It comes from paintings: from Uccello's Battle of San Romano, or Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, paintings that preserve a medieval view of the world, a peasant experience of landscape, as something that envelops you, in the way that medieval scholars believed the canopy of heaven swaddled the earth.
She was apparently not an infallible folklorist: Elizabeth Coxhead, editor of the modern edition of Gregory's Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, notes that "some of the tales may have been bowdlerised for her ear, and the wicked landlord, who loomed large in peasant experience, is notably absent from her accounts".
Under depressing and burdensome conditions, landless female peasants experience a decline in their quality of sleep, which reduces their energy, ultimately trapping them in the vicious cycle of declining physical and psychological health.
Soon Mr. Li was required to join the Socialist Education Movement, which sent urban youths to the countryside -- in his case to Acheng County, 30 miles southeast of Harbin -- to experience peasant life.
In addition, China was poor and industrially underdeveloped, and its people were mostly illiterate peasants with no experience of democratic politics.
My favorite nun saga is "The Song of Bernadette," a bio-pic about a French peasant girl who experiences visions of the Virgin, as portrayed by an immaculately brunet Linda Darnell.
Classic novels, he said, either portray the middle and upper classes exclusively, or show peasants through the eyes of the middle class, as in Anna Karenina, in which the reader learns about about Russian peasants through the experience of the middle-class Konstantin Levin.
Evo Morales - a coca farmer himself - saw them burn a peasant farmer alive, an experience he says "changed me forever".
When individual peasants came to them and purchased lime on credit, they always took advantage of those peasants who had little experience in buying lime and lacked the knowledge to evaluate its quality, even though it was very likely that the peasants could pay on time.
But he made his point in his 1934 opera and associated symphony Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the 16th-century painter Mathias Grunewald, who renounced his art to join the Peasants' War, only to experience a vision which compelled him to return painting as the only effective contribution he could make.
The PLA is much more professional now than when it was a peasant army, but it lacks experience.
