In what may be the first explicitly comparative study of the effects of globalization on metropolitan and rural communities, In Gotham's Shadow examines how three central New York communities struggled over the last half century to survive in a global economy that seems to have forgotten them. Utica, formerly a city of one hundred thousand, experienced the same trends of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and urban renewal as nearly every American city, with the same mixed results. In Cooperstown and Hartwick, two small villages forty miles south of Utica, the same trends were at work, though with different outcomes. Hartwick may be seen as an example of how small towns have lost their core, while Cooperstown may be seen as an example of how a small town can survive by transforming itself into a tourist destination. Thomas provides extensive historical background mixed with newspaper excerpts and lively interviews that add a human dimension to the transformations these communities have experienced.

As one of the most important natural resources, the management of water is becoming increasingly important as water resources are growing more scarce. This is especially the case for rural areas and developing countries, such as Africa. In sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries today, the demand for water resources is increasing. In this innovative study, the author examines these forms of traditional or customary institutions of water management in a manner that has never been done before. First, the author provides us with an understanding and appreciation of the differential impact of customary institutions on drinking- and irrigation-water management. Most sociological studies on rural water management in SSA have addressed water-management issues without adequately analyzing customary institutions and showing how they affect rural water management. Most studies in river-basin management focus on water for irrigation. Few studies have examined how the customary and statutory institutions influence water management for different water uses. This study looks at how the management of water for domestic use differs from the management of water for livestock and small-scale irrigation. The second unique contribution of this book is the analysis of the role of women and how customary and statutory institutions affect women's participation in water management. Few studies have looked at the role of women and their contribution to rural water management. Previous studies have focused only on the statutory institutions. Finally, the study offers a valuable comparison of the effectiveness of statutory and customary institutions in enforcement of their regulations, resolving natural-resource conflicts, and in ensuring access to water for different uses. Although many researchers recognize the importance of customary institutions, their analysis tends to focus more on the statutory institutions for water management. In this book, both formal and informal water-management institutions are considered for a more balanced understanding. The findings of this study will serve as the basis for formulating policies and programs that include customary institutions in the management of rural water resources in Tanzania. In Tanzania, lack of access to safe water for many rural populations is a major concern. Lack of safe water has implications for rural people and the country as a whole. Policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, planners, and water providers need to be informed so they can incorporate customary institutions into policies and strategies for management of rural water resources. This is an important book for African studies, environmental studies, and policy studies.

This book presents a study in educational sociology, exploring the function of rural schools, which are a symbol of the state in rural society, in a time characterized by local cultural transition. The book begins with an investigation of the status quo, background and history of a representative rural school, Fengning Hope Elementary School, and gives a definition of "the 'states' in villages." Subsequently, on the basis of research on the teachers, an analysis of the courses taught, and comparison to other rural elementary schools of the same type, it reveals the dual status of rural schools and their relation with social development in rural areas. Based on thorough fieldwork and empirical research, the book provides a new vision of the interactive relation between the state and rural society, particularly focusing on the role of rural education in that relation. In addition, it explores the reshaping of Chinese culture and the part that intellectuals play in the process of today's cultural transition. For English-language readers and Western professionals, this translated version will offer an essential window into Chinese studies from a local point of view.

Foot and mouth disease and BSE have both had a devastating impact on rural society. Alongside these devastating developments, the rise of the organic food movement has helped to revitalize an already politicized rural population. From fox-hunting to farming, the vigour with which rural activities and living are defended overturns received notions of a sleepy and complacent countryside. Over the years "rural life" has been defined, redefined and eventually fallen out of fashion as a sociological concept--in contrast to urban studies, which has flourished. This much-needed reappraisal calls for its reinterpretation in light of the profound changes affecting the countryside. First providing an overview of rural sociology, Hillyard goes on to offer contemporary case studies that clearly demonstrate the need for a reinvigorated rural sociology. Tackling a range of contentious issues--from fox-hunting to organic farming--this book offers a new model for rural sociology and reassesses its role in contemporary society.

Following the Second World War, a massive land reclamation project to boost Japan's rice production capacity led to the transformation of the shallow lagoon of Hachirogata in Akita Prefecture into a seventeen-thousand-hectare expanse of farmland. In 1964, the village of Ogata-mura was founded on the empoldered land inside the lagoon and nearly six hundred pioneers from across the country were brought to settle there. The village was to be a model of a new breed of highly mechanized, efficient rice agriculture; however, the village's purpose was jeopardized when the demand for rice fell, and the goal of creating an egalitarian farming community was threatened as individual entrepreneurialism took root and as the settlers became divided into political factions that to this day continue to struggle for control of the village. Based on seventeen years of research, this book explores the process of Ogatamura's development from the planning stages to the present. An intensive ethnographic study of the relationship between land reclamation, agriculture, and politics in regional Japan, it traces the internal social effects of the village's economic transformations while addressing the implications of national policy at the municipal and regional levels.

This volume represents current and futuristic thinking of seminal rural education researchers, with the goal of providing perspectives and directions to inform the work of rural education research, practice, and policy. With an emphasis on leveraging collaboration among key rural education stakeholders, this title both outlines our current research knowledge base and maps a future research agenda for maximizing the educational experiences and achievement of rural K-12 students and their families and educators in the United States. In examining the interrelated impacts of teacher practices, family engagement, school/community environment and contextual factors, the book offers the evidence-based insights of seminal researchers on issues ranging from professional development and family-school partnership approaches to methodological considerations. It also explores the needs, opportunities and realities associated with translating research to the arenas of practice and policy - while considering how the latter can inform future scholarship.

This book will be a valuable source of information for those concerned with rural and farm tourism, sustainable tourism and the marketing of "Calibri">local gastronomy. It presents cases with an international and interdisciplinary approach in order to provideideas for strategic perspectives in tourism studies. Furthermore, for the first time the complex fields of rural and food tourism are examined from an international (Italy and Germany) viewpoint. This book explores ways in which gastronomical heritage (i.e., regional food, organic food) can be incorporated in rural tourism (above all farm tourism) and development policies as well as in new avenues of research e.g., sensory marketing, online marketing) in order to enhance sustainable practices both in the tourism and in the agri-food sector. Overall, the book presents an overview of benchmark practices for professionals (associations of rural tourism, farmers, etc.), while offering scholars a well-founded source to refer to in order to gain up-to-date insights into the state of the art of studies on rural and food tourism.

This book draws on preeminent planning theorist Patsy Healey's personal experiences as a resident of a small rural town in England, to explore what place and community mean in a particular context, and how different initiatives struggle to get a stake in the wider governance relations while maintaining their own focus and ways of working. Throughout the book, Healey assesses the public value generated by community initiatives and the impact of such activity on wider governance dynamics. Healey explores the power which small communities are able to mobilise through self-organisation and grassroots activism. Through the lens of Wooler and Glendale as a micro-society, the book centres on a community experiencing an economic and demographic transition. It focuses on three initiatives developed and led by local people - a small community development trust, an informal attentionmobilising network, and a Neighbourhood Plan project which uses an opportunity provided within the formal planning system. It examines how, in such civil society activism, people came together to promote local development in a place and community neglected by the dominant political economy. The book details the power and force of community initiative and its potential for transforming both the future possibilities for the place and community itself, as well as wider governance relations. Overall, it seeks to enrich academic and policy discussion about how the relations between formal government and civil society energy could evolve in more productive and progressive directions.

The ways we understand processes of agrarian change are pressing issues for policy makers and development practitioners. Interpreting changes in two agrarian societies in India and Indonesia, the author reveals how transformations to self are critical factors shaping change, as well as under-recognized consequences of development initiatives.

This book provides insight into rural poverty in Latin America. It draws on six case studies of recent rural household surveys for Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Paraguay, and Peru and several thematic studies examining land, labor, rural financial markets, the environments, and disadvantaged groups. Recognizing the heterogeneity within the rural economy, the studies characterize three important groups--small farmers, landless farm workers, and rural non-farm workers--and provide quantitative and qualitative analyses of the determinants of household income.

Linking the terms "rural" and "literacy" often conjures images of deficit and improvement. This book takes a different approach, unpacking both of these laden concepts in diverse national contexts. It explores how people in many rural places understand and experience what it means to be rural and the multiple ways that exist of being literate, including ways that are linked to and situated in a particular place and conception of that place. The chapters in this international collection investigate a wide range of theorizations of rurality and literacy; literate practices and pedagogies; questions of place, space, and sustainability; and complex representations of rurality that challenge simplistic conceptions of standardized literacy and the real-and-imagined world beyond the metropolis.

Coming of Age in Times of Crisis is an anthropological study of the intersecting roles of gender and schooling in the lives of rural Venezuelan youth as they make the transition to adulthood during times of national political and economic crisis. Strongly grounded in local detail while speaking to larger comparative issues and the crises that surround globalization, the study enables us to see how gender roles and social class are reproduced in a culture experiencing profound upheaval, and to see how rural Venezuelans have managed to reproduce and change their culture in these circumstances. This book is based on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic field research Hurtig conducted in the Andean region of Venezuela between 1991 and 1993, and again briefly in 1996.

Fliegel overviews and summarizes research on the spread of innovations through rural populations. The volume begins with a look at the discovery of diffusion as a patterned process in the 1940s and examines the creation of the classical model to explain diffusion as a transfer of information. Fliegel then notes how the classical model changed to accommodate the particular socioeconomic condition when the model was applied to developing countries after 1945. He concludes by commenting on the revival of interest in diffusion research, the further development and refinement of the classical model, and the modern emphasis on conservation-oriented innovations rather than on innovations that enhance production. Fliegel overviews and summarizes research on the spread of innovations through rural populations. The volume gives detailed attention to the development and utilization of diffusion research from the 1940s to 1970 and traces the creation of the classical model for explaining the spread of innovations. Because the classical model seemed inadequate when applied to the diffusion of innovations in lesser-developed countries after World War II, the model changed to accommodate new research. The book notes the role of diffusion research in developing countries after the second world war, the change of the classical model to include socioeconomic conditions peculiar to these countries, and the growth and development of diffusion research to the present day. The first part of the book provides an historical survey of diffusion research through 1970. The chapters in this section discuss the discovery of diffusion as a patterned process, the development of the classical model to explain diffusion as an information transfer, and the implementation of diffusion research in developing countries after 1945. The second part, devoted to recent trends, includes chapters on the further development and refinement of the classical model, the revival of interest in diffusion research, and the modern emphasis on conservation-oriented innovations rather than on ones that enhance production. An extensive bibliography concludes this comprehensive study.

The issue of collective and multiple property rights in animals, such as cattle, camels or reindeers, among pastoralists has never been a subject of special cross-cultural and comparative study. Focusing on pastoralist societies in East and West Africa, the Far North and Siberia, and the Eurasian steppes, this volume addresses the issue of property rights and the changes these societies have undergone due to the direct or indirect influence of modernization and globalization processes. The contributors also investigate the interplay of older sets of rights and modern marketing policies; political, ecological and economic effects of collectivization and de-collectivization; the existence of collective and private property in the Soviet Union and its successor states; state taxation and destocking measures in African dry lands; and the effects of quarantine, as well as import and export regulations. The rich and well-researched ethnographic, historical, and economic data in these chapters provides new theoretical insights into the matter of property rights in animals.

Anatoly M. Khazanov is Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Nomads and the Outside World (1st. ed. Cambridge University Press, 1984) and After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Comonwealth of Independent States (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Gunther Schlee is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Until 1999, he was a Professor for Social Anthropology at the University of Bielefeld. His publications include Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (Manchester University Press 1989).

Dr. Hossen carried out an exceptional program of research in Bangladesh which focused on water governance in relation to human rights, international water law and environmental sustainability. His major argument is that eco-agricultural system encounters major disruptions due to a number of factors including regional hydropolitics and neoliberal and highly centralized approaches to water resource management that follow the principles of "ecocracy." In this context, Dr. Hossen explores three major questions: (i) How can local ecological knowledge be incorporated into national water policy? (ii) What strategies and reforms are required at the international watershed governance level? and (iii) How can human rights principles, including the principle of water as a human right, be used to formulate more effective water policy and governance principles? To answer these questions, Dr. Hossen explores the effects of regional hydropolitics on water management, focusing on three large engineering projects, the Farakka Barrage built by India on the Ganges River, and the Ganges-Kobodak (GK) and Gorai River Restoration (GRR) Projects in Bangladesh. This analysis is based on his research into local knowledge and farming practices during a year of fieldwork in 2011-12, focus group discussions, in-depth case studies and social survey methods. In addition to this primary data, he looks at extensive secondary documents from the government of Bangladesh pertaining to water management, agricultural modernization and institutional structures. The arguments herein are applicable particularly to the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin countries in South Asia but also to the river basins of other parts of the world.

Since 1957, more than 45 African countries have received aid from China, yet until recently little has been known about the effectiveness or impact of this assistance. Brautigam provides the first authoritative account of China's experience as an aid donor in rural Africa. In a detailed and highly readable analysis, the author draws on anthropology, economics, organization theory and political science to explain how China's domestic agenda shaped the design of its aid, and how domestic politics in African countries influenced its outcome.

This book builds upon the ground-breaking work already undertaken by the author filling the absence of research into the significance, character and value of creative industries beyond major urban centres. What has emerged in this work is the specific centrality of place, time and the natural environment to the creative practice of those who have chosen or found themselves operating outside the mainstream of urban creative milieus. Unlike any existing book in the market, Locating Cultural Work uniquely examines creative workers in terms of three interlinked concerns: the wider history of creativity and place in the UK since the Industrial Revolution (in particular the Romantics and the Arts and Craft Movement, especially as manifest in the Lake District and Cotswolds); the emotional-affective-drivers of creativity and place; and, the relationship between rural and regional cultural industries, tourism and environmental awareness.

In compiling this collection of previously unpublished essays, Seroka was prompted by several concerns about current administrative responses and opportunities for change in rural areas. Specfically, these concerns were that the rural renaissance has placed administrative offices and officials in affected governmental units under severe and unanticipated stress; that rural policy programs require specific considerations which are divided from urban-based programs; and that rural governmental units must be studied flexibly, and not as a single monolithic block. Particular subjects discussed include the theory of rural administrative change, rural administration in the township, administration under "boom and bust" circumstances, policy variations in rural areas, the impact of intergovernmental fundings on rural policymaking, and policy limitations and constraints on rural public administration. The volume is divided into four distinct units. In the first, alternate models for rural public administration are introduced. In the second, the rural administrative environment is defined and described. The third examines particular rural administrative responses to immediate and specific problems. In the fourth part the editor offers an overall assessment of rural public administration research.

Margaret Spufford has written as detailed an account of the lives and activities of the chapmen as there is likely to be, given the widely-spread and fragmented evidence. She shows where and when they were active, and in particular their rise in the seventeenth century, their ranks and their typical careers, the variety of the cloths and other wares they carried, and the attitude of authority towards them.

Recent research suggests that rural residents in the global North are happier than urban populations in the same countries. This goes against received wisdom in the field, where the opposite is usually assumed. Is quality of life better in the rural areas? How and under which circumstances is this the case? What can we learn from digging deeper into the rural-urban happiness paradox and which critical questions does this leave us with for the future? What might policymakers, planners, architects, and other decision-makers learn about how, when, and where to intervene? Rural quality of life delves deeper into these matters by asking what quality of life in rural areas is all about - in everyday life, through interventions in the built environment, in civil society and measures of subjective well-being. -- .