This book analyses the decollectivization reform in China during the early 1980s in order to gauge the impact of post-Mao decentralization on central control and provincial discretion. The volume challenges the notion that the decision to decentralize administrative authority ipso facto produces local discretion properly keyed to local conditions. In fact, outcomes often differ from the intended goals. While, generally, local interests and central-local clientilistic networks determine the policy responses of the provinces, bureaucratic careerism also plays a crucial role. In the case of post-Mao decollectivization, national-level analyses suggest that a majority of provinces adopted household farming neither too quickly nor too slowly, since both 'pioneering' and 'resisting' entailed potentially enormous political risks. Once Beijing's preference appeared firmly fixed, however, they all quickly bandwagoned by popularizing the policy as swiftly as possible. Three detailed case studies of Anhui as a pioneer, Shandong as a bandwagoner, and Heilongjiang as a resister further highlight the evolutionary process in which provincial variations came to be replaced by uniform compliance imposed by Beijing. Theoretically, this study contends that the overall scope of local discretion is circumscribed by the dominant norms and incentive relations embedded in the implementation dynamics. Methodologically, the book employs a combination of aggregate analyses and comparative case studies. Empirically, on the basis of newly available materials (including classified documents) and interviews, it challenges the 'peasant-power' school which has somehow allowed local governments to evaporate in its descriptions of post-Mao decollectivization.

This is the first in-depth analysis of the impact of Italian unification on the hitherto isolated communities of rural Sicily. Traditional explanations of Sicily's instability depict a society trapped by a feudal past. Lucy Riall finds instead that many areas of the island were experiencing a period of rapid modernization, as local government increased their organizational efforts. Beginning with the period prior to the revolution of 1860, Dr Riall shows why successive attempts at political reform failed, and analyses the effects of this failure. She describes the bitter and violent conflict between rival elites and the mounting tide of peasant unrest which together threatened the status quo within the isolated communities of the Sicilian interior. Through an examination of the problems of local government - tax collection, conscription, the organization of policing - and of attempts to suppress peasant disturbances and control crime, she shows that the modernization of the Sicilian countryside both undermined the control of the central government and made the countryside itself more unstable.

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded pits the "coarse" rural masses against the "refined" urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural "types"-peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish-offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era. An English-only edition.

Lewis Island in Lambertville, New Jersey, is the site of the Lewis Fishery, the last haul seine American shad fishery on the nontidal Delaware River. The Lewis family has fished in the same spot since 1888 and operated the fishery through five generations. The extended Lewis family, its fishery's crew, and the Lambertville community connect with people throughout the region, including environmentalists concerned about the river. It was a Lewis who raised the alarm and helped resurrect a polluted river and its biosphere. While this once exclusively masculine activity is central to the tiny island, today men, women, and children fish, living out a sense of place, belonging, and sustainability. In Another Haul: Narrative Stewardship and Cultural Sustainability at the Lewis Family Fishery, author Charlie Groth highlights the traditional, vernacular, and everyday cultural expressions of the family and crew to understand how community, culture, and the environment intersect. Groth argues there is a system of narrative here that combines verbal activities and everyday activities. On the basis of over two decades of participation and observation, interviews, surveys, and a wide variety of published sources, Groth identifies a phenomenon she calls ""narrative stewardship."" This narrative system, emphasizing place, community, and commitment, in turn, encourages environmental and cultural stewardship, tradition, and community. Intricate and embedded, the system appears invisible, but careful study unpacks and untangles how people, often unconsciously, foster sustainability. Though an ethnography of an occupation, the volume encourages readers to consider what arises as special about all cultures and what needs to be seen and preserved.

Similar to large cities, rural towns have undergone dramatic change since mid-century. The decline in retailing, changes in manufacturing, and jobs moving abroad have had a tremendous impact. Yet while rural and industrial areas have similar concerns about adjusting to a changing economy, successful urban strategies cannot be blindly transferred to rural areas. Nor can rural areas be considered homogeneous. They differ in ethnic makeup, industrial structure, topography, and natural and human resources. Appreciating the diversity of rural areas, this book presents case studies from different industries, regions, and cultures, providing examples of the activity in small town and rural development, and reflecting on how these strategies might be pursued elsewhere.

This collection provides examples of communities that have attempted to affect their future. Telling the stories of small towns that do not attract the attention of national media, this book celebrates the success, creativity, and vision of rural residents. Also included are examples of less effective rural development initiatives, which can be lessons to analyze and avoid mistakes. Ultimately, what is best in small town and rural development is the result of community engagement. This volume will help people to begin, or strengthen, that process of engagement.

The Natal Midlands was ravaged by conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between supporters of the United Democratic Front and Inkatha. The violence left thousands of people dead, injured, homeless and emotionally wounded. This book provides a historical study of the origins, causes and nature of political violence in the rural community of KwaShange in the Vulindlela district. This was one of the areas most affected by the political violence in the Natal Midlands, but it has been the subject of only patchy and partial investigation.

Mxolisi Mchunu threads individual and local factors with regional and national forces and, through a local study, explains to great effect the political violence that rocked parts of Natal in that period. The account offers the testimony of survivors and the effect of the violence on community members in the ensuing years. One central contention is that the influence of the violence was transmitted across generations and sexes, through whole families and communities. Mchunu tells a story of ordinary people caught up in the cycle of revenge and despair in the killing fields of the Natal Midlands.

Rural-oriented scholarship in criminology is growing, in part motivated by governmental, community and academic recognition that, despite stereotypes of the 'rural idyll', crime and justice are significant issues in the rural landscape. Using the notion of 'crossroads' to provide a unique lens through which to examine realities of rural crime, Crossroads of Rural Crime: Representations and Realities of Transgression in the Australian Countryside provides a dynamic understanding of the nature of rural life and ways in which transgression manifests itself in the context of a presumed rural-urban divide. Common myths regarding rural crime are challenged by exploring its diverse dimensions from a central conceptual focal point; the many 'roads' that lead into and out of rural spaces, whether literal, virtual or figurative. With a focus on the Australian countryside, the authors examine issues such as drug abuse, persecution of wildlife, rural penal practices, and health in Indigenous communities. The first substantive edited collection to focus on notions of the mobility of crime within, to and from rural spaces, this interdisciplinary collection draws together contributions from criminology, politics, sociology, Indigenous studies, literature and anthropology to significantly contribute to our understanding of rural crime.

The purpose of this book is to highlight the work of teacher educators in the field of rural education. In this book, education faculty who work in teacher education study the ways in which one's identity impacts one's teaching and the partnerships with rural schools. Although the field of research on teacher preparation has an abundance of studies on preparing students for the challenges of urban settings, there is much less emphasis on rural education, despite the prevalence of rural schools. This book problematises notions of rural or rurality which is often considered via a deficit or a generalised model where a stereotype of one kind of rural is outlined. Developing more multi-faceted understandings of rurality is a key to attracting and retaining teachers who understand the complexities and opportunities of living and working in rural spaces.

Ethnography in the Raw describes the author's encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife's friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork 'in the raw,' and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.

Using the New Social History method and examining nearly every document produced over the years covered, this study examines the growth of communities in the Upper Pee Dee region of the South Carolina backcountry in the 18th century. The study considers the emergence of a landed elite, slavery, and a mobile population, plus the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. Inhabitants of the Cheraws District had access to a river that flowed to the coast, allowing them to transport their agricultural produce to the market at Georgetown. This ease of transportation enabled the district to become more developed than other regions of the South Carolina backcountry. In the 1770s, local inhabitants built a courthouse and a jail, and members of the rising planter class formed St. David's Society to educate parish youth. Records from two of the oldest Baptist churches in the South provide clues to communal cohesion and ethnicity. These accounts, combined with land and probate records, provide information concerning settlement, wealth, and slaveholding patterns in the region.

There is growing international evidence that the effectiveness of health services stems primarily from the extent to which the incentives facing providers and consumers are aligned with ""better health"" objectives. Efficiency in health service provision requires that providers and consumers have incentives to use healthcare resources in ways that generate the maximum health gains. Equity in at least one sense requires that consumers requiring the same care are treated equally, irrespective of their ability to pay. Efficiency in the use of health services requires that consumers are knowledgeable about the services on offer and which are most appropriate to their needs. The papers in this volume are selected from an international conference organised by the CDRI, Cambodia, that tried to deal with some of these issues. With participation of international and local experts, it aimed at collecting major experiences and innovative solutions from inside and outside the country to improve health sector performance, with particular focus on institutions, motivations and incentives.

Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas--the heart of the Flint Hills--lies the abandoned settlement of Thurman. At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain.

Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, which--along with the village, hamlet, and small town--was a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. He traces Thurman's birth in 1874, its shallow rises and falls, and its demise in 1944. Akin to what William Least Heat-Moon did for Chase County in PrairyErth, Hicky provides a "deep map" for one post-office community and, consequently, tells us a great deal about America's rural past.

Describing the shifting relationships between Thurmanites and their Matfield Green neighbors, Hickey details how social forces set in motion by the American ideal of individualism and the machinations of capitalist entrepreneurs produced a Darwinian struggle between Thurman stock raisers and Flint Hills "cattle barons" that ultimately doomed Thurman. Central to the story are the concept of "ordinary entrepreneurship" and the profoundly capitalist attitudes of the farmers who settled Thurman and thousands of other communities dotting the American landscape.

Hickey's account of Thurman's social organization and disintegration provides a new perspective on what happened when the cattle drives from Texas and the Southwest shifted in the 1880s from the Kansas cowtowns to the Flint Hills. Moreover, he punctures numerous myths about the Flint Hills, including those that cattle dominated because the land is too rocky to farm or that Indians refused to farm because of traditional beliefs.

Like many other small rural communities, Hickey argues, Thurman during its seventy-year history was actually several different settlements. A product of changing social conditions, each one resulted from shifting memberships and boundaries that reflected the efforts of local entrepreneurs to use country schools, churches, and other forms of "social capital" to gain advantages over their competitors. In the end, Thurman succumbed to the impact of agribusiness, which had the effect of transforming social capital from an asset into a liability. Ultimately, Hickey shows, the settlement's fate echoed the decline of rural community throughout America.

This volume examines the relationships between rural settlement processes and the spatial patterns they produce by mapping past and present patterns and tracing the historical processes which generated them. Using the historical records of Palestine (Eretz Israel), David Grossman reviews the settlement processes of bedouins (sedentarization and nomadization), Arab peasants (settlement fixation, migration, and frontier expansion of fallahin), and early Jewish settlers. Past records are traced back to the biblical period, and a survey of the literature dealing with British evidence of rural processes and settlement in medieval times is presented for comparison--sharpening Grossman's particular approach to the subject. The introduction provides a review of the literature and a discussion of the various approaches to the interpretation of rural spatial processes. It evaluates theoretical models and concludes with a simple model functioning as a hypothetical basis for the rest of the book. The following two chapters are devoted to the British colonization process, which, unlike the Palestinian one, can be traced in a fairly uninterrupted manner to its Anglo-Saxon roots. Next are chapters detailing the settlement processes and process patterns in Palestine, concluding with a reexamination of theoretical models in light of empirical evidence. Rural Process-Pattern Relationships considers subjects central to both historical geography and rural geography, representing a unique approach of interest to a wide range of scholars.

Southern England has been studied considerably less than the industrialising north and midlands in the debate on the standard of living in the period up to 1850. Yet it is becoming clear that it was in the south and in the countryside that the greatest poverty and deprivation was to be found. In these essays John Rule and Roger Wells, whose work has made them leading authorities in this area, examine responses to the struggle to live. These responses ranged from, at the most extreme, sheepstealing and incendiarism to joining in food riots in an attempt to impose a 'moral economy'. More sustained protest is to be seen in passive and sometimes active resistance to authority, and in particular in the opposition to the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834. Finally the appeal yet limitations of Chartism in the south is demonstrated.

"A few years ago, as I listened one night to my mother telling incidents of her life pioneering in the semi-arid region of Western Kansas, it occurred to me that the picture of that early time was worth drawing and preserving for the future, and that, if this were ever to be done, it must be done soon, before all of the old settlers were gone. This book is the result-an effort to picture that life truly and realistically. It is the story of an energetic and capable girl, the child of German immigrant parents, who at the age of seventeen married a young German farmer, and moved to a homestead on the wind-swept plains of Kansas, where she reared eleven of her twelve children, and remembering regretfully her own half-day in school, sent nine of them through college. It is a story of grim and tenacious devotion in the face of hardships and disappointments, devotion that never flagged until the long, hard task of near a lifetime was done."--John Ise (from the preface)

Deeply moved by his mother's memories of a waning era and rapidly disappearing lifestyle, John Ise painstakingly recorded the adventures and adversities of his family and boyhood neighbors--the early homesteaders of Osborne County, Kansas. First published in 1936, his "nonfiction novel" Sod and Stubble has since become a widely read and much loved classic. In the original, Ise changed some identities and time sequences but accurately retained the uplifting and disheartening realities of prairie life. Von Rothenberger brings us a new annotated and expanded edition that greatly enhances Ise's timeless tale. He includes the entire first edition-replete with Ise's charm, wit, and veracity, restores four of Ise's original chapters that have never been published, and adds photographs of many of the key characters. In his notes, Rothenberger reveals the true identity of Ise's family and neighbors, provides background on their lives, and places events within a wider historical and geographical context.

Ushering us through a dynamic period of pioneering history, from the 1870s to the turn of the century, "Sod and Stubble" abounds with the events and issues--fires and droughts, parties and picnics, insect infestations and bumper crops, prosperity and poverty, divisiveness and generosity, births and deaths--that shaped the lives and destinies of Henry and Rosa Ise, their family, and their community.

One hundred and twenty-five years after Osborne County was organized and Henry Ise homesteaded his claim, a corner of nineteenth-century Kansas social history remains safeguarded thanks to the tenacity of John Ise and the insight of Von Rotheberger, who enlivens Ise's story with revealing detail.

This collection analyses various European rural locations through a relational lens, attending to key aspects and dimensions of the 'relational rurals' such as cooperation, contestation, solidarity and consensus. By observing rural settings in such terms, contributors are able to rethink European rurality from a distinctly relational perspective.

In 1835, Winston and Salem was a well-ordered, bucolic, and attractive North Carolina town. A visitor could walk up Main Street from the village square and get a sense of the quiet Moravian community that had settled there. Yet, over the next half-century, this idyllic village was to experience dramatic changes. While calling forth images of great factories, mills, and machinery, the industrial revolution involved far more than mere changes in modes of production. The essence of industrialization was nothing less than the full-scale societal transformation of economic, social, and political institutions, as well as the emergence of a new mind-set that brought about new ways of thinking and acting. In this compellingly descriptive account, Michael Shirley examines the case of Salem, a community of artisans and small farmers united, as members of a religious congregation, by a single vision of life. Transformed in just a few decades from an agricultural region into the home of the smokestacks and office towers of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, the Moravian community at Salem offers an illuminating illustration of the changes that swept Southern society in the nineteenth century and the concomitant development in these communities of a new ethos. While providing a wealth of information about the Winston-Salem community specifically, Michael Shirley's book also significantly broadens our understanding of how wholesale changes in the nineteenth-century South redefined the meaning and experience of community. For, by the end of the century, community had an entirely new meaning, namely as a forum in which competing individuals pursued privateopportunities and interests.

Mediterranean agriculture is by and large envisaged as a landscape of small farms of high nature value producing worldwide recognisable quality food products that make up the basis of the famous Mediterranean diet and shape Southern European cultures. However, the dynamics developing in the Mediterranean countryside are further complex and diverse; comprising differentiated agricultural systems which have been scarcely analysed in an integrated fashion. This volume illustrates and deepens the understanding of current agrarian dynamics developing in Mediterranean countries in the light of recent theoretical contributions. The book compiles and analyses a set of Mediterranean case studies that show the range of transformations shaping contemporary agriculture in Southern Europe, which allow considering the usefulness of recent theoretical frameworks in explaining the array of dynamics underway; contributing to the refinement of contemporary conceptualizations.

An investigation into farming practices throughout a period of seismic change. WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize "This meticulously researched book gives a detailed and authoritative history of agricultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. The book skilfully weaves together the hitherto underexplored individual returns of the Farm Management Survey with oral histories of the farmers who enacted change on the ground to offer an incisive account of the complex technological, political and cultural developments which gave rise to some of the greatest changes in English farming history. It will stand as the key reference point for those with an interest in the history of agricultural change in Britain." Professor Mark Riley, University of Liverpool At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies. Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.

Where do we get our notions of social hierarchy and personal worth? What underlies our beliefs about the goals worth aiming for, the persons we hope to become? Elvin Hatch addresses these questions in his ethnography of a small New Zealand farming community, articulating the cultural system beneath the social hierarchy. The author describes a cultural theory of social hierarchy that defines not only the local system of social rank, but personhood as well. Because people define respectability differently, a crucial part of Hatch's approach is to examine how these differences are worked out over time. The concept of occupations is central to Hatch's analysis, since the work that people do provides the skeletal framework of the hierarchical order. He focuses in particular on sheep farming and compares his New Zealand community with one in California. Wealth and respectability are defined differently in the two places, with the result that California landholders perceive a social hierarchy different from the New Zealanders'. Thus the distinctive "shape" that characterizes the hierarchy among these New Zealand landholders and their conceptions of self reflect the distinctive cultural th

Buck shines a new light on China's transition to capitalism by focusing on and analyzing the development of networks between the urban and rural factories that have produced the regional economy of greater Shanghai. These networks have incorporated millions of villagers into the national and the global economy. By getting inside these networks and watching as their restructuring unfolds, Buck reveals hidden aspects of major changes: China's transition from centralized planning to market economy, the transformation of Shanghai from industrial to financial center, and a wave of privatization that has swept away the last vestiges of socialism.

This book is a detailed study of rural reform in China. After the death of Mao, and with the ascendency of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began a programme of agricultural reform intended to increase productivity. Three major changes moved the agricultural sector from a centrally planned system to a more market-oriented system. First, replacement of collective teams by farming by households. Second, an increase in free markets for rural products, and increase in state prices for farm products, and the partial elimination of the two-tier price system. Third were changes in the economic structure that facilitied greater productivity and a 250% increase in average real rural incomes between 1979 and 1986. This book is unique in that it studies a single township (Dahe in Hebei Province) in depth over the two periods, thus providing a great deal of data about the effects of the reform at the village level.

Moving Spaces and Places is about movement as a transformative experience, showing how movement changes affect and percept of spaces and place and solidifies space into meaningful places. The cross-disciplinary contributions in this collection - brought together by aesthetics and artistic practices and embodied and participatory research approaches - illustrate how the physical act of moving and the psychological experience of movement are inextricably interwoven. Traversing the knowledge domains and practices of culture, art, pedagogy, geography, architecture, and city planning, the chapters reveal the diversity of the study of movement in relation to space and place; as a way of setting things in motion, as a psychological act of agency, and as a way to reflect, instantiate, and eventually reconcile-and even heal-relationships between people, spaces, and places. This multi-layered investigation of movement takes temporal, physical, and psychological transformation as its conceptual core, and appeals to a myriad of readers ranging from architectural practitioners and urban planners to activists, artists and geographers.