At the core of Steven Feierman’s Peasant Intellectuals is the conviction that peasants are active participants in shaping political discourse. Alongside this conviction, Feierman asserts that peasants "draw upon a rich variety of past forms" to create a "new political discourse" (3). Through an exhausting study of the political and social movements in Shambaai, Tanganyika, he reveals how the traditional concepts of kubana shi (to harm the land) and kuzifya shi (to heal the land) and its concomitant theory of nguvu kwa nguvu (power against power) developed within peasant thought. He pays special attention to the ways in which these fundamental terms of peasant political discourse shaped and were shaped by political movements. These terms are the tools through which peasant intellectuals entered the public, political discourse, pursued political goals, and rewrote their political future.
The introduction to Feierman’s work is theoretically dense. He analyzes and interacts with many prominent and even not-so-prominent social theorists. Through this analysis, Feierman attempts to demonstrate that political language and symbols are not explainable within a "unitary framework" or a "binary definition" (9). Instead, political language and symbols function within a complex discourse that includes not only politics but also culture. Cultural expression acts to preserve certain forms of the language, even under the stress of counter-ideological dominance, while at the same time imbuing the content of these forms with new meaning, regardless of any contingencies. For Feierman, the significant revelation is that peasants are the authors and proponents of the discourse that arises out of the interrelatedness of political and cultural expression. Furthermore, Feierman asserts that the peasantry is able to promulgate this discourse despite their divergent, heterogeneous character. On this point, Feierman stands in sharp contrast to Gramsci, who argues that only the working class and its affiliation with the Communist Party could create, elaborate, and distribute such discourse (19).
Even so, Feierman returns to Gramsci in his attempt resolve the distinction between and the role of discursive consciousness and practical consciousness. In agreement with Gramsci, Feierman asserts that practical consciousness, and the acts that arise out of it, transform discursive consciousness. The peasantry, embracing its practical consciousness, "rejects hegemonic values" and shapes a "radical discursive consciousness" (32). It is this project, undertaken primarily by the peasantry, which Feierman traces in his history of Shambaai, Tanganyika. Feierman argues that it is the practical consciousness, revealed in practical activities such as tribute payment, the kifu group, sacrifices, and farming, that subverts colonial rule and provides a foundation for the independence movement. The practical consciousness creates the discursive consciousness that empowers TANU in its fight against the hegemony of British rule. In Feierman’s final analysis—which is a return to his sharp critique of Gramsci’s theory of the need for a centralized party to act as the "collective intellectual"—it is TANU, using the "substantial collective influence" of the bureaucracy to suppress the emergence of popular peasant organizations, that betrays the peasantry (19, 233).
Applying Feierman’s methodology to ancient history, and specifically ancient Israelite history, presents a formidable challenge. The temporal distance at which historians of the ancient world find themselves in relation to their subject makes uncovering the practical consciousness difficult, if not in most cases impossible. Most evidence to which the historians of the ancient world must appeal is representative of the discursive consciousness of their subject. Moreover, the illiteracy of the masses ensures that even this evidence reflects primarily, if not exclusively, the discursive consciousness of a dominant ideology. The biblical text, however, as a historio-cultural artifact collecting a corpus of sacred literature spanning at minimum 200 years and as much as 1500 years of cultural and religious history, is a relatively unique piece of evidence to which Feierman’s methodology can, with some merit, apply.
As the multiple documents and traditions that exist in the biblical text were collected, they assumed a sacred status. This means that successive generations approached the work of preceding generations with a certain amount of reverence. While successive generations could add, revise, edit, and even take away, they still worked with the preserved documents and therefore appear not to have completely suppressed the ideology or ideologies reflected in the literature of the preceding generations. The Hebrew Bible, therefore, preserves many and often conflicting voices of Israelite cultural and religious history.
By examining the various compositional layers of the documents or the intertextuality in a given corpus, ancient historians can begin to recover the voice of religious and political movements, social classes, and even where links to oral tradition are discernable, the peasantry. These voices may have had pre-eminence at one time and were supplanted at another time; but the evidence of their existence remains in the texts. It is, unavoidably so, a discursive consciousness represented in the texts but at least it provides evidence of how common traditions, history, and practices were appropriated and given new meaning in disparate social and political climates. The Hebrew Bible has its share of political and religious language and symbols that like kubana shi and kuzifya shi shaped, were shaped by, and actually continue to shape political and religious movements and discourse.
Recovering Peasant Discourse
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