Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, ahs been known for two centuries as the "Garden Spot of America," a quintessentially rural place. Walbert considers what it means to be the Garden Spot in a culture that associates rurality with the past and asks whether or not a truly rural future is possible for such communities.

Rural people and communities continue to play important social, economic, and environmental roles at a time when societies are rapidly urbanizing. This unrivaled critical introduction, now in a comprehensively updated second edition, examines the causes and consequences of major social and economic transformations affecting rural populations in recent decades, explores policies developed to ameliorate problems or enhance opportunities, and highlights the resilience of rural people and communities. In an engaging, reader-friendly style, the book explores both socio-demographic and political economic aspects of rural transformation through an accessible and up-to-date blend of theory and empirical analysis, with each chapter's discussion grounded in real-life case-study materials. The new edition has been completely revised throughout, with new data and literature, and carefully updated to address emerging issues of direct relevance to rural people and places, including a whole new chapter on rural politics. Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century will continue to be the standard reading of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural sociology, community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development, and population studies.

Over a period of ten years, William Sax studied the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Garhwal, located in north India. These people are deeply devoted to the great Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. Sax attended and participated in dozens of performances of the pandav lila - a ritual reenactment of scenes from the Mahabharata in dance - and observed in context in village life. He also discovered and documented a bizarre and fascinating cult whose existence was only previously rumoured, which worships and exalts the villains of the epic and reviles the usual heroes. This book not only opens a window on a fascinating (and threatened) aspect of rural Indian life and Hinduism as a living religion, but provides an accessible introduction to the Mahabharata itself, including lively translations of many songs and poems based on the epic, and a prologue containing a concise and readable summary of the entire story.

Over a period of ten years, William Sax studied the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Garhwal, located in north India. These people are deeply devoted to the great Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. Sax attended and participated in dozens of performances of the pandav lila - a ritual reenactment of scenes from the Mahabharata in dance - and observed in context in village life. He also discovered and documented a bizarre and fascinating cult whose existence was only previously rumoured, which worships and exalts the villains of the epic and reviles the usual heroes. This book not only opens a window on a fascinating (and threatened) aspect of rural Indian life and Hinduism as a living religion, but provides an accessible introduction to the Mahabharata itself, including lively translations of many songs and poems based on the epic, and a prologue containing a concise and readable summary of the entire story.

This book is a critical work of synthesis and interpretation on one of the central themes in modern Indian history - agrarian change under British colonial rule. Sugata Bose analyses the relationships between demography, commercialization, class structure and peasant resistance unfolding over the long term between 1770 and the present. By integrating the histories of land and capital, he examines the relationship between capitalist ‘development’ of the wider economy under colonial rule and agrarian continuity and change. Drawing most of his empirical evidence from rural Bengal, the author makes comparisons with regional agrarian histories of other parts of South Asia. Thus, this study stands on its own in the field of modern Indian social and economic history in its chronological sweep and comparative context and makes the complex subject of India’s peasantry accessible to students and the interested non-specialist.

This book examines the English rural community, past and present, in its variety and dynamism. The distinguished team of contributors brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear upon the central issues of movement and migration; the farm family and rural labour force; the development of contrasting rural communities; the portrayal of rural labour in both 'high' and popular culture; the changing nature of religious practice in the English countryside; the rural/urban fringe, and the spread of notions of a rural English arcadia within a predominantly urban society. Fully illustrated with accompanying maps, paintings and photographs, The English Rural Community provides an important and innovative overview of a subject where history, myth and debate are inseparably entwined. A full bibliography will assist a broad range of general readers and students of social history, historical geography and development studies approaching the subject for the first time, and the whole should establish itself as the central analytical account in an area where image and reality are notoriously hard to unravel.

This volume examines just how successful community-based conservation approaches have been in their twin objectives of conserving African environments and improving rural livelihoods. Recent conservation policies in Africa have followed three main principles: 1) that conservation should be community-based; 2) that things conserved should be managed to achieve both development and conservation goals; 3) that markets should play a role in shaping the incentives for conservation. The editors and contributors of this volume examine the success or otherwise of these practices in a number of different contexts across the continent. Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Kenya: EAEP; Zimbabwe: Weaver Press

Since China entered the post-Mao "Reform Era" in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese economy has taken off as few economies ever have. Labor migration, rural enterprises, rising production, and globalization have all combined to end the isolation of the Chinese countryside. Yet although China's unsurpassed economic boom has produced reams of impressive statistics, has this economic growth led to improving the livelihood of the average Chinese person? Has development accompanied economic growth? Has the promise of "opening to the outside" been fulfilled in providing a better life for China's 1.2 billion-plus people? In this book, which is based on field work, Guldin presents and explores some of the changes sweeping through China in the 1990s that are affecting hundreds of millions of people. Guldin looks at the growth of town and village enterprises, labor mobility, and the other aspects of rural urbanization to investigate the connection between economic growth and development in contemporary China. The political changes at the village level, the swelling flows of capital, data, goods, and people, new ways of thinking and behaving, and a significant surge in social inequalities are all topis for chapter discussions. Guldin invites readers to face the same question that former Chinese peasants must face, namely, how to respond, as their villages are transformed forever.

This important ethnographic study explores the world-view of the Lohorung Rai, a hill tribe of about 3,000 members living in Eastern Nepal. These rice farmers have a tradition of migration combined with hunting and gathering. By examining Lohorung concepts and their discourse on self and emotion, this book explores the way in which ancestral influence dominates the daily lives and rituals of the Lohorung. It explores the 'other world' of the Lohorung within which their concepts about the nature of the person and the natural world can be understood.
This study will be relevant not only to Himalayan experts but to all anthropologists interested in culture, self and emotion.

Between the frequently recounted events of the Gold Rush and the Great Depression stretches a period of California history that is equally crucial but less often acknowledged. In his fresh, synthetic consideration of these in-between years, George L. Henderson points specifically to the take-off of California's rural juggernaut between the 1880s and middle 1920s--the upward spiral of city bids for country dollars and rural bids for urban investments. These decades were salve for mining's risky finances yet groundwork for the chaotic 1930s. Moreover, Henderson argues that much like the two important periods which framed it, this era produced a cultural and literary apparatus that attempted to grapple with capital's machinations, if only to legitimate them in the end.
Central to California and the Fictions of Capital is a theory of how the circulation of capital wove itself into agriculture. The book asks why it mattered to capital that agriculture was based in Nature, and then explores the procedures through which images of Nature became central to capitalism's story of itself. What unique possibilities did Nature offer to circuits of capital and what was their role in suturing the urban and rural together? How did boom and bust intervene and set the pace for regional change? How was capital linked to the racializing of working bodies? And why was the capitalist imperative expressed in landscape alterations like irrigation? Such are the key questions informing this bold, far-reaching volume.
Beyond political economy, the book also looks to the rural juggernaut's cultural and literary work, which was stamped by celebratory, if fretful, ruminations. In all sorts of texts--but especially in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, Harold Bell Wright, and many other writers--difficult questions surfaced. Capital was seen in terms of its spillage into rural frontiers, just as rural frontiers were seen in terms of movements of capital. Capital was the new geography of money. But for whom did it work? Which identities did it favor? In mapping the real and imaginary realms that capital occupied, Henderson locates the banker-, land developer-, and engineer-heroes of California fiction as well as the fictionalized "new woman" of the capitalist, agrarian West. He unravels the colliding representations of race, gender, and class, while linking their treatment to the naturalizing rhetoric of capital's agrarian turn.
In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal to all students and scholars of California's--and the American West's--economic, environmental, and cultural past.

The Performance of Gender presents a vivid description of everyday life in order to explore the concept of performance for an anthropology of gender. A detailed and evocotive account of the lives of men and women in a South Indian fishing community reveals new ways of framing gender relations, the body and kinship. The ethnographic account is set within the context of social and cultural theory, notably the ideas of Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. The study sheds new light on the ways in which gender is understood as both performative, that is enacted through everyday practices, and also substantial and embodied, that is marked out in the separate sexual fluids and procreative capacities of husbands and wives.

This study focuses on the politics of memory in the village of Dachuan in northwest China, in which 85 percent of the villagers are surnamed Kong and believe themselves to be descendants of Confucius. It recounts both how this proud community was subjected to intense suffering during the Maoist era, culminating in its forcible resettlement in December 1960 to make way for the construction of a major hydroelectric dam, and how the village eventually sought recovery through the commemoration of that suffering and the revival of a redefined religion.
Before 1949, the Kongs had dominated their area because of their political influence, wealth, and, above all, their identification with Confucius, whose precepts underlay so much of the Chinese ethical and political tradition. After the Communists came to power in 1949, these people, as a literal embodiment of the Confucian heritage, became prime targets for Maoist political campaigns attacking the traditional order, from land reform to the "Criticize Confucius" movement. Many villagers were arrested, three were beheaded, and others died in labor camps. When the villagers were forced to hastily abandon their homes and the village temple, they had time to disinter only the bones of their closest family members; the tombs of earlier generations were destroyed by construction workers for the dam.

After the Vietnam War, socialist governments ascended to power in all the countries of the former Indochina. In Laos, more than a decade of socialist reorganization was followed by economic liberalization in the late 1980s. Laotian women had traditionally sustained the household and local economy with their work in field, forest, and family, but political and economic changes markedly affected the context of rural women's prevailing sources of power and subordination. Socialist policies, for example, curtailed women's commercial activities while recognizing women's work in agriculture and child care. In this richly detailed volume, Carol Ireson draws on ten years of fieldwork and research to explore this metamorphosis among Laotian women. Throughout, she poses questions such as: What has happened to women's traditional sources of control over their own and others' activities since the 1975 socialist revolution? Have their traditional sources of power or autonomy expanded or contracted as changing conditions have allowed other groups to appropriate women's traditional resources and roles? Have the dramatic changes had different effects on rural women of differing ethnic backgrounds and varying economic means? Focusing on women from three major ethnic groups - the lowland Lao, the Khmu, and the Hmong - Ireson examines the different ways they have responded to political and economic changes. She shows us that the Laotian experience reveals in microcosm the processes of change toward specialization and integration of women's work into national and global economies and explains how this shift deeply affects women's lives.

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 here. Yet, over the next half-century, this idyllic village was to experience dramatic changes. The Industrial Revolution calls forth images of great factories, mills, and machinery; yet, the character of the Industrial Revolution went beyond mere changes in modes of production. It meant the radical transformation of economic, social, and political institutions, and the emergence of a new mindset that brought about new ways of thinking and acting. Here is the illuminating story of Winston-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. Providing a rich wealth of information about the Winston-Salem community specifically, From Congregation Town to Industrial City 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 gained an entirely new meaning, namely as a forum in which competing individuals pursued private opportunities and interests.

This book analyses the changing context and conditions of production and livelihood amongst Southeast Asia's peasants since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It argues that with demographic growth and the nineteenth century development of great global markets based on small-scale production, the size and economic significance of peasantries throughout the region was magnified. However, such changes brought with them new forces - stronger states, more regular legal systems, a revolution in communications, intensive commercialisation - which themselves worked to undermine the foundations of peasant society and, eventually, to transform peasants into farmers, workers and citizens.

This study focuses on the politics of memory in the village of Dachuan in northwest China, in which 85 percent of the villagers are surnamed Kong and believe themselves to be descendants of Confucius. It recounts both how this proud community was subjected to intense suffering during the Maoist era, culminating in its forcible resettlement in December 1960 to make way for the construction of a major hydroelectric dam, and how the village eventually sought recovery through the commemoration of that suffering and the revival of a redefined religion.
Before 1949, the Kongs had dominated their area because of their political influence, wealth, and, above all, their identification with Confucius, whose precepts underlay so much of the Chinese ethical and political tradition. After the Communists came to power in 1949, these people, as a literal embodiment of the Confucian heritage, became prime targets for Maoist political campaigns attacking the traditional order, from land reform to the "Criticize Confucius" movement. Many villagers were arrested, three were beheaded, and others died in labor camps. When the villagers were forced to hastily abandon their homes and the village temple, they had time to disinter only the bones of their closest family members; the tombs of earlier generations were destroyed by construction workers for the dam.

This book examines two subordinated groups--"untouchables" and women--in a village in Tamilnadu, South India. The lives and work of "untouchable" women in this village provide a unique analytical focus that clarifies the ways in which three axes of identity--gender, caste, and class--are constructed in South India. Karin Kapadia argues that subordinated groups do not internalize the values of their masters but instead reject them in innumerable subtle ways.Kapadia contends that elites who hold economic power do not dominate the symbolic means of production. Looking at the everyday practices, rituals, and cultural discourses of Tamil low castes, she shows how their cultural values repudiate the norms of Brahminical elites. She also demonstrates that caste and class processes cannot be fully addressed without considering their interrelationship with gender.

In 2006, Kwan Kew Lai left her full-time position as a professor in the United States to provide medical humanitarian aid to the remote villages and the war-torn areas of Africa. This memoir follows her experiences from 2006 to 2013 as she provided care during the HIV/AIDs epidemics, after natural disasters, and as a relief doctor in refugee camps in Kenya, Libya, Uganda and in South Sudan, where civil war virtually wiped out all existing healthcare facilities. Throughout her memoir, Lai recounts intimate encounters with refugees and internally displaced people in camps and in hospitals with limited resources, telling tales of their resilience, unflinching courage, and survival through extreme hardship. Her writing provides insight into communities and transports readers to heart-achingly beautiful parts of Africa not frequented by the usual travelers. This is a deeply personal account of the huge disparities in the healthcare system of our "global village" and is a call to action for readers to understand the interconnectedness of the modern world, the needs of less developed neighbors, and the shortcomings of their healthcare systems.

Reaching all the way back to the classical and medieval past, Teaching the Commons chronicles ideas and resulting policies that have shaped contemporary rural life and living in much of the industrial West. The book examines philosophical assumptions and charts their evolution into conventional wisdom about how human beings should meet their needs, govern themselves, and educate their children. Further, this book examines how policies emanating from these assumptions have slowly eroded the vitality of rural communities, finding that if there is sufficient interest in saving what is left of rural America, an educational agenda at the local level needs to be embraced by America's rural schools. Using concrete ideas generated in rural schools across the country, Teaching the Commons demonstrates that it is possible to simultaneously revitalize rural schools and communities. Through concerted curricular and pedagogical attention to place-the immediate locality-schools can contribute to rebuilding community in rural America on an educational foundation. Arguing that vital, self-governing communities rather than self-interested individuals represent the greatest hope for American democracy, Teaching the Commons lays out an institutional foundation that would turn the cultivation of civic virtue into an educational goal every bit as important and attainable as education for success in the economic market.

Since the mid-1980s, Vietnam has experienced remarkable economic, political, and social change. This is the first study in English to focus on rural Vietnam--where nearly 80 percent of Vietnam's people live, much of its economic production occurs, and political upheavals earlier this century changed the course of history.Analyzing the impact of economic liberalization on the countryside, the contributors note that despite significant improvements in real income for most rural Vietnamese, poverty is still pronounced and socioeconomic inequality appears to be growing. The poorest now appear to have less access to educational and health services. Environmental conditions also pose significant problems. Highlighting the dynamic political scene in Vietnam, the contributors also consider the interplay between national policymaking and local pressures and activity.

This engaging book sketches an intimate portrait of the life of Wang Fucheng, an illiterate peasant who served for thirty years as Communist party secretary of an impoverished village on the north China plain. Based on conversations over a seven-year period (1987-1994), between Wang Fucheng and Peter Seybolt the book unfolds as a continuous first-person narrative, framed by the author's overview and chapter introductions.Born in 1923, Wang Fucheng rose under the Communists from extreme poverty to a position of power and prestige in his village. His account provides a fascinating illustration of the process of social mobility during the Maoist era, the interaction between central and local leaders, and the way central policies were adapted at the village level. The book's compelling and evocative picture of life in rural China will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike.

City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective. Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

"This fascinating study is a fine example of the benefits of long-term research in a particular place. It is also an excellent reflection of the sort of anthropological work that 'development professionals' should take seriously. . . . Cancian also contributes to current debates within anthropology."--Development Policy Review

Applying a feminist and environmentalist approach to her investigation of how the changing global economy affects rural women, Carolyn Sachs focuses on land ownership and use, cropping systems, and women's work with animals in highly industrialized as well as developing countries.Viewing rural women's daily lives in a variety of circumstances, Sachs analyzes the rich multiplicity of their experiences in terms of their gender, class, and race. Drawing on historical and contemporary research, rural women's writings, and in-depth interviews, she shows how environmental degradation results from economic and development practices that disadvantage rural women. In addition, she explores the strategies women use for resistance and survival in the face of these trends.Offering a range of examples from different countries, "Gendered Fields" will appeal to readers interested in commonalities and differences in women's knowledge of and interactions with the natural environment.

This book looks at the evolution of rural settlement in Scotland from the Mesolithic period through to the improving movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. The main emphasis is on changes in society and technology, but the book also considers how the development of the physical landscape laid the foundation for such changes. The author strikes a balance between general perspectives (including relevant contextual materials such as the political structures) and local studies, with much emphasis on individual sites. Lack of documentation prior to the 10th century places particular importance on the archaeological evidence, but imaginative interpretation of this evidence has led to a major re-evaluation. Ideas emphasizing continuity of settlement and local adaptation are replacing older 'invasionist' theories emphasizing Celtic war lords and broch-building pirates.