Abstract
This introduction considers the issues raised in the debate, recently joined in the works of James Scott and Samuel Popkin and explored in the papers in this symposium, regarding the relative salience of moral and rational economic approaches to the study of the adaptation of peasantries to worlds transformed by their incorporation into modern states and into a global economy. The author offers a refiguration of theoretical assumptions, arguing that, in order to understand the variations in modes of adaptation that have been described in the symposium, it is necessary to assume that the constraints on the worlds of peasants generated by political-economic changes are made meaningful for social action not only in terms of instrumental rationality, but also with reference to culturally distinctive moral premises.
