P.F. Souyri
are the only “historical fact.” Only natural disasters that strike peasant communities have been
recorded in sources, but are they enough to write a history of the peasantry?
Recent histories of the peasantry, even when their authors are unaware of this fact, give too
much weight to violent events such as ikki. When we examine things over the long run,
only disasters are brought to our attention. ... And yet, our ancestors lived more often than
not in peace, and entire generations never knew a single revolt. ... Only considering written
sources when attempting to understand the daily lives of people who themselves only had
the most tenuous link to the written word cannot but lead to errors.^15He went on to encourage a history of daily life and the social practices of the peasantry that
would include the methods of ethnologists.
A few historians, such as Nakamura Kichiji or Nishioka Toranosuke, heard the voice of the
founder of ethnology in Japan. They were opposed to the narrowly nationalist views that were
in fashion at the end of the 1930s and reaffirmed, through estate- centered or local monographs,
the importance of constructing a history of peasant daily life that would integrate popular culture
in all its aspects, including revolt. After the war, Nishioka published a particularly innovative
work on the necessity of writing a history of the daily life of the people, the only method, accord-
ing to him, by which to tear oneself away from a political history of the state and of the elites and
to write “a true historical work.”^16
A second shift in the historiography took place around 1980. Influenced by Japanese ethnolo-
gists, some historians turned once more to research leaning toward the study of daily practices,
founding a new wave that ended up being labeled shakaishi (social history) and became the starting
point for a new form of historical anthropology. For them, the goal was to practice a true form
of interdisciplinarity, to bring down the walls between narrowly defined fields, and to recognize
the importance of sources that had previously been underestimated by traditional positivist
historians. The new school embraced such diverse methodologies as the study of rituals, use of
the results of archeological research, and fresh examinations of artistic and literary sources.
This group of historians, which included Amino Yoshihiko and Katsumata Shizuo,
examined more specifically the links that existed not only between peasants and lords, but also
the relationships between peasants and the non- farming residents of the countryside, which
often included itinerant populations. They placed new importance on the analysis of rituals,
and showed how villagers could use the sacred and manipulate it to impress on the mighty the
legitimacy of their struggles. Accordingly, these scholars built a link between social history
and popular religiosity. For Katsumata, Ikki means the institution by the group of an exceptional
form of organization, which breaks the routine of daily life to raise the participants above their
social condition. No one, before the birth of this historical school, had paid attention to such
matters as the physical appearance of the rebels and its anthropological meaning. A new
historical narrative was thus free to emerge, taking on a new shape which can be summarized
as follows:
For centuries, peasants clung to the land, which they were trying to take over from lords,
usurers, and all sorts of people encroaching upon the land. This effort created its own
ideology, one that justified a distinctive character of landowning in which cultivating rights
should be inalienable. Scattered, mobile, and insecure financially, the peasantry attempted
throughout the middle ages to stabilize their condition by persuading the mighty to recog-
nize the particularities of their status as farmers, a goal they achieved gradually, by imposing
village communities as a structure of counter- power to that of the lords. But just as their