Structurs Of Resistance

11 Pages 2702 Words

an overseer (soprastante) and a number of field guards (campieri). The overseer was the gabelloto’s ‘man of confidence’ — ‘he dealt with the peasants set to work on the estates and took care of the general protection of the enterprise.’ The campieri assisted the overseer in his work, and ‘constituted a kind of private police force which, in the absence of an efficient formal control apparatus, claimed to maintain law and order in the countryside.’ This hierarchical structure is replicated in Latin American latifundios, as described by Ernest Feder in ‘Latifundios and Agricultural Labour.’ Feder further describes the Latin American latifundismo as being characterised by ‘absentee landlordism’. He asserts that ‘for the rural worker almost every estate owner is an absenteeist, as the bulk of the large estates is managed by administrators’; the latter appearing to be Latin American counterparts of the soprastanti. This administrative structure has several important repercussions for the socioeconomic structural evolution...