Call for papers to the Rural Labour session in the XIIIth Agrarian History Conference to be held in Lleida/Lerida (Spain) between the 12th and the 14th of May of 2011, organised by the Spanish Society of Agrarian History (SEHA).
Rural Labour: its Material Realities, Social Relationship Structure and Cultural Forms, From the 11th to the 21st Centuries
Josemiguel Lana (Navarre Public University) [mailto]josem.lana@unavarra.es[/mailto]
Enric Saguer (Girona University) [mailto]enric.saguer@udg.edu[/mailto]
Carmen Sarasúa (Barcelona Autonomous University) [mailto]Carmen.Sarasua@uab.es[/mailto]
Antonio Furió (Valencia University) [mailto]antoni.furio@uv.es[/mailto]
The topic of labour in the farming sector and the rural setting is, beyond any doubt, one of the major issues in our field of study and can be addressed from multiple different viewpoints. It was the explicit leitmotif of one of the two plenary sessions of the 11th Congress of Farming History that took place in Bilbao from the 15th to the 17th of September, 1999. Held under the coordination of Isabel Alfonso, Pegerto Saavedra and Ramón Garrabou, on that occasion its focus was on "Labour organisation in the rural world and its historical development". Now, a dozen years later, it may become necessary to subject this issue to the scrutiny of researchers and incorporate the concerns and contributions that have been expressed and made in the interim.
As this is such an ample topic, and bearing in mind the suitability of mapping out itineraries to be followed by specialists within a broad chronological and geographical spectrum, we propose the following broad outline of topics to be dealt with:
1. The complementation and transition in labour organisation modes.
The most classical focus in labour history has prioritised the analysis of its organisational modes, often adopting a sequential and progressive dynamic, under the influence of the thought of Marx and Engels. Historiography, however, has confirmed the coexistence of different labour organisational modes at the same historical time and even in the same place, without our being able to establish a strict direct or inverse relationship between labour organisational modes and the presence of a market economy. Slavery, serfdom, indentured labour ("peonaje" to use the Spanish word), wage-earning and family work have all coexisted at different levels within many societies and at many times, with a tendency to swing in one or another direction according to varying circumstances. Mediaeval Spain, the metropolitan and colonial world until 1898, and even the 20th Century offer numerous examples of this complementation between the different options for capturing and controlling the labour force. However, it is also interesting to unravel the transition processes between the different forms of labour organisation, whether these appear in the direction predicted by the staging scheme, or in any other: from slavery to wage-earning, from family work to wage-earning, from wage-earning to family work, from wage-earning to forced labour, etc. What are the factors and circumstances that explain these hypothetical developments? What role do markets play in these processes? And does it make any sense to invoke property rights within this terrain? We are used to dealing with this plane of analysis when we address the land factor, but less used to doing so when we study labour. It cannot be a mere coincidence that a monument of law such as the Code Napoléon, simultaneously with the defining of property rights to real estate, makes an effort to consecrate the authority of the head of the family in a country which, thanks to the French Revolution, had become one of property-owning rural workers. The abolitionist movement may be seen in turn as just one more facet of that radical liberalism that had made property rights, in this case the right to dispose of one's own person, a key anchoring-point of its argument.
2. Rural employment and underemployment, precariousness and poverty.
Recent events within the world economy, and especially their incidence in Spain, face us again with lacerating proof of the grey area between the labour world and poverty. The official statistics placing a percentage of the wage-earning population under the poverty threshold, even if we do not consider other sectors of society such as the unemployed, young workers and pensioners, should draw our attention to this borderline territory between quality of life and exclusion in a sector such as that of rural labour, which is marked by strong seasonality. Obvious though this may be, rural underemployment, not to mention outright unemployment, is a topic which has been little studied and even less measured. Despite the difficulties it poses, it is worthwhile for us to make progress within this terrain and offer certain solid references in this regard. Female labour is particularly important in this sense, and some solid work has been accumulating in this area over the last few decades. Aspects such as widowhood in the rural setting, with an overwhelming presence in documentary testimony, or women's labour (as slaves, serfs, forced workers, family workers or wage-earners), which is poorly reflected (without any understandable justification) in censuses, may be studied for this purpose. Much the same can be said about child labour, which has been insufficiently explored despite some important publications. How can we study, in this aspect, the widespread presence in the rural world of orphans, bastards, foundlings and apprentices? We could also include, within our analysis, aspects relating to immigrant labour or to that of marginal ethnical groups in the rural world, notably that of the Moriscos. Lastly, to provide a photographic negative of the workers' situation we have the case of beggars, because often the rural worker lived part-time as a beggar and tried to increase his income "ostiatim" (i.e., begging from door to door). It may perhaps be useful to study both labour and mendicancy within this context as a single problem.
3. Monetary economy, daily wages and income in the rural world.
Despite the progress made over the last few decades in collecting and reconstructing the wage series for different periods in the Peninsula, both in nominal and real terms, much remains to be done. It is therefore a good idea to make a new call for the submission of analyses based on the wage series for the rural world, and for this purpose, we propose that this reconstruction take into account the different lines of labour relationship differentiation. One would have to be careful about classifying and differentiating contracts, tasks and remunerations. Thus, a distinction should be made between steady and occasional workers, adults and children, men and women, rural labourers and non-farming workers (those employed in wine cellars, edible oil mills, granaries, proto-industries, building industry, maintenance, etc), as also between unskilled and skilled labour tasks, and one should not lose sight either of the differences in the length of the working day. That way, we can make progress on a comparative focus from the viewpoints of both production costs and rural population lifestyle levels. The study of wages, which may have been paid in kind, in money or in a combination of both, also offers the chance of tackling another problem of general interest which has been largely glossed over, namely the penetration of the monetary economy within labour relationships in general within the rural world. This process, not necessarily a linear one by any means, will allow us a better understanding of the historical processes of change.
4. Languages, cultures and working ideologies.
The last line of research we propose considers our dependency as historians with regard to the language codes we have imbibed in both our classic literature and in the sources. Those who have worked on the population censuses of the 19th Century will have been surprised to find few indigents in Andalusia, but many in Galicia, Asturias and Leon, and will have had a hard time in comparatively differentiating the contents of categories such as those of 'owner', 'tenant' and 'daily wage earner'. Bearing in mind that language is a two-way bridge, in which both the articulation and understanding of meaning are crucial events, one should first of all ask oneself what facts lie hidden behind the semantic categories (whose semantic value has been doubly transformed by both the issuer and the receiver of the information) of rural worker, labourer, agricultural worker, farmer, daily labourer, protegé, servant, poor man, beggar, etc. This may be a good starting point from which to explo! re territory which although difficult to apprehend is more important: that of identity, culture and morality. Thus, we provide the example of the expression "a uso y costumbre de buen labrador" (according to the usage and custom of a good labourer) that repeatedly appears in hiring contracts. Is this a merely rhetorical expression that establishes certain standards of behaviour in the service of landowners? Or does it instead reflect a wider notion, an identity present in the rural medium, involving certain recognised behavioural or labour codes? Or, to take another stance: how were the political discourse terms "rustic" and "daily worker", which had previously been used as expressions of contempt, transformed into the basis for national exaltation and social redemption during the 19th and 20th Centuries? In between the universe of inherited culture transformed by the local environment and the ideology built up and preached from the centres of power or counter-power, lies a largely unexplored territory consisting of language and also material circumstances which awaits our analysis.
On a concluding note, we would like to insist on the relevance of these topics and on the fact that it is possible to approach them from very open chronological and geographical viewpoints, providing examples from those of the mediaevalists up to those of experts on the last few decades, and also allowing the participation of our colleagues from the other side of the Atlantic, from beyond the Pyrenees, or from Portugal.
Deadline for paper proposal: 30 of November of 2009 Please, send it to [mailto]gha@historia.udl.cat[/mailto], indicating title, author(s), email address, abstract (less than 3100 characters) and five keywords.