"Inside the Fence", the Social Basis of Privacy in Nabenchauk

Resumen

The guarded privacy of peasant life has long been a commonplace of European folk wisdom, and is well-established in social theory as a principle element in the notion of tradition. The privacy -and inaccessability- of the peasant has been the object of strategic manoeuvre by colonial policymakers, revolutionary cadres and agents of political and economic development. Current sociological and anthropological accounts of Mediterranean, Latin American, Asian and African peasantries revolve around the same axis. Through all these theories of society, both pragmatic and academic, run two competing images of peasants, coloured by the positive and negative aspects of privacy.