"Peasant Society","Peasants",Non-farm work : A case study of a village in Bangladesh

Abstract

Many scholars have been studying village Bangladesh as a "peasant socrety", particularly m terms of landholding and the rights related to land. This has seemingly been caused by the fact that Bangladesh is demographically defined as an agricultural country. On the other hand, however, some scholars have mentioned the existence of non-farm work and workers In rural areas, from the relatively early years of anthropological or sociological studies in Bangladesh. Unfortunately, thls line of study has not been pursued in detail. It is thus necessary to reexamine the situation in rural Bangladesh. Village K (about 100 km east of the capital, Dhaka) is situated in the midst of the flood plain. This village has sometimes been affected by the flash flood of the Gumti, a branch of the Meghna. Though this village itself floats on a sea of paddy fields, the bazaar is not so far (about 2 km) from the village. For analytical purposes, I will use some local terms, i.e. Paribar (slmllar to "household") as an economic unit and Kani (=0.3 acre) as a unit of land. At the same time, I will classify the 121 Paribars studied into eight groups according to landholding sizes and types of management. Groups no. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 in Table 4 can be hierarchically codlfied, while groups 6, 7, and 8 cannot. Concerning landholding (effective or functional, not nominal), some remarkable features have been found. i) Nearly 70% of all the Paribars (groups no. 4-〜8 in Table 4) cannot maintain themselves by the products of their farming. They can only prepare, at best, half of the necessary quantity of food by their own farming. ii) Over 60% of all Paribars (groups no.1, 2, 5, 6, and 7), more or less, participate in nonfarm work. If we include agricultural wage labor (group no. 8) in this category, the percentage becomes higher. iii) Even groups l, 2, and 3 (about 30% of all the Paribars) have relatively small areas of land, their average being 5.14 Kani (about 1.5 acres), though they have some selfsufficient or surplus amount of land. In my oplnion, it is not appropriate to express this situation as simply "polarized", althcugh I have not touched upon this point in detail in this paper.