From commune to household: statistics and the social construction of Chaianov's theory of peasant economy.

Categorization plays an integral part in how we see and interpret the world. This is especially true when we attempt to comprehend the complexities of human society, where the heterogeneity of human activity across time and space demands that some criterion (class, gender, age, profession, etc.) be used to reduce the number of variables examined. From the mid-nineteenth century—as statistics evolved from the simple “political arithmetic” of tax collectors and army recruiters into a potential science of human behavior—categorizing the population became a contentious issue that reflected the social and political agendas of data collectors.1 At the same time, when data refused to be molded to researchers’ assumptions, the task of putting people and their activities into analytical categories challenged the validity of the categories themselves. In this way, statistical representations and categories became socially constructed knowledge. Attempts by Russia’s zemstvo statisticians to discover underlying “universal laws” of peasant society illustrate this tension in the process of collecting data and categorizing it for analysis.2 These attempts reflected researchers’ assumptions and necessitated a shift in the way they perceived their subject. What began as investigations of the Russian peasant’s repartitional land commune (mir or obshchina) soon shifted focus to individual peasant households. An examination of this process reveals the socially constructed nature of the household model of peasant economy offered in the work of A. V. Chaianov and others of the so-called Organization and Production School.3 On one hand, his approach to understanding the dynamics of the peasant economy differed sub-