The grace of peasants

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: And here we might step back a moment and consider that something of great weight may be going on here, with this matter of the morality of ordinary life, and with the word ‘grace’ in particular. For a word that is traditionally applied to the lord seems equally and perhaps more applicable to the peasant, one who is decorous, courtly even. Where does being civilized really reside? Where is ‘civilization’ to be found? The anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers was deeply interested in the concept of what he called grace in what he termed traditional societies. The subject of Pitt-Rivers’ anthropology was the peasants of twentieth-century Adalucian Spain, not its aristocrats. As he puts it, ‘grace is inspired by the notion of something over and above what is due, economically, legally, or morally; it is neither foreseeable, predictable by reasoning, nor subject to guarantee.’ It is the gift freely given, a sort of cousin to ‘honour’. As such it infuses…