Tom Brass

Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at Queen's College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.

Born on 3 March 1946, Tom (Thomas Ferdinand Norman) Brass was educated at boarding schools run by the Dominicans (Blackfriars, Llanarth and Laxton), studied social sciences (sociology, anthropology) at the new universities (Essex, Sussex) and then taught these same subjects at the old ones (Durham, Cambridge). He conducted fieldwork research in eastern Peru during the mid-1970s and in Northern India during the 1980s. An account by him of his arrest, interrogation, imprisonment and expulsion from Peru is contained in ‘The Sabotage of Anthropology and the Anthropologist as Saboteur’, The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XIII, No. 2 (1982). (Reprinted together with a postscript in Labour Markets, Identities, Controversies, pages 181-191).

Described by James Petras (Science and Society, Vol. 77, No. 3, 2013, p. 434) as ‘one of the United Kingdom’s leading Marxist scholars’, much of what Brass has published deals with two contentious and much-debated issues in the area of development studies: the link between unfree labour and capitalism, and the political impact of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism. His views have influenced others writing about these same issues.

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