Cultivating dissent : work, identity, and praxis in rural Languedoc /

Focusing on a village in the Languedoc wine-growing region of southern France, Lem explores the struggles of small farmers to maintain their traditional lifestyle in a centralized capitalist nation. She analyzes how regional identities and consciousness emerge, documenting the history of Occitania's collective protests and probing the ambiguities of accommodating and resisting the state. She discusses the familistic ethic (cooperation, mutuality, subordination of individual interests), the need for a variety of activities to supplement viticulture income, and the fact that reproduction of the family farm is often a patriarchal dynamic. She also shows how ideologies of kinship and community are reconfigured to involve capitalist calculation and exploitation, and how ties of tradition are reinvented as part of a political and economic strategy to keep petty commodity production viable in a modern state. Lem investigates vinification cooperatives, concluding that these bureaucratic institutions alienate farmers from their products. The book provides a convincing analysis of praxis and cultural resilience of small-scale Languedoc wine growers in the face of capitalist domination. Ample references to studies of peasants, class struggles, and agrarian movements. Upper-division undergraduates and above. V. J. Baker; Eckerd College