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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Rural communities
Community planner Susan Guyette presents the first field-tested model of development planning that addresses the special concerns of Native American and rural communities. In Guyette's model, revitalizing cultural traditions becomes the central focus of the economic planning process. The author demonstrates, step by step, how community planning works, using the creation of the Poeh Center at Pojoaque Pueblo in northern New Mexico as a case study. She offers practical, detailed guidelines on how to develop a strategic plan, assess and document needs, ensure community participation, support business and tourism, and generate funding for community projects. This book provides a unique opportunity to see rural development in action.
Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated. Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people-how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past-hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains-and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.
A sweeping historical and political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa. In post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid Constitution shifts squatters' struggles onto the judicial register. Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers' struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.
Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments-only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants. Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants' and elites' own economic grievances. Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.
A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we've been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But are there other models that don't rely on a flourishing high-tech industry? In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they're wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.
You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up. Zukin explores the people and plans that have literally rooted digital technology in the city. That in turn has shaped a workforce, molded a mindset, and generated an archipelago of tech spaces, which in combination have produced a now-hegemonic "innovation" culture and geography. She begins with the subculture of hackathons and meetups, introduces startup founders and venture capitalists, and explores the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to "innovation coastline." She shows how, far beyond Silicon Valley, cities like New York are shaped by an influential "triple helix" of business, government, and university leaders-an alliance that joins C. Wright Mills's "power elite," real estate developers, and ambitious avatars of "academic capitalism." As a result, cities around the world are caught between the demands of the tech economy and communities' desires for growth-a massive and often-insurmountable challenge for those who hope to reap the rewards of innovation's success.
A TELEGRAPH AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 'Impressive . . . tender, unflinching' Guardian 'This is poetry in the grand tradition of annihiliation by desire. It's what the young are always learning, and the old, if they are wise, never forget' Anne Boyer, author of The Undying 'Brilliant . . . heralds the arrival of a frank and vital poetic voice' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti 'Frank and alert . . . an important voice in British poetry' Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary 'Direct and heart-breaking' Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems 'A rare thing . . . razor-sharp' Julia Copus, author of This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew In Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb turns poetry to an examination of the textures of class, youth, adulthood and death in the working communities of the West Country, from mobile home parks, boyish factory workers and saleswomen kept on the road for days at a time, to the yearnings of young love and the complexities of masculinity. Alongside individual poems, three sequences predominate: a series of 'Love Stories', charting a course through the dreams, lies and salt-baked limbs of multiple relationships; 'Diagnostics', which tells the story of the death from cancer of the poet's father; and 'Treetops', a virtuosic long poem weaving together grief and mental health struggles in an attempt to come to terms with the overwhelming data of a life. The world of these poems is close, dangerous, lustrous and difficult: a world in which whole existences are lived in the spin of almost-inescapable fates. In searching for the light within it, this prodigious debut collection announces the arrival of a major new voice in British poetry.
The South African government has prioritized a reduction of poverty and increased food security in rural parts of South Africa through agrarian transformation. As the bearers and beneficiaries of rural development initiatives, smallholder farmers, including those keeping livestock, loom large in this arena. Likewise, on international development agendas steered by bodies such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), smallholders are prioritized as the engines of national economies. This book, based on a pilot study of two livestock keeping communities along the Mpumalanga-Limpopo border, explores smallholder households in order to paint a picture of the challenges faced by smallholder livestock farmers, the practices and knowledge of primary animal healthcare (PAHC) among these farmers, relationships between the state and the smallholders, gendered issues, and the relationship between poor socioeconomic conditions and the keeping of livestock. This book opens up a variety of research and policy questions that encourage further exploration and study.
Philip Hoffman shatters the widespread myth that traditional agricultural societies in early modern Europe were socially and economically stagnant and ultimately dependent on wide-scale political revolution for their growth. Through a richly detailed historical investigation of the peasant agriculture of "ancien-regime" France, the author uncovers evidence that requires a new understanding of what constituted economic growth in such societies. His arguments rest on a measurement of long-term growth that enables him to analyze the economic, institutional, and political factors that explain its forms and rhythms. In comparing France with England and Germany, Hoffman arrives at fresh answers to some classic questions: Did French agriculture lag behind farming in other countries? If so, did the obstacles in French agriculture lurk within peasant society itself, in the peasants' culture, in their communal property rights, or in the small scale of their farms? Or did the obstacles hide elsewhere, in politics, in the tax system, or in meager opportunities for trade? The author discovers that growth cannot be explained by culture, property rights, or farm size, and argues that the real causes of growth derived from politics and gains from trade. By challenging other widely held beliefs, such as the nature of the commons and the workings of the rural economy, Hoffman offers a new analysis of peasant society and culture, one based on microeconomics and game theory and intended for a wide range of social scientists."
This study opposes the prevailing view that Indian villages have little social solidarity and points out the relationship between village solidarity and the potentially centrifugal factors of caste, conflict, and power. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This captivating story of the Jewish community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania reveals a pattern of adaptation to American life surprisingly different from that followed by Jewish immigrants to metropolitan areas. Although four-fifths of Jewish immigrants did settle in major cities, another fifth created small-town communities like the one described here by Ewa Morawska. Rather than climbing up the mainstream education and occupational success ladder, the Jewish Johnstowners created in the local economy a tightly knit ethnic entrepreneurial niche and pursued within it their main life goals: achieving a satisfactory standard of living against the recurrent slumps in local mills and coal mines and enjoying the company of their fellow congregants. Rather than secularizing and diversifying their communal life, as did Jewish immigrants to larger cities, they devoted their energies to creating and maintaining an inclusive, multipurpose religious congregation. Morawska begins with an extensive examination of Jewish life in the Eastern European regions from which most of Johnstown's immigrants came, tracing features of culture and social relations that they brought with them to America. After detailing the process by which migration from Eastern Europe occurred, Morawska takes up the social organization of Johnstown, the place of Jews in that social order, the transformation of Jewish social life in the city, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. The resulting work will appeal simultaneously to students of American history, of American social life, of immigration, and of Jewish experience, as well as to the general reader interested in any of these topics.
A revealing exploration of political disruption and violence in a rural Chinese county during the Cultural Revolution A Decade of Upheaval chronicles the surprising and dramatic political conflicts of a rural Chinese county over the course of the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on an unprecedented range of sources-including work diaries, interviews, internal party documents, and military directives-Dong Guoqiang and Andrew Walder uncover a previously unimagined level of strife in the countryside that began with the Red Guard Movement in 1966 and continued unabated until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Showing how the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were not limited to urban areas, but reached far into isolated rural regions, Dong and Walder reveal that the intervention of military forces in 1967 encouraged factional divisions in Feng County because different branches of China's armed forces took various sides in local disputes. The authors also lay bare how the fortunes of local political groups were closely tethered to unpredictable shifts in the decisions of government authorities in Beijing. Eventually, a backlash against suppression and victimization grew in the early 1970s and resulted in active protests, which presaged the settling of scores against radical Maoism. A meticulous look at how one overlooked region experienced the Cultural Revolution, A Decade of Upheaval illuminates the all-encompassing nature of one of the most unstable periods in modern Chinese history.
In the 1970s, the Thai state organized the Village Scout movement to counter communist insurgency. The movement was soon used to thwart growing demands for democratic reform, recruiting five million members to become the largest mass organization in Thai history, and, mobilized by the military-controlled media, helped topple a civilian government and restore military rule. This book bridges both the macro and micro levels of analysis to place the dynamics of a national political movement within a richly detailed account of its working at the village level.
Revelatory, lyrical and immersive, this is an extraordinary book that takes you deep into these ordinary women's worlds... Their stories are urgent and forcefully articulated - and this book gives us the chance to hear them. On an island at the eastern edge of India, rural, remote and dense with jungle, is a Muslim village. In an ever-shifting landscape of mangroves and rivers, the women here dwell among contradictions, constrictions and change in a place where one's neighbours are often too close for comfort. Nine Paths follows the lives of nine of these women, and their families, over the course of a year - from one monsoon season to another. There are weddings to celebrate and deaths to mourn, difficult marriages to navigate and tragedies to overcome, as we observe the everyday drudgery and unexpected turmoil, and the dreams of something better. Revelatory, lyrical and immersive, this is an extraordinary book that takes you deep into these ordinary women's worlds. Anthropologist Lexi Stadlen spent sixteen months in this village, talking, listening, and getting to know these women, who were willing to share their complicated, fascinating lives. Their stories are urgent and forcefully articulated - and this book gives us the chance to hear them.
This book tells what happened in a Chinese village during and since Mao's long leadership, breaking through official versions of history by allowing commune members to speak. It describes the enormous changes that have taken place since the Chinese revolution both externally, in the physical environment, and internally, in the hearts and minds of individuals. Stephen Lyon Endicott examines how fluctuations in official policy affected village life. He also raises important political and philosophical questions: on what basis is the collective or social good to be defined? To what extent can socialist welfare goals be achieved while maintaining productivity in the work force? Based on interviews with scores of villagers right up to 1988, as well as on Chinese government documents, local records and newspapers, this study reveals the dynamics of China's revolutionary social, economic and cultural change through the microcosm of village life. Red Earth, a beautifully written book, will appeal to many general readers as well as specialists on China, Communism, development studies and anthropology.
A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversy Shale gas extraction-commonly known as fracking-is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet-whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet-is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend "up to heaven and down to hell," which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America's ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors' liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all.
The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia-still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.
Private investigator Kate Weller knows her co-workers are in serious trouble when she is unable to reach them in the third enthralling Marked for Retribution mystery. Kate Weller's boss, Nate Price, has some exciting news: Julian Frazier, a friend of one of the agency's wealthy clients, has invited the Nate Price Investigations team and their partners on a trip of a lifetime to his home on Elysian Island, an exclusive retreat off the Georgian coast. But there's a catch. Frazier has written his own murder mystery script, and the PIs must work out whodunnit. As they're about to discover, though, the murder Frazier wants them to solve is a real cold case, and there's a killer twist that isn't in the script . . . Unable to reach Elysian Island and her co-workers, Kate is sure that someone wants her to stay away. Can she stop a ruthless killer and uncover the truth behind a deadly game?
Mobilizing for Development tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s-1970s), South Korea (1950s-1970s), and China (1980s-2000s), Kristen E. Looney shows that different types of development outcomes-improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment-were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. She argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. Looney's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.
The popular culture of urban and rural tsarist Russia revealed a dynamic and troubled world. Stephen Frank and Mark Steinberg have gathered here a diverse collection of essays by Western and Russian scholars who question conventional interpretations and recall neglected stories about popular behavior, politics, and culture. What emerges is a new picture of lower-class life, in which traditions and innovations intermingled and social boundaries and identities were battered and reconstructed. The authors vividly convey the vitality as well as the contradictions of social life in old regime Russia, while also confronting problems of interpretation, methodology, and cultural theory. They tell of peasant death rites and religious beliefs, family relationships and brutalities, defiant peasant women, folk songs, urban amusement parks, expressions of popular patriotism, the penny press, workers' notions of the self, street hooliganism, and attempts by educated Russians to transform popular festivities. Together, the authors portray popular culture not as a static, separate world, but as the dynamic means through which lower-class Russians engaged the world around them. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Daniel R. Brower, Barbara Alpern Engel, Hubertus F. Jahn, Al'bin M. Konechnyi, Boris N. Mironov, Joan Neuberger, Robert A. Rothstein, and Christine D. Worobec.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, when the word "capital"
first found its way into the vocabulary of mid-Hudson Valley
residents, the term irrevocably marked the profound change that had
transformed the region from an inward-looking, rural community into
a participant in an emerging market economy. In "Farm, Shop,
Landing" Martin Bruegel turns his attention to the daily lives of
merchants, artisans, and farmers who lived and worked along the
Hudson River in the decades following the American Revolution to
explain how the seeds of capitalism were spread on rural U.S.
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