3.3 Agricultural Society

The way of life: cultivation settles humanity — first horticulture (slash-and-burn — shifting plots), then intensive agriculture (the plough, irrigation, the field's permanence): surplus becomes systematic — and surplus changes everything. Social organisation (the greattransformation):villages and their permanence; population density; land as property (the new scarce, defensible, heritable core — inheritance rules harden); stratificationinstitutionalised: chiefs and kings, priests and taxes, peasants and lords (estate and caste systems — Sociology Unit 2.6); the state is born of the granary (administration, law, war); specialisation and markets; kinship's formalisation — lineages, clans, marriage alliances (Levi- Strauss's exchange theory — Unit 5.3); organised religion (legitimation's machinery — from agrarian ritual to church). Order institutions: chiefly courts and customary tribunals; thepeasant moral economy (Scott's subsistence ethic: the norm of the "righteous granary" — elite breach of subsistence norms as rebellion's cause); peasantries as "part-societies" (Wolf) — the village inside, the state's reach outside (rent, tax, corvée — Nepal's jagir/birta peasantry of the Hill state — Nepali History Unit 5). Nepal's case (the paradigm): the hill and tarai agrarian order — terrace (bhat/pakho) agriculture; farmer-managed irrigation institutions (kulo and its maintenance rules — a famous commons case); caste as agrarian division of labour; land tenures' legal history (raikar, kipat, birta — your Economics-I and History units' ledger).