Village in Asia revisited
- Delhi Oxford University Press 1997
- 450 p.
This interdisciplinary collection of articles by scholars who have returned to previously investigated villages relates village studies to the global rural-urban transformation. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, historical, and economic perspectives, these essays are based on grass-roots level research analyzed in the context of national and global policies and their local level impact.
The theme of this volume can be narrowly interpreted to refer exclusively to work which involves revisiting particular villages already studied earlier. In a sense, this would reflect one of the motivations underlying the project from which the volume emerged, namely, to consider in depth the findings, and even more the methodologies, of these restudies of specific villages. However, the theme can, and indeed needs to, be read in its broader possibility, where the focus is on a return to the theme of the village as such, where what is sought is a recon sideration, or return to the study, of the Asian village.
This more general concern, equally valid and important, would place in the foreground a somewhat wider agenda of investigation and would embrace such questions as the location and interface of the Asian village with larger global and societal processes. The narrow and the wider interpretations are clearly complementary in the attempt to identify and explain patterns of rural social and economic change over the past decades. The essays in the volume relate variously to either of these themes and, as such, stimulate reflection over issues ranging from specific questions concerning alternative methodologies of re studies of the 'same' village, to queries over the changing nature of the village in general in response to either exogenous pressures or endogenous transformations and metamorphoses. The com mon strand running through both lines of approach is the comprehension and analysis of rural change. The broader focus provides a timely emphasis to contem porary agrarian questions. Arguably, the peasantry remains the unsung hero in most renditions of the legend of the East Asian miracle. Some of the Southeast Asian economies might optimis tically harbour hopes of letting rapid non-agricultural growth, usually in combination with rural to urban migration, resolve their particular agrarian questions. Such optimism might be much less warranted in the South Asian context, where the rural sector has also remained largely outside the current discourse and debates on economic reforms that are dominated by agendas limited to trade and industrialization. The rural population is somehow meant to adapt, to sort itself out, to muddle through, to carry on or just to fade away. The scribes of the new age seem not to have had the interest to script this side-show. And yet, this event being enacted beyond the spotlight of centrestage involves a cast of hundreds of millions who at the end of the twentieth century, still constitute the majority of the populations of these countries.