Pig Earth was published by Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative in 1979, the first volume of the Into Their Labours trilogy. In the early 1970s, Berger left London and moved to a peasant community in the French Alps — not as an observer or tourist but as a participant, working alongside his neighbors, attending to the rhythms of agricultural labor and seasonal life. Pig Earth is the literary fruit of this decision.
The book combines short stories (following specific characters through the dramas of rural life — love, death, inheritance, the slow dispossession by modernity), poems (precise, sensuous, attending to the physical world of animals, weather, and labor), and a concluding essay, “Historical Afterword,” that places the stories within a larger analysis of peasant culture’s disappearance from Europe.
Berger’s peasants are not pastoral idealizations. They are shrewd, suspicious, sometimes cruel, bound by codes of honor and shame that an outsider cannot easily penetrate. Their relationship to land and animals is not romantic but instrumental — and yet this instrumentality contains a respect for living things that industrial agriculture has destroyed. A peasant who slaughters a pig has a different relationship to death than a consumer who buys packaged meat; the relationship is not necessarily kinder, but it is honest.
The “Historical Afterword” argues that peasant culture — the oldest form of human social organization, surviving for ten thousand years — is being destroyed in a single century by industrial capitalism, and that its disappearance represents an incalculable loss of human knowledge about how to live with the earth rather than against it.
Collecting Pig Earth
First edition (Writers and Readers, London, 1979): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition: $15–$35
- Signed copies: $50–$150
- US first (Pantheon, 1979): $10–$25