the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

of Phear’s studies is devoted to particular villages, all are generalized withrespect to either of the two regions in question. His announced task wasto describe to English readers a type specimen of an agricultural villagein Bengal. It is not a specimen that he dealt with, but a type. NeverthelessPhear provided detailed accounts of household budgets, landaccounts, tax schedules, lists of possessions which are quite concrete (seePhear excerpts, pp. 134, 143 and passim). The brevity of Marx’s excerptsfrom the last chapter, on the Aryan village, in addition to his commentson it, indicate his impatience with such hypothetical reconstructions ofthe past. Phear was well informed on rural India during the nineteenthcentury particularly in regard to deltaic Bengal, but save for a few ancientdocuments which he had interpreted for him he was not well informedabout India prior to the Muslim conquest; yet he attempted to reconstructthe ‘Aryan’ village from data which he gathered in Bengal and in SinghaleseCeylon, to which those from Mhairwarra and Ajmere were added.The contrast of the position of the peasant in the land tenure system ofIndia and in Europe was the last thought that Marx took from Phear’sbook.Phear held Maine in high esteem; Marx was generally objective towardPhear, noting data derived from him, with few objections. Substantiveissues raised by Marx in opposition to Phear, beside the speculative reconstructionsalready mentioned, concern the relation between the familyand society in the oriental village community, and the question of theoriental community and society in relation to feudalism. The problem ofthe relations of the family, village and society, in particular, whether thesociety is the village on a larger scale, was critically treated by Marx whorejected Phear’s idea that gradations of ‘respectability and employment’59in Phear’s terms grew up within the village itself; a fortiori, therefore, thefamily could still less have been the ground for the development of socialdifferences or economic relations. In this connection, Marx commented,“The asinus lets everything be founded by private families.” (Marx,Phear excerpts, p. 15 3). The point had already been raised in regard tothe Morgan excerpts (see also in reference to Maine excerpts, n. 144); hereit is further developed by Marx in terms of the difference between urbanand rural families; the urban-rural difference is independent of theindustrial-agricultural difference, for the latter did not come into beingin a significant way in the oriental society of the nineteenth century.Phear was directed both toward and away from the idea of the orientalcommunity as a social category unto itself. On the one hand he criticizeda contemporary writer for having falsified the facts by phraseologyborrowed from feudal Europe,60 on the other he alluded to sub-infeudationin East Bengal;61 further in this connection, Marx (Phear excerpts,p. 136) noted, “Dieser Esel Phear nennt die constitution des villagefeudal” .62 The application of the category of feudalism to the oriental32