This case study is based on a consequent implementing of the Grounded Theory Approach. It takes a close look at rural women's life worlds, not only capturing them as agents in the ongoing process of social and political change, but also revealing concepts and motivations leading their agency. It clearly shows rural women in the Northwest Province of Cameroon involved in mass protests fighting for more democracy, and at the same time struggling to improve their participation in all fields of social action, from family level to the economic sphere and the political arena of local government.

This book analyzes the functions, content, methods, findings, and impacts of social and cultural research carried out by the worldwide network of 16 International Agricultural Research Centers of the CGIAR(Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). Its two main parts - "insiders" and "outsiders" - bring together the perspectives of over 50 eminent scholars and social researchers from 30 countries, working within the Centers or within outside academic and development institutions. The authors examine critically the priorities, strengths, and weaknesses of research on the socio-structural, behavioral, cultural, and institutional variables of developing agriculture, forestry, livestock, and fisheries. The studies focus on farmers' values, needs and knowledge, their patterns of social organization, issues of food security, natural resource management and poverty reduction. Alternative models of multidisciplinary research, reuniting biological, natural, economic and social sciences are scrutinized in the light of experience and results, with emphasis on the nature of social science research as a source of international public goods and a key contributor to induced development.

Multiple caretaking arrangements exist in non-western societies with other members of the household and the community assisting the mother in child care. These others include the children's older siblings especially in subsistence based horticultural and or pastoral societies where sibling caretaking comprises a large portion of children's daily activities. During these caretaking sessions, older siblings may intentionally or unintentionally transmit culture to the younger children. Caretaking of small children thus implies transmitting cultural values to the children in everyday context during everyday activities. As very little research has been conducted in the area of sibling teaching, this study sets out to investigate sibling teaching among the Agikuyu of Kenya by means of video recording. It looks at the different teaching abilities and strategies of the children according to age and social status. It also pays attention to the cultural context, in which the teaching occurs, as well as to the reflection of social relationships found in the children's interaction. The author points out, that and in what way children can be important socialization tools to their younger siblings.

This work documents the history of change during the colonial period in the Abakaliki division and town of south-eastern Igbo Nigeria over four main historical periods: pre- British Abakaliki; the beginnings of colonialism from the early twentieth century until the 1920s; the 1920s until the 2nd World War; and the post-war period through to independence in 1960. Within the context of rapid urbanisation and urban sprawl in Africa, the study focuses on one Nigerian town and its rural environs. It is the story of successful rural farmers and of an emerging town in their midst; and a study of ethnic interrelationships, integration and conflict between the town and the rural areas. It is a study in colonial history within the framework of British control and conquest; and also a story of African responses to colonialism: resistance, accommodation and innovation. The author characterises his work as more descriptive than theoretical, and as having regard for both anthropological and historical approaches and the positive and negative aspects of colonialism, without being overtly ideological.

This book highlights some of the main areas of debate around the subject of agricultural policy in Eastern Africa. Its major aim is to introduce the reader to different issues of economic and social change arising from agricultural development and to provide an understanding of some of the major difficulties faced by African countries in pursuing an agricultural policy.

The assembled stable of writers has produced a highly readable - and nostalgic - volume. Some will make you laugh; some may bring tears. Any one is worth the price of the book.

prestigious and significant volume offering theological relection on a wide range of issues relating to the countryside, the rural economy and rural life. At a time when it has been officially recognised that British society is deeply uninformed about rural matters, this is a critical contribution from the Church to the wider debate taking place. Chapters focus on: Cultural Diversity, Agriculture, Globalisation and Local Economy, Food Production, Biodiversity, Isolated Communities, Spiritual Refreshment for an Urban Population and more. Rowan Williams distils this shared wisdom in a theological afterword. Contributors include Graham James-Norwich, John Saxbee-Lincoln, John Oliver-Hereford, John Davies-St Asaph, Richard Clarke- Meath & Kildare, Anthony Russell- Ely, Bruce Cameron- Aberdeen & Orkney.

Bill Kauffman, a self-proclaimed "placeist" who believes that things urban are homogenizing our national scene, returned to his roots after a bumpy ride on the D.C. fast track. Rarely has he ventured forth since. Here he illuminates the place he loves, traveling from Batavia's scenic vistas to the very seams of its grimy semi-industrial pockets, from its architecturally insignificant new mall to the pastoral grounds of its internationally known School for the Blind. Not one to shy from controversy, Kauffman also investigates his town's efforts to devastate its landmarks through urban renewal, the passions simmering inside its clogged political machinery, and the sagging fortunes of its baseball heroes, the legendary Muckdogs.

No one has done more to emphasise the significance of the land in early modern England that Joan Thirsk, whose writings are both an important contribution to its history and point the way for future research. The subjects of this collection include the origin and nature of the common fields, Tudor enclosures, the Commonwealth confiscation of Royalist land and its subsequent return after the Restoration, inheritance customs, and the role of industries in the rural economy, among them stocking knitting.

Doing Fieldwork in Japan taps the expertise of North American and European specialists on the practicalities of conducting longterm research in the social sciences and cultural studies. In lively first-person accounts, they discuss their successes and failures doing fieldwork across rural and urban Japan in a wide range of settings: among religious pilgrims and adolescent consumers; on factory assembly lines and in high schools and wholesale seafood markets; with bureaucrats in charge of defense, foreign aid, and social welfare policy; inside radical political movements; among adherents of "New Religions"; inside a prosecutor's office and the JET Program for foreign English teachers; with journalists in the NHK newsroom; while researching race, ethnicity, and migration; and amidst fans and consumers of contemporary popular culture.

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores the importance of land and land ownership to the people of one Transylvanian community, Aurel Vlaicu. Verdery traces how collectivized land was transformed into private property, how land was valued, what the new owners were able to do with it, and what it signified to each of the different groups vying for land rights.

Verdery tells this story about transforming socialist property forms in a global context, showing the fruitfulness of conceptualizing property as a political symbol, as a complex of social relations among people and things, and as a process of assigning value. This book is a window on rural life after socialism but it also provides a framework for assessing the neo-liberal economic policies that have prevailed elsewhere, such as in Latin America. Verdery shows how the trajectory of property after socialism was deeply conditioned by the forms property took in socialism itself; this is in contrast to the image of a "tabula rasa" that governed much thinking about post-socialist property reform.

The world confronts major challenges in rural development as it enters the 21st century. Most of the world's poverty is in rural areas, and will remain so, yet there is a pro-urban bias in most countries' development strategies, and in their allocation of public investment funds. Rural people, and ethnic minorities, in particular, have little political clout to influence public policy to attract more public investment in rural areas. This document outlines a holistic and spatial approach that tackles some tough and long-ignored issues and also addresses old issues in new ways. The revised action-oriented strategy provides guidelines and focal points for enhancing the effectiveness of the World Bank's rural development efforts.

The practice of social history is particularly advanced by the publication of collective volumes each consisting of fairly diverse studies. An outstanding feature of these publications is the comprehensive introductions in which historiographical, theoretical and comparative frameworks are provided. Communities at the margin: Studies in rural society and migration in southern Africa, 1890u1980 forms part of this valuable body of work. The authors are well-known scholars of African studies and African history, and the title makes an original contribution to research in these fields. The main focus of the work is on the struggle of communities at the margin of dispossession in colonial and post-colonial societies of Southern Africa. Although centred on the weak and impoverished, it tries to go beyond viewing them as victims. The aim is to form an understanding of the role and perspectives of those who lived their lives outside racial and ethnic elites, far from colonial capitals, and away from centres of white economic empowerment. According to the editors, these studies attempt to provide further evidence that the actions of the rural communities, no less than policies imposed from

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.

The larger context for this study is the rural-urban divide: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

"Contingent Work, Disrupted Lives" examines the repercussions of economic globalization on several manufacturing-dependent rural communities in Canada. Foregrounding a distinct interest in the 'grassroots' effects of such contemporary corporate strategies as plant closures and downsizing, authors Anthony Winson and Belinda Leach consider the impact of this restructuring on the residents of various communities. The authors argue that the new rural economy involves a fundamental shift in the stability and security of people's lives and, ultimately, it causes wrenching change and an arduous struggle as rural dwellers struggle to rebuild their lives in the new economic terrain.

Beginning with broader theoretical and empirical literature on global changes in the economy and the effects of these changes on labour, the text then focuses exploration on manufacturing in Ontario with an analysis of five community case studies. Winson and Leach give considerable attention to the testimony of numerous residents; they report on in-depth interviews with key respondents and blue-collar workers in five separate communities, ranging from diverse manufacturing towns to single-industry settlements. The result is an intimate contextual knowledge of the workers' lives and their attempts to adapt to the tumultuous economic terrain of 1990s rural Canada.

Winner of the John Porter Prize for 2003, awarded by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association.

This book initiates a fresh discussion of affordability in rural housing set in the context of the rapidly shifting balance between rural and urban populations. It conceptualises affordability in rural housing along a spectrum that is interlaced with cultural and social values integral to rural livelihoods at both personal and community level. Developed around four intersecting themes: explaining houses and housing in rural settings; exploring affordability in the context of aspirations and vulnerability; rural development agendas involving housing and communities; and construction for resilience in rural communities, the book provides an overview of some of the little understood and sometimes counter-intuitive best practices on rural affordability and affordable housing that have emerged in developing economies over the last thirty years. Drawing on practice-based evidence this book presents innovative ideas for harnessing rural potential, and empowering rural communities with added affordability and progressive development in the context of housing and improved living standards. For a student aspiring to work in rural areas in developing countries it is an introduction to and map of some key solutions around the critical area of affordable housing For the rural development professional, it provides a map of a territory they rarely see because they are absorbed in a particular rural area or project For the academic looking to expand their activities into rural areas, especially in rural housing, it provides a handy introduction to a body of knowledge serving 47% of the world's population, and how this differs from urban practice For the policy makers, it provides a map for understanding the dynamics around rural affordability, growth potential and community aspirations helping them to devise appropriate intervention programs on rural housing and development

This book is designed to present and appraise techinques of social research to students and graduates operating in rural communities in developing countries. It questions the validity of adopting methodologies used in the industrialised world into the less-industrialised world, where rural populations dominate. The study details the stages involved in the process of social research; the problems and issues of fieldwork; methods of data collection; problems of research strategies particular to social science; writing of research reports; and the wider uses of social research.

The Chipko movement emerged in the early 1970s in the Garhwal region of the Indian Himalayas. In attempting to draw attention to the difficulty of sustaining their livelihoods in the region, local communities engaged in protest by hugging trees that were marked for felling in state-owned commercial forests. As the story of these protests spread across India and the globe, Chipko was transformed into a shining symbol of grassroots activism. Ironically, as the Chipko story was embraced worldwide by ecologists, ecofeminists, policy makers and academics so it became increasingly disconnected from the realities that gave rise to the original protests. Chipko now exists as a myth, tenuously linked to an imagined space of the Himalayas that represents the timeless realm of pristine nature and simple peasant life - the terrain that escapes history. Or, in the more prosaic language of policy makers, it is one of several 'disturbances' to have emerged from a mountainous region that has, since the late 1800s, been characterized as 'backward' or 'isolated.' This book brings the Chipko movement back from the realm of myth into the world of geographical history. It traces the modes of administration and policy intervention in the region through the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases, and reveals how its biogeography has been shaped by varying struggles over resources, livelihoods and autonomy. Chipko, when seen in the context of its geographical history, shows that the question of sustainability in Garhwal, or in any other 'backward' or 'pristine' realm of the world, hinges more on an understanding of substantive democratic processes than on the need to make heroes or villains of those who participate in activist movements.

In many European countries, there has been a decline in the agricultural labour force, providing a major challenge for the rural economy and society. This book provides an analysis of rural employment dynamics in European Union member states and is the result of the RUREMPLO (Agriculture and employment in the rural regions of the EU") project, supported by an EU research programme. The book provides: a statistical analysis of socio-economic characteristics of all EU regions; 18 in-depth case studies covering leading and lagging regions in 9 EU member states; a discussion of the theory of employment development in the rural regions; recommendations for encouraging rural employment.

In 1975, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) led the country to independence after a ten-year guerilla war against Portuguese colonial rule. Peasants were essential to the victory, but once in power Frelimo evolved from a popular liberation movement into a bureaucratic one-party state whose policies proved to be as inimical to the peasantry as those of the Portuguese colonial regime. These policies not only characterized the socialist phase of Frelimo rule; they continued during the period of economic and political reform that took place in the 1990s under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. Merle L. Bowen's book offers a fresh assessment of the impact that such policies, pursued by postindependence states and NGOs alike, have had on the peasantry and agricultural production in Africa.

In contrast to accounts that blame the state, the elite, or the peasantry itself for the agricultural crisis in postcolonial Africa, Bowen argues that Mozambique's decline in production is rooted in policies established during colonialism and continued by Frelimo. By tracing shifts in policy over a longer period than previous studies and across changing regimes, Bowen provides solid evidence that the continuation of colonial policies under the Frelimo government alienated the peasantry and contributed to internal conflict.

Bowen refuses to treat the peasantry as a homogeneous mass. Drawing on oral data, archival research, and published accounts, she charts the rise and fall of a stratum of middle class agricultural producers in southern Mozambique that she deems central to the problem of food production. Like those of the colonial government, Frelimo's anti-peasant policies are rooted in a desire to prevent this middle class from becoming politically and economically independent and thereby acting as a counterweight to state power. To address the agricultural crisis, Bowen calls for a reconsideration of Mozambican and IMF policies to support rather than suppress capital accumulation within this rural middle class.

Through its careful consideration of the peasantry and the role of NGOs, The State Against the Peasantry offers a nuanced understanding of the development process that has taken place in Mozambique and other southern African countries since independence.