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The limitations of any field of study are most strikingly revealed in its shared definitions of what counts as relevant. A great deal of the recent work on the peasantry-my own as well as that of others-eoncerns rebellions and revolutions. Excepting always the standard ethnographic accounts of kinship, ritual, cultivation, and language-it is fair to say that much attention has been devoted to organized, large-scale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily, to pose a threat to the state. I can think ofa host ofmutually reinforcing reasons why this shared understanding of relevance should prevail. On the left, it is apparent that the inordinate attention devoted to peasant insurrections was stimulated by the Vietnam war and by a now fading left-wing, academic romance with wars of national liberation. The historical record and the archives-both resolutely centered on the state's interests-abetted this romance by not …