling, I decided to get them.

This couple is more clearly handmade and “Stolt 1960” is carved onto the bottom. In this case, though, I don’t think they’re unique; I was able to find a very similar couple listed online, same artist, but dated 1957. So maybe the person carved several of these figures over the years.

Here’s one of the new folks enjoying this morning’s sunshine.