Serf's Up

You may have noticed that I have recently discovered the joys of hyperlinking.  I have actually known about hyperlinks for a long time, since at least 1998 when my computer-savvy grade 7 teacher commissioned us to do internet projects on the history of Grand Forks.  My poorly-researched and ill-formatted page on early settlers went offline sometime in the mid-2000s, but my knowledge of hyperlinking has only temporarily evaded me.  As such, all this wallowing in eastern Europe and romancing the countryside has reminded me of an article I read a couple of years ago that regularly gets me fired up when the subject of the eastern European peasantry comes up (more often than not if I have my way in a conversation).

I recently had a European couchsurfer who was offended by the apparent classism in some of my remarks—specifically the use of “peasant” to describe one from a village engaged in agriculture.  My need to classify this couchsurfer as “European” stems from the fact that in North America we romanticise the peasant and with good reason.  I could have classified this couchsurfer as a German male but gender and ethnicity bear much less relevance to this than what can be perceived as a general European attitude towards class.  

For starters, if you’re a North American then you’re probably of hardy peasant stock.  Sure, life has gotten soft for a lot of us and we’ve all gotten a bit portly in subsequent generations, but if CBC Heritage Minutes have taught me anything it’s that everyone in Canada has descended from a sturdy, enterprising peasantry that lived in sod houses on the Prairies and survived -40 winters.  This is still my image of Canadian immigration, and part of me thinks living in a sod house for one calendar year should not only be mandatory for new arrivals to Canada today, but also for the rather soft and doughy youth we’re rearing today as some sort of intro-to-Canada boot-camp.  

Next, it’s no secret that North America has perfected the idea of taking something from another culture and making it standardised, internalised, and available for mass consumption.  Then things like cottage cheese, Hungarian salami, etc. get churned out and shipped all around the continent with promises of “Old World” taste and quality and available to everyone everywhere, to the point where we have fully forgotten what inspired these types of foods in the first place.  So when I see homemade sausages, cheese, and jars of artisanal jams for sale by people who actually know how to make them, I lose my shit. 

Let’s face it, the reason my ancestors left Austria-Hungary is because they didn’t have the opportunity to sit at bohemian cafés in Budapest reading classic literature and discussing theoretical linguistics.  And I know that when my great-grandmother boarded that train for Hamburg from Bukovina with the ultimate destination of Thunder Bay, all she was thinking about and hoping for her issue was that they may one day pay 3 euros for a latte in a smokey café while reading Kundera after a hard day of slaving over Excel spreadsheets.  I’m just living up to family expectations.  

So you’ll be pleased to know that I turned the tables on my couchsurfer and denounced him as classist for inferring that I was implying that a self-sufficient and hardworking person was somehow beneath me.  This, if anything, exposed the kind of endemic, elitist bias on his part that resulted in such mass outmigration in centuries past of enterprising individuals whose descendents are now frequenting the cafés of Budapest and Europe en masse; buying handicrafts and specialty food items from people with whom they share a common lineage; and finally, supporting the European economy through tourist dollars spent trying to enjoy an elevated and cultured lifestyle not available in North American society due to it being nurtured and built by a underclass never allowed to enjoy it in Europe.  

And that, kids, is why “peasant” is not a pejorative, and why taking offense at the term is inherently classist.  So eat it.