英米農民研究の一潮流から学ぶ現代農業研究の課題 : Journal of Agrarian Changeのワークショップに参加して

抄録

This paper reports about the workshop called "Agrarian Questions: Lineages and Prospects" which was organized by the Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC) at the School of Oriental and African Studies of University of London from May 1st through the 3rd of 2008. JAC was established in 2001 by Terry Byres and Henry Bernstein who had edited the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) for more than 15 years. This workshop was held to celebrate the handover of the editorship from Bernstein and Byres to a new editorial team of Deborah Johnston, Cristobal Kay, Jens Lerche, and Carlos Oya and to discuss the journal's past achievements and future agendas. This paper first explains JPS's main interests and characteristics of its approaches which are inherited in JAC to understand well about JAC, second, it summarizes the content of this workshop, and third, it remarks what implication I get from participating in this workshop. JPS's main characteristics is that it concerns not only the classic peasant problems in transition to capitalism in Europe, but also the agrarian transformations and peasant movements in other parts of the world as the revolutionary force, while emphasizing elaborated theoretical problematization based on Marxism. These intellectual features were also present at the workshop. Now that the counter movements to corporate globalization and backlashes from nature are increasing, the "externalist problematic" (Bernstein) which approaches agrarian changes focusing on external forces such as agribusinesses is under criticism. I believe that the tradition of JPS and JAC, which have long committed to the "internalist problematic" (Bernstein) represented by the classic agrarian question, but have also committed to comparative analysis of broad historical realities instead of addressing abstract general law of the agrarian question, can give a hint for today's agrarian studies in a new phase of globalization.