The peasants’ lack of respect for hard work is remarkable. “Him? He digs in the field like a beetle from morning till night!” They often say this with scorn.
Caveats: I think this ethnography is likely to be biased for the reasons Jason lists, I haven’t read the work I’m about to quote in years, and I thought it had problems at the time. Nonetheless...
Farewell to Alms looked at European vs East Asian folk sayings around farming, and concluded that Asian sayings tended to emphasize the rewards to hard work, whereas European sayings tended to be closer to “I sure hope it rains”, emphasizing luck and deemphasizing personal effort. He attributes this to the fact that European farming results were based much less on hard work and much more on luck, whereas rice farming in east Asia had a much stronger correlation between effort and reward.
(I low-confidence think Farewell to Alms underestimated how much effort European farming was, but maybe not the relative amount of work compared to Asian rice farming)
Caveats: I think this ethnography is likely to be biased for the reasons Jason lists, I haven’t read the work I’m about to quote in years, and I thought it had problems at the time. Nonetheless...
Farewell to Alms looked at European vs East Asian folk sayings around farming, and concluded that Asian sayings tended to emphasize the rewards to hard work, whereas European sayings tended to be closer to “I sure hope it rains”, emphasizing luck and deemphasizing personal effort. He attributes this to the fact that European farming results were based much less on hard work and much more on luck, whereas rice farming in east Asia had a much stronger correlation between effort and reward.
(I low-confidence think Farewell to Alms underestimated how much effort European farming was, but maybe not the relative amount of work compared to Asian rice farming)