Many rural areas in the United States find themselves struggling to build local assets and create wealth, and, when this wealth is created, they often struggle to hold on it. Previous approaches to community and economic development have been inadequate in attempting to reverse these trends. Shifting to a new way of enabling economic development requires supporting innovative community leaders as they explore new ways of approaching the task at hand. It also requires thinking anew about the role of rural areas, based on valuing multiple forms of wealth - natural, social, and human. There is a real need for an approach that can help stem the potential loss of existing wealth, and attract new investment that will allow rural areas to become valued partners in regional economies. This book provides an important insight into rural wealth creation as a sustainable economic development strategy. At the same time, a number of compelling issues are raised that merit future research effort and discussion. This book was originally published as a special issue of Community Development.

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin's New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends. Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin's Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian-American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

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.

The first ethnographic study of a community with structured trading relationships, the nomadic forest community of the Hill Pandarm.

A century ago, most Americans had ties to the land. Now only one in fifty is engaged in farming and little more than a fourth live in rural communities. Though not new, this exodus from the land represents one of the great social movements of our age and is also symptomatic of an unparalleled transformation of our society.
In "Children of the Land," the authors ask whether traditional observations about farm families--strong intergenerational ties, productive roles for youth in work and social leadership, dedicated parents and a network of positive engagement in church, school, and community life--apply to three hundred Iowa children who have grown up with some tie to the land. The answer, as this study shows, is a resounding yes. In spite of the hardships they faced during the agricultural crisis of the 1980s, these children, whose lives we follow from the seventh grade to after high school graduation, proved to be remarkably successful, both academically and socially.
A moving testament to the distinctly positive lifestyle of Iowa families with connections to the land, this uplifting book also suggests important routes to success for youths in other high risk settings.

Chock full of the wit and wisdom that has become  the Foxfire trademark, this entirely new volume in  the acclaimed, 6-million-copy best-selling  Foxfire series is on oral history of  Appalachian lives and traditions, homespun crafts,  and folk arts.

This book shares research and practice on current trends in digital technology for agricultural and rural development in the Global South. Growth of research in this field has been slower than the pace of change for practitioners, particularly in bringing socio-technical views of information technology and agricultural development perspectives together. The contents are therefore structured around three main themes: sharing information and knowledge for agricultural development, information and knowledge intermediaries, and facilitating change in agricultural systems and settings. The book includes: -Views from diverse academic disciplines as well as practitioners with experience of implementing mobile applications and agriculture information systems in differing country contexts. -Case studies from a range of developing countries and information from across the public and private sector. -A set of practitioner guidelines for successful implementation of digital technologies. With contributions reaching beyond just a technological perspective, the book also provides a consideration of social and cultural factors and new forms of organization and institutional change in agricultural and rural settings. An invaluable read for researchers in international development, socio-economics and agriculture, it forms a useful resource for practitioners working in the area.

Beautiful Villages gives a comprehensive review of rural construction practices in contemporary China through a number of projects, such as the intervention of artists and art exhibitions, industrialisation efforts, and the creation of new social landscapes. In order to explore the social and historical significance of recent architectural work in rural areas, the book presents around 40 projects, most of which are the works of some of the most influential architects in China. The perspective of Beautiful Villages on rural development provides valuable insight for both government officials and architects alike.

*** 'In the January dark, a young man walks slowly into the sea. He can't see where he is going, but he knows the island is calling...' Mary and Patrick's dream was to live in London, have 2.4 children, the nice house, the successful jobs. But life had other plans, and in one traumatic year that all came crashing down. Bruised and battered, Mary finds herself pulled towards Cornwall and dreams of St George's Island, where she spent halcyon childhood summers. So, when an opportunity arises to become tenants if they renovate the old Island House, they grab it with both hands. Life on the island is hard, especially in winter, the sea and weather, unforgiving. But the rugged natural beauty, the friendly ghosts of previous inhabitants, and the beautiful isolation of island life bring hope and purpose, as they discover a resilience they never knew they had.

This book debates the emergent proprieties of rural and peri-urban South Africa since land and agrarian reforms were initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994. It explores how these reforms have broadened options for the use of land and natural resources. Reform-minded policies in South Africa have assumed that if access to land and other natural resources is less problematic, the use of these resources would be intensified which in turn would alter the structure and dynamic of rural and urban poverty. Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa examines in detail, and from several disciplinary perspectives, whether and how this has occurred, and if not, why not. A key argument that this collection pursues is whether land reform has resulted in transformed use of natural (i.e. land, crops, cattle, rangeland, wild products etc.) and other strategic resources (labour, knowledge, institutions, networks etc.), and the value communities and household place on them. The contributions explore a combination of new or alternative meanings of land, including a look beyond crops and cattle per se to include the collection and selling of wild products, as well as a discussion of how land for agriculture has become redefined by land reform beneficiaries as urban land, for settlement and urban employment opportunities, in addition to urban-based agricultural activities. Unlike most analyses and commentaries on land reform, this book pursues an analysis of land reform dynamics at various levels of aggregation. National and regional level analyses of poverty and the ramifications of the property clause are combined with analyses at disaggregate levels such as the land reform project or village. The book will be of interest to both researchers and policy makers with an interest in rural development and social change.

As a commercial fisher in Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, Raymond Rogers experienced the collapse of Canada's East Coast fishery first-hand. Afterward, while preparing to leave the province to find work elsewhere, Rogers noticed a lone gravestone across the road from his home in Shelburne County that commemorates the life of Donald McDonald, a crofter from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, who ""departed this life"" in 1881. Rogers wondered if there might be a connection between the necessity of his own departure, and McDonald's lonely presence on the nearby Atlantic shore, linking them as members of local communities that were displaced in the name of ""economic progress.""In Rough and Plenty: A Memorial, Rogers explores the parallel processes of dispossession suffered by nineteenth-century Scottish crofters expelled from their ancestral lands during the Highland Clearances, and by the marginalization of coastal fishing communities in Nova Scotia. The book aims to memorialize local ways of life that were destroyed by the forces of industrial production, as well as to convey the experience of dislocation using first-hand narratives, recent and historical. The author makes the case that in a world where capital abhors all communities but itself, remembering becomes a form of advocacy that can challenge dominant structures.

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this volume, individual contributions from a variety of researchers across the field highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Brazilian resistance that have broader resonance in the region and beyond: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state-society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. By analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this title increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This study of the living conditions of Dalit agricultural laborers in Muktidih Village in southwest Bihar throws light on the problems they face in accessing the basic necessities of existence, including food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. Their tribulations are conveyed through their own testimonies. Bihar is the poorest state in India, where the highest proportion of the population (79.3 percent), live in multidimensional poverty. They experience a range of deprivations, including deficient diet, poor health, and lack of education. Having shown that the lives of the laborers in Muktidih are part of a much bigger picture, Anand Chakravarti argues that forces based on caste and class located in the wider political economy of Bihar are antithetical toward ameliorating the conditions of those living in poverty. An outstanding example is the reactionary stance of various regimes in Bihar on the question of land reform. Part I (Chapters 2 to 5) covers the situation as the author found it in 2001, and Part II (Chapters 6 to 9) covers the same issues from 2009 to 2015.

What were new ideas 30 years ago, such as the concepts of participatory development and systems thinking, are now accepted norms in international development circles. The majority of professionals engaged in rural development accept the proposition that the people who participate in development should play an active role in defining, implementing, and evaluating projects intended to improve their productivity and lives. However this goal remains unrealized in many development programs. Harnessing the Power of Collective Learning considers the challenges and potential of enabling collective learning in rural development initiatives. The book presents 11 case studies of organizations trying to develop and implement collective learning systems as an integral component of sustainable development practice. Through systematic reflection on action and experience, key lessons and themes emerge regarding the nature of voice, participation, feedback loops, accountability and transparency, that will be useful for many others in the development community. This book is a useful resource for academics, practitioners and policy makers in the areas of international development, sustainable development, organizational development, philanthropy, learning communities, monitoring and evaluation and rural development.

Development schemes are common throughout the third world. Many fail, but the reasons for failure or success are only too often not adequately studied. In this monograph two schemes started in Basutoland - now Lesotho - are intensively analysed and compared: the first, which was abandoned in 1961, primarily by means of documentary material; the second, which was and still is successful in at least part of the area, mainly through observation and field research. The analysis reveals the factors making for success or failure, particularly in the fields of politics, economics, and communication. The relevance of the study extends beyond Lesotho and even Africa, the analysis dealing with problems common to introduced social change and development in any part of the world.

To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South. From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs, Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk" reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used their study of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsighted liberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.

English rural society underwent fundamental changes between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries with urbanization, commercialization and industrialization producing new challenges and opportunities for inhabitants of rural communities. However, our understanding of this period has been shaped by the compartmentalization of history into medieval and early-modern specialisms and by the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism and landlord-tenant relations. Inspired by the classic works of Tawney and Postan, this collection of essays examines their relevance to historians today, distinguishing between their contrasting approaches to the pre-industrial economy and exploring the development of agriculture and rural industry; changes in land and property rights; and competition over resources in the English countryside.

Like many countries around the world, China has been implementing policies aimed at improving parent-school relationships. However, unlike many developed countries, the historical context of family-school relationships has been limited and parents typically do not participate in the school context. Until now, there has been little research conducted in rural China on parental involvement in their children's education. This book investigates the nature of parental involvement in primary children's education in rural China by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. It outlines the layered strategies of how rural parents are involved in their children's schooling, showing that rural parents strongly desire educational success for their children and view education as a means to their children gaining social mobility. It demonstrates that few rural parents engage in visible forms of parental involvement in their children's schools, such as attending parent-teacher meetings. Rather, they are more likely to engage strategies to support their children's education which are largely invisible to schools. It adds to the growing body of parental involvement research that suggests that culture, location, and socio-economic status influence different forms of parental involvement, and highlights nuances in invisible forms of parental involvement. Providing insights into how poor rural parents envision their role with their children, schools, and the larger society, and how these relationships can affect the social mobility of students and families, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian education, comparative and international education, and Chinese society.

This book offers unique insights into the changing nature of power and hierarchy in rural Pakistan from colonial times to present day. It shows how electoral politics and the erosion of traditional patron-client ties have not empowered the lower classes. The monograph highlights the persistence of debt-bondage, and illustrates how electoral politics provides assertive landlord politicians with opportunities to further consolidate their power and wealth at the expense of subordinate classes. It also critically examines the relationship between local forms of Islam and landed power. The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers on Pakistan and South Asian politics, sociology and social anthropology, Islam, as also economics, development studies, and security studies.

This collection of original chapters, written by prominent social scientists, elucidates the theory and practice of contemporary rural sociology. The book applies lessons from the careers of sociologists and their field research endeavors, covering a wide range of topics: agricultural production, processing, and marketing; international food security and rural development; degradation of the bio-physical environment across borders; and the study of community, family, health, and many other issues in an increasingly globalized world. The authors' candid accounts provide insight into possibilities for enhancing opportunity and equality and serving basic human needs.

This book broadens the scope of the subject of rural education and enlivens the ways in which the subject may be studied. Through textual and visual analysis of a range of sources - including young adult novels, the farming simulation game 'Hay Day' and reality television programs - the contributors investigate how the lives of young people in rural spaces are mediated by a range of social locations including class, ethnicity and sexuality. Additionally, through rich and detailed ethnographic work, the book explores the complicated and multifaceted meanings of rural places and examines how these meanings shape experiences of schooling for teachers and students. In doing so, the book embeds the study of rural education in explorations of patrilineal inheritance on family farms, international migration, globalisation and economic restructuring. It aims to start a conversation about the robust and complex ways in which the confluence between 'rural' and 'education' may be imagined, experienced and researched. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

In Minding Spirituality, Randall Sorenson, a clinical psychoanalyst, "invites us to take an interest in our patients' spirituality that is respectful but not diffident, curious but not reductionistic, welcoming but not indoctrinating." Out of this invitation emerges a fascinating and broadening investigation of how contemporary psychoanalysis can "mind" spirituality in the threefold sense of being bothered by it, of attending to it, and of cultivating it. Both the questions Sorenson asks, and the answers he begins to formulate, reflect progressive changes in the psychoanalytic understanding of spirituality. Sorenson begins by quantitatively analyzing 75 years of journal literature and documenting how psychoanalytic approaches to religious and spiritual experiences have evolved far beyond the "wholesale pathologizing of religion" prevalent during Freud's lifetime. Then, in successive chapters, he explores and illustrates the kind of clinical technique appropriate to the modern treatment of religious issues. And the issue of technique is consequential in more than one way -- Sorenson presents evidence that how analysts work clinically has a greater impact on their patients' spirituality than the patients' own parents have. Sorenson brings an array of disciplinary perspectives to bear in examining the multiple relationships among psychoanalysis, religion, and spirituality. Empirical analysis, psychoanalytic history, sociology of religion, comparative theory, and sustained clinical interpretation all enter into his effort to open a dialogue that is clinically relevant. Turning traditional critiques of psychoanalytic training on their head, he argues that psychoanalytic education has much to learn from models of contemporary theological education. Beautifully crafted and engagingly written, Minding Spirituality not only invites interdisciplinary dialogue but, via Sorenson's wide-ranging and passionately open-minded scholarship, exemplifies it.

This book debates the emergent proprieties of rural and peri-urban South Africa since land and agrarian reforms were initiated after the transition to democracy in 1994. It explores how these reforms have broadened options for the use of land and natural resources. Reform-minded policies in South Africa have assumed that if access to land and other natural resources is less problematic, the use of these resources would be intensified which in turn would alter the structure and dynamic of rural and urban poverty. Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa examines in detail, and from several disciplinary perspectives, whether and how this has occurred, and if not, why not. A key argument that this collection pursues is whether land reform has resulted in transformed use of natural (i.e. land, crops, cattle, rangeland, wild products etc.) and other strategic resources (labour, knowledge, institutions, networks etc.), and the value communities and household place on them. The contributions explore a combination of new or alternative meanings of land, including a look beyond crops and cattle per se to include the collection and selling of wild products, as well as a discussion of how land for agriculture has become redefined by land reform beneficiaries as urban land, for settlement and urban employment opportunities, in addition to urban-based agricultural activities. Unlike most analyses and commentaries on land reform, this book pursues an analysis of land reform dynamics at various levels of aggregation. National and regional level analyses of poverty and the ramifications of the property clause are combined with analyses at disaggregate levels such as the land reform project or village. The book will be of interest to both researchers and policy makers with an interest in rural development and social change.

Transformations on the Ground considers the ways in which power in all its forms-local, international, legal, familial-affects the collision of global with local concerns over access to land and control over its use. In Botswana's struggle to access international economies, few resources are as fundamental and fraught as control over land. On a local level, land and control over its use provides homes, livelihoods, and the economic security to help lift populations out of impoverishment. Yet on the international level, global capital concerns compete with strategies for sustainable development and economic empowerment. Drawing on extensive archival research, legal records, fieldwork, and interviews with five generations of family members in the village of Molepolole, Anne M. O. Griffiths provides a sweeping consideration of the scale of power from global economy to household experience in Botswana. In doing so, Griffiths provides a frame through which the connections between legal power and local engagement can provide fresh insight into our understanding of the global.

AIDS epidemics continue to threaten the livelihoods of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa. Three decades after the disease was first recognized, the annual death toll from AIDS exceeds that from wars, famine and floods combined. Yet despite millions of dollars of aid and research, there has previously been little detailed on-the-ground analysis of the multifaceted impacts on rural people. Filling that gap, this book brings together recent evidence of AIDS impacts on rural households, livelihoods, and agricultural practice in sub-Saharan Africa. There is particular emphasis on the role of women in affected households, and on the situation of children. The book is unique in presenting micro-level information collected by original empirical research in a range of African countries, and showing how well-grounded conclusions on trends, impacts and local responses can be applied to the design of HIV-responsive policies and programmes. AIDS impacts are more diverse than we previously thought, and local responses more varied - sometimes innovative, sometimes desperate. The book represents a major contribution to our understanding of the impacts of AIDS in the epidemic's heartland, and how these can be managed at different levels.