Peasant Wisdom

Peasant Wisdom: Cultural Adaptation in a Swiss Village offers an intimate ethnographic portrait of Bruson, a small Alpine village in the canton of Valais, as it negotiates the pressures of modernization while holding fast to an enduring ideology of “peasant wisdom.” Drawing on nineteen months of fieldwork in the late 1960s, Daniela Weinberg traces how households, kinship networks, and village institutions adapt to shifting agricultural economies, federal subsidies, and the lure of wage labor without losing the cultural continuities that tie contemporary Brusonins to their medieval forebears. Her richly detailed account examines everything from inheritance disputes and cooperative dairying to the rituals of communal eating and the symbolic weight of family names, showing how local practices sustain a sense of autonomy and identity within Switzerland’s nested federal system.

At once a study of cultural resilience and of subtle transformation, Peasant Wisdom challenges prevailing models of rural decline and “exode rural” by documenting how Bruson reframes its agricultural base, embraces tourism, and maintains vibrant communal ties. Weinberg demonstrates that regulation and adaptation are not opposed processes but overlapping strategies by which mountain villagers balance change with continuity. This nuanced case study contributes to debates in anthropology, European studies, and political sociology, illuminating the ways in which peasant societies endure as active participants in modern democratic states while preserving their distinctive worldviews.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.