From “Moral Economy” to “Rational Peasants”: the Contrary or the Two Facets of Rural World

Abstract

For most scholars, the poor world is largely a rural world and, in terms of livelihoods, this rural world is an agricultural one where farming predominates and where land is the critical resource. The large majority of people in rural world live in the countryside and the livelihoods of most, it would seem, are dependent on farming. This paper seeks to challenge two popular visions of rural world: one from moral economy and the other from political economy.