The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture: All Too Familiar studies how the mythology of the primitive rural other became linked to evolutionary theories, both biological and social, that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. This mythology fit well on the imaginary continuums of primitive to civilized, rural to urbanormative, backward to forward-thinking, and regress versus progress. In each chapter of The Rural Primitive, Karen E. Hayden uses popular cultural depictions of the rural primitive to illustrate the ways in which this trope was used to set poor, rural whites apart from others. Not only were they set apart, however; they were also set further down on the imaginary continuum of progress and regress, of evolution and devolution. Hayden argues that small, rural, tight-knit communities, where "everyone knows everyone" and "everyone is related" came to be an allegory for what will happen if society resists modernization and urbanization. The message of the rural, close-knit community is clear: degeneracy, primitivism, savagery, and an overall devolution will result if groups are allowed to become too insular, too close, too familiar.

Representing Rural Women highlights the complexity and diversity of representations of rural women in the U.S. and Canada from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The 15 chapters in this collection offer fresh perspectives on representations of rural women in literature, popular culture, and print, digital, and social media. They explore a wide range of time periods, geographic spaces, and rural women's experiences, including Mormon pioneer women, rural lesbians in the 1970s, Canadian rural women's organizations, and rural trans youth. In their stories, these women and girls navigate the complex realities of rural life, create spaces for self-expression, develop networks to communicate their experiences, and challenge misconceptions and stereotypes of rural womanhood. The chapters in this collection consider the ways that rural geography allows freedoms as well as imposes constraints on women's lives, and explore how cultural representations of rural womanhood both reflect and shape women's experiences.

constructive discussion on the development path of Yangtze River Delta, which is the most prosperous area in China conducts detailed evaluation based on nearly a thousand historical materials comprehensive depiction of more than sixty years of the historic process of a Chinese famous village in-depth analysis of a special and important institution for rural areas in China

Emerging in the throes of a global pandemic that threatens Europe's economies and food security, International Labour Migration to Europe's Rural Regions combines a diverse range of empirically rich, in-depth case studies, analysis of their rural context specificities, and insights from labour market and migration theories, to critically examine the conditions and implications of rural labour migration. Despite its growing political, economic and social importance, our understanding of international labour migration to Europe's rural regions remains limited. This edited volume provides intricate descriptions of lived experience, critical theoretical analyses, analytical synthesis, and policy recommendations for this novel and developing phenomenon that has the potential to transform the lives of international migrants and local communities. The book's 25 authors represent a wide range of social science disciplines, with coverage of a vast range of Europe's rural regions, and diverse types of rural labour in areas such as horticulture, shepherding, wild berry picking and fish processing. The volume will be of interest to policy makers at local, regional, national and European levels, and scholars and students in a broad range of areas, including migration, labour markets, and rural studies. This book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com.

This book focuses on the transformation of rural places, peoples, and land endemic to the contemporary manifestations of globalization. Migration, global economic restructuring, and climate change are rapidly transforming rural places across the globe. Yet, global attention characteristically focuses on urban social and economic issues, neglecting the continued roles of rural people and places. Organized around the three core themes of demographic change, rural-urban partnerships and innovations, and landscape change, the case studies included in this volume represent both the Global North and Global South and underscore the complexity and multi-scalar nature of these contemporary challenges in rural development, planning, and sustainability. This book would be valuable supplementary reading for both students and professionals in the fields of rural land management and rural planning.

In 1939, residents of a rural village near Chengdu watched as Lei Mingyuan, a member of a violent secret society known as the Gowned Brothers, executed his teenage daughter. Six years later, Shen Baoyuan, a sociology student at Yenching University, arrived in the town to conduct fieldwork on the society that once held sway over local matters. She got to know Lei Mingyuan and his family, recording many rare insights about the murder and the Gowned Brothers' inner workings. Using the filicide as a starting point to examine the history, culture, and organization of the Gowned Brothers, Di Wang offers nuanced insights into the structures of local power in 1940s rural Sichuan. Moreover, he examines the influence of Western sociology and anthropology on the way intellectuals in the Republic of China perceived rural communities. By studying the complex relationship between the Gowned Brothers and the Chinese Communist Party, he offers a unique perspective on China's transition to socialism. In so doing, Wang persuasively connects a family in a rural community, with little overt influence on national destiny, to the movements and ideologies that helped shape contemporary China.

The culture wars continue to rage across the United States. Clashes over hate speech regulations, affirmative action, abortion, immigration, art, history, and lifestyle questions suggest that America is more polarized than ever before. This study looks at the rapid changes occurring in cities and suburbs in order to understand these cultural conflicts which, according to Rodriguez, have arisen in part because Americans continue to view themselves as city people or suburbanites in a time when the two areas are converging. As suburbs draw more businesses and residents, they produce new forms of art and cultural events which longtime residents resist as undermining the essentially residential quality of suburbs. Similarly, in cities, new parking structures, highways, and downtown malls produce suburban landscapes that urbanites reject, seeing those changes as evidence of the intrusion of suburban culture. Four community conflicts in the Bay Area from the 1960s to the 1990s illustrate these changes.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, freeways and rapid transit have brought city and suburb closer together. Local residents have resisted these changes that threaten their communities' original identities. In San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose and Concord, residents have clashed over the construction of freeways and rapid transit, urban and suburban redevelopment, affirmative action, and modern art. In each locality, rapid changes produced conflict over local identities, as white, black, and Chicano residents have attempted to maintain a clear distinction between urban and suburban culture in the face of forces that are driving city and suburb closer together.

'A priceless portrait of one of the least understood and frequently most vilified of people: farmers. It should really be read by all in this country who buys food - i.e. everyone.' Daily Mail 'Highly researched and deeply thoughtful ... Bathurst peers under the bonnet of these lives and reveals things that rarely make it into print.' James Rebanks, The Times 'A fine achievement: describing the indescribable' Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows We think we know what makes Britain's countryside: drystone walls, stiles, sheep on a distant hillside. But for many of us, farmers themselves - the men and women who shape, maintain and care for that land - often remain a mystery: familiar but unpredictable, a secretive industry that's still visible from space. In Field Work, Bella Bathurst journeys through Britain to talk to those on the far side of the fence. From fruit farmers to fallen stock operators, from grassy uplands to polytunnels, she creates a portrait of modern Britain, exposing in the process the inextricable bonds that exist between land and the people who farm it. As farmers find themselves torn between time-honoured methods and modern appetites, these raw, wise and funny accounts reveal an ancient way of life changing beyond recognition.

The tremendous loss of groundwater has been a longstanding concern in Kansas, where areas of the High Plains aquifer have plummeted. Groundwater Citizenship: Well Owners, Environmentalism, and the Depletion of the High Plains Aquifer investigates water conservation efforts, environmental priorities, and water supply awareness among private water well owners, a key social group whose water usage is pivotal to safeguarding aquifers. This book discusses how reliance on private and public water supplies influences watering practices by asking if owning a well changes the propensity to conserve water. To explore how water supplies shape environmental actions and beliefs, sociologist Brock Ternes constructed a one-of-a-kind dataset by surveying over 850 well owners and non-well owners throughout Kansas. His analyses reveal that well ownership influences several dimensions of water consumption, and he identifies how Kansans' notions of environmentalism are recalibrated by their systems of water provision. This book frames well owners as unique conservationists whose water use is shaped by larger structures-aquifers, water laws, and food systems. Groundwater Citizenship takes a sociological look at water systems to facilitate adaptive approaches to sustainable resource management.

This concise and unique volume explores the vital relationship between testimony, memory, and the community in medieval society. Joel T. Rosenthal assembles various categories of testimonies to illuminate how "ordinary" Late Medieval people saw themselves as units of their community, their awareness of the issues surrounding the theater of birth, their interest in the world of and beyond the village, and what aspects of the ubiquitous mother Church were worth recalling. Supported by primary sources and by modern scholarly focus on such issues as social memory, village life, rumor and gossip, and demography, this book provides both a wealth of source material and insightful discussion on how historians can chart the role of memory and community in its shaping of medieval identity and society.

Rural crime has long been overlooked in the field of crime prevention. Sustained academic interrogation is necessary, therefore, to reduce the extensive economic and social costs of rural crime as well as to challenge some of the myths regarding the prevention of rural crime. Rural Crime Prevention: Theory, Tactics and Techniques critically analyses, challenges, considers and assesses a suite of crime prevention initiatives across an array of international contexts. This book recognises the diversity and distinct features of rural places and the ways that these elements impact on rates, experiences and responses. Crucially, Rural Crime Prevention also incorporates non-academic voices which are embedded throughout the book, linking theory and scholarship with practice. Proactive responses to rural offending based on sound evidence can serve to facilitate feelings of safety and security throughout communities, enhance individual wellbeing and alleviate pressure on the overburdened and typically under-resourced formal elements of the criminal justice system. This book provides an opportunity to focus on the prevention of crime in regional, rural and remote parts of the globe. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, sociology and practitioners interested in learning about the best-practice international approaches to rural crime prevention in the twenty-first century.

Human Rights and the Third World: Issues and Discourses deals with the controversial questions on the universalistic notions of human rights. It finds Third World perspectives on human rights and seeks to open up a discursive space in the human rights discourse to address unresolved questions, citing issues and problems from different countries in the Third World: 1.Whether alternative perspectives should be taken as the standard for human rights in the Third World countries? 2.Should there be a universalistic notion of rights for Homo sapiens or are we talking about two diametrically opposite trends and standards of human rights for the same species? 3.How far these Third World perspectives of human rights can ensure the protection of the minorities and the vulnerable sections of population, particularly the women and children within the Third World? 4.Can these alternative perspectives help in fighting the Third World problems like poverty, hunger, corruption, despotism, social exclusion like the caste system in India, communalism, and the like? 5.Can there be reconciliation between the Third World perspectives and the Western perspective of human rights?

During China's Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong's "rustication program" resettled 17 million urban youths, known as "sent downs," to the countryside for manual labor and socialist reeducation. This book, the most comprehensive study of the program to be published in either English or Chinese to date, examines the mechanisms and dynamics of state craft in China, from the rustication program's inception in 1968 to its official termination in 1980 and actual completion in the 1990s. Rustication, in the ideology of Mao's peasant-based revolution, formed a critical component of the Cultural Revolution's larger attack on bureaucrats, capitalists, the intelligentsia, and "degenerative" urban life. This book assesses the program's origins, development, organization, implementation, performance, and public administrative consequences. It was the defining experience for many Chinese born between 1949 and 1962, and many of China's contemporary leaders went through the rustication program. The author explains the lasting impact of the rustication program on China's contemporary administrative culture, for example, showing how and why bureaucracy persisted and even grew stronger during the wrenching chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She also focuses on the special difficulties female sent-downs faced in terms of work, pressures to marry local peasants, and sexual harassment, predation, and violence. The author's parents were both sent downs, and she was able to interview over fifty former sent downs from around the country, something never previously accomplished. China's Sent-Down Generation demonstrates the rustication program's profound long-term consequences for China's bureaucracy, for the spread of corruption, and for the families traumatized by this authoritarian social experiment. The book will appeal to academics, graduate and undergraduate students in public administration and China studies programs, and individuals who are interested in China's Cultural Revolution era.

The importance of the global rural-urban matrix is often overlooked due to urban-normativity. But sometimes agrarian populism and a pastoral rural imaginary result in the equally fallacy of a rural-normativity, as in Jeffersonian nostalgia for a lost way of life that never existed. The nature of rurality in North America is important to study, but as Alessandro Bonanno makes clear, we cannot limit ourselves to the study of one or two nation-states. We must take a global perspective when it comes to the bio-physical environment and the nature of the world capitalist system. This collection takes such a perspective. The editor frames the contributions with a Meta-Paradigm called the New Political Economy Perspective (NPEP) and explains the roots of that approach in Classical Political Economy and the Canadian Political Economy Tradition of Harold Adams Innis. There are chapters by an anthropologist, a geographer, two generalist sociologists and a group of rural sociologists. There is also a chapter on psychiatry and mental health; and, another chapter which discusses pedagogy. The use of an inter-disciplinary framework to study global issues makes this a stimulating book which provides a window on issues that are often overlooked.

Vu tells the story of Vietnamese farmers who have survived a 30-year war of independence and unification, its damaging legacies in their living environment, and the unfamiliar pressure of the market economy. Vietnamese famers are neither simply obedient beneficiaries of policy decisions made by higher authorities nor convention-ridden cyphers. Rather, they are sophisticated decision-makers capable of navigating the changes threatening to disrupt their lives over multiple generations. Vu's research pays particular attention to those farmers whose families have suffered from direct and indirect exposure to the toxic herbicides popularly known as Agent Orange. She demonstrates that their priority has tended to be the protection of their existing assets, rather than pursuing the promise of new riches, and that this tendency has helped them maintain stability in a turbulent economic environment. A fascinating study for scholars of Vietnamese anthropology and society, the book will also be of interest to sociologists and economists with a broader interest in the impact of economic and political change on rural lifestyles.

This book critically examines the socio-economic impacts of out-migration on households and gender dynamics in rural northern India. The first of its kind, this study unearths, through detailed regional and demographical research, the ways in which economic and migratory trends of male family members in rural India in general, and hilly regions of Garhwal in particular, affect the wives, children, extended families, and agricultural lands that they have left behind. It offers vital research in how rural India's socio-economic formations and topographic characteristics can today more effectively contribute to the national and global economy with respect to migratory trends, gender dynamics and home life. Furthermore, it investigates the collapse of agricultural and many other traditional economic activities without a corresponding creation of fresh economic opportunities. This book moreover elucidates how male out-migration from rural to urban centres has greatly re-shaped kinship and economic structures at places of origin and has consequently had a serious impact on the socio-psychological well-being of family members. This book will be of great value to scholars and researchers of development economics, agricultural economics, environment studies, sociology, social anthropology, population studies, gender and women's studies, social psychology, migration and diaspora studies, South Asian studies and behavioral studies.

Presenting a broad range of case studies, this book explores rural social movements contesting natural resource development initiatives. Natural resource development takes multiple forms, including infrastructure corridors, mines, dams, resource processing plants and pipelines. Many of which are driven by economic valuations, whilst social and environmental effects are given limited consideration. In this volume the authors discuss the emergence, process and outcomes of social movements with respect to these natural resource development projects, including examples of confrontation seeking to either block developments or promote alternative development approaches, such as agritourism. The examples taken from Africa, Asia, North America, Europe and Latin America demonstrate the diversity of struggles stimulated by natural resource development, including both immediate and longer-term effects, repertoires of action, political and cultural work. Taken together the case studies provide a rich overview of current movements engaged in resisting the neoliberal agenda of global resource exploitation. This book will be key reading for scholars interested in social movements, natural resource development, environmental policy and development studies. It will also be of interest to activists engaged in mobilizations stimulated by natural resource development projects.

The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about 'populism', 'nationalism', 'authoritarianism' and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key - not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples' disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Rural life in Southeast Asia is being transformed by new and intensifying processes of migration and mobility. Migration out of rural areas creates new forms of class mobility, familial relations, production processes and income. Migration into rural areas creates a new and sometimes marginalized workforce, contestation over resource access, and the juxtaposition of culturally different groups. At the same time, everyday mobility stretches the spatial boundaries of village and family life. The bounded space of the village is no longer adequate to understand the dynamics that are driving (and resulting from) rural social change. This collection of original studies explores the cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of intensifying migration and mobility in rural Southeast Asia at multiple scales. Diverse processes are explored including rural-urban flows, rural-rural movement, everyday mobilities, and international migrations into regional and global labour markets. Drawing on fieldwork in six countries across the region, these essays also explore what migration means for our understanding of class, citizenship, gender and the state in a rapidly changing part of the world. This book was based on a two parts of a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

This work focuses on rural community versions of Spanish Early Modern Theatre and deals with cultural heritage and the contemporary impact of Golden Age theatre on local rural communities. To this end, I examine the burgeoning of annual rural Golden Age theatre festivals that generate site-centered, non-professional productions of the plays, and revisit the conflict between tradition and innovation, between popular and high culture between authority of literary heritage and the people's right to the canon. The selection of Early Modern plays set in actual Spanish communities-Fuenteovejuna, El Alcalde de Zalamea, Numancia and Los tres blasones de Espana-renders an overview of the effect of these important works on their respective communities and focuses on the theatrical festivals as peripheral, subaltern, hybrid cultural phenomena. I take into consideration not only traditional and significant studies on these four renowned plays, but recent theories on staging, performance and popular reception and agency. The research involved crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries between literature, history, geography, and politics by centering on the appropriation and re-examination of a past that is continuously revised through contemporary performance, and which is adjusted to fit the needs and desires of the context in which it is interpreted. This diachronic approach allows for a new perspective on contemporary performances which question cultural politics, redefine tradition and transcend geo-political boundaries.

Originally published in 1981, this book explores the plight of the locally born or locally employed faced with spiralling house prices and strong and unequal competition from the wealthier commuter, second-home owner or retirement migrant. It was the first book to examine the policy and planning issues in relation to these problems from the starting point of basic research and analysis.

J. W. von Archenholtz's England is a political and sociological description of Great Britain during the second half of the 18th century. Based primarily on Archenholtz's firsthand observations from 1769 to 1779, England looks with precision and anecdotal detail at the behavior of Britons of all ranks. Never without an attitude, Archenholtz conveys a wide range of topics from debates in the House of Commons to the garb of serving women. Whether describing the newly formed militia or the shenanigans of James Graham and his "celestial bed," he provides a focused, point-driven account that will inform history enthusiasts.

In spite of living often unspeakably hard, endlessly challenging lives, rural folks, no matter how poor, remain tirelessly optimistic and believe things will get better next year. One struggling farmer explained it this way: "Sometimes I feel like a jackass in a hailstorm - I just have to stand here and take it...but what the hell - it'll stop hailing sooner or later". Trying to survive on the richest farmland in America has produced some of the nation's poorest people. Yet, this book argues, as pertains to rural poverty, the usual definitions and criteria don't always apply, the known predictors of poverty don't necessarily hold up -and rural people save themselves again and again, because they know no one else will. The book also refutes the common image of the poor as lazy slackers who don't want to work. In reality, the rural heartland is populated by fiercely independent, politically astute, extremely hard-working men and women who possess a wide array of useful skills - and who struggle year over year to stay afloat in small-town economies that rise and fall on the whims of remote farm policy decisions, a volatile world-wide marketplace, and Mother Nature, who is a fickle, wildly unpredictable business partner.

This is an important innovative analysis of communication and society in Pahang, West Malaysia, based on fieldwork carried out in Kampung Kuala Bera. Dr Wilder is concerned with communication networks of all kinds as found in a long-established Malay village, including the uses of language, small-scale (kinship and village-based) networks, and higher-level systems (the district and the nation as a whole). Dr Wilder lays particular emphasis on the role of communication in the process of economic development and on administration during a period of rapid and induced social change. His study is prefaced by a detailed historical account of Pahang and a thorough sociological analysis of Kampung Kuala Bera. The ethnography is meticulously detailed; its special contribution includes the first-ever publication of a Malay village genealogy, a systematic account of birth-order names (a major feature of the kinship system), complete figures on marital breakdowns for the whole village population, and an intensive analysis of leadership in its local context. This work will be of value to students of Southeast Asian societies, rural sociology, network studies, economic development, political education and the mass media in third world countries.