Chayanov - Ch. 4 - Bao

On p. 142, Chayanov wrote, "We dare suppose that every system....is something artificial and its significance is always only temporary and pedagogic... We personally ascribe great significance to the purposive evaluation of the systems, i.e. evaluation of any system according to how convenient it is for a particular purpose." I thought this was a particularly interesting quote since it seems to relate to what we are attempting to do in the class currently. While Chayanov was researching peasant households for reasons that we discussed last week in class, we are also studying the same topic but simply with different intentions. It brings us back to the very first class in which we introduced ourselves and our reasons for taking this course. What is more striking to me, however, is that we can look at the same body of data and come away with vastly different opinions or conclusions despite having the same starting point.

On another point: Chayanov goes into great detail about the organization of farms and the tools at their disposal. While he mentions additional workers on a farm, I was curious to see how these individuals factored in with the family - did they live with the family during the months they worked on the farm? And how did families deal with having members working on other farms? Similarly, I was curious to see how the peasant, non-market farm related with the surrounding community. Were resources shared, like technology or machines, between neighbors or was each farm just an autonomous unit? How did they interact with the rest of the community? And finally, on the difference between rural communities and urban locales, did farmers view urban dwellers as consumers and did they believe they had some sort of obligation to supply them?