Word: peasant
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...invocation of history and "forced-draft urbanization and modernization" reminds me of the invocation of history by the Stalinists who destroyed a large part of the peasant class in the Soviet Union in the thirties, and the "forced-draft" ruralization by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (a mirror image of "forced-draft urbanization"), after the U.S. invasion of that country. Such people can have whatever political opinion they want: I do not regard these opinions as science, merely political opinions and their implementations. Note how the word "modernization" occurs in a paragraph like the above, as well...
...Only two months after his release in 1945, Walesa's father died. At 24, the young rural mechanic, one of seven children, grew bored with his job and moved to the Baltic port of Gdansk, where he became a shipyard electrician. He describes himself as a typical peasant worker, "not really belonging to the city, nor the countryside, a wage earner in appearance only, profoundly attached to his farm." Such men and women were pragmatic, practicing Catholics with little interest in the abstract Communist orthodoxy of Poland's Soviet-backed rulers. Their main concern was poverty. Shipyard conditions were harsh...
...trilogy of comic masterpieces. It opens with the imminent marriage of Arnolphe (Eric Oleson), an arrogant country squire and "raving paranoid." Obsessed with a fear of being ridiculed in his choice of a wife, Arnolphe has carefully planned his marriage over many years. He took charge of a young peasant girl, Agnes (Katherine Robin), and raised her just as he wished--innocent and stupid, a girl who thinks "children are begotten through the ear." Now that she's reached marriageable age, he's brought her to a secluded manor near his home to keep her chaste in the last days...
Vasilii Perov was one of the dominant figuresof the period, as well as a founding member of theCircle of the Itinerants. His work reflects anintense compassion for the suffering of thepeople, and his work comprises scenes of theeveryday tragedies of peasant life. In "A DrownedWoman," all the humiliation and injury of peasantliving is dramatized in one image of everydaytragedy: a peasant woman clad in black lies washedup on the shore, her hands and feet intertwinedwith seaweed. The yellows, browns and blacks ofthe painting are not beautiful, but they reflectPerov's artistic asceticism, his willingness tosacrifice prettiness for the sake...
DURING THE 1870s, NEW SOCIAL issues tiedto the emergence of capitalism replaced concernfor the legacy of serfdom, and the realistpainters turned their eye to these new problems.The image of the peasant dominated many canvassesof the period; as Lecturer in History andLiterature Cathy Frierson has pointed out, it wasthe objective of many realist painters to"penetrate and master the peasant soul." IvanKramskoi's portrait, "Mina Moiseev" is the firstwork to confront visitors to the exhibit, and itgives clear insight into the Itinerant painter'sdetermination to study the psychological behaviorof the peasant. Using a restricted palette,Kramskoi does not idealize his subject...