Search Results

This chapter discusses the rural social movements that have arisen in Latin America. This rise is generally associated with the debt-induced economic crisis of the 1980s and the impact of structural adjustment policies and rural social movements. It also makes occasional references to the information presented in the some of the preceding chapters.

The alliance between the state and Western medicine culminated when the Nationalist government included in its first constitution of 1947 a commitment to the policy of State Medicine, a healthcare system through which the state guaranteed all Chinese citizens equal and free access to healthcare services. Specifically, I explore why the Nationalist government came to accept this daunting responsibility of providing State Medicine in the early 1940s. The key to this question lies in the emergence of rural China as the crucial arena for the political struggle between the Nationalist and Communist Parties in the 1930s. In their attempt to address this seemingly impossible task of providing modern healthcare to China’s rural residents, various historical actors—the Rural Reconstruction Movement, the China Medical Association, the Nationalist government, and the advocates of Chinese medicine—all arrived at the conclusion that State Medicine represented the only solution to China’s Health Problem.

The first chapter introduces the main political and cultural actors engaged in the struggles in Northeastern Brazil during the Cold War. The chapter analyzes the origin stories of the different groups to show how certain versions that reinforced the trope of o Nordeste gained more attention in the mass media. The groups include the main rural social movements in the Northeast in the 1950s and 60s – the Ligas Camponesas, the Brazilian Communist Party Rural Syndicates, and the Catholic Church Federations; “Conservatives” including large landowners, the mainstream media, and state police; Brazilian development institutions such as SUDENE (Regional Development Agency); Brazilian regional and national politicians, U.S. journalists and government officials in the Northeast; and cultural movements and artists including filmmakers and popular poets. The chapter also outlines the regional, national, and international historical context of Northeastern Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s.

Set against existing explanations for Thailand’s landmark universal coverage policy, this chapter traces the historical rise of a movement of progressive physicians in Thailand (the Rural Doctors’ Movement). After establishing their origins, it explores the critical role they played in institutionalizing universal healthcare over powerful opposition forces. In the absence of the strategic actions of this professional movement, the evidence presented here suggests that there is little reason to believe that Thailand’s universal coverage policy would ever have become a major issue in the 2001 election, much less a policy that would have been implemented and gone on to receive international acclaim. It points to the knowledge, social networks, and privileged positions in the state that allowed the movement to have an outsized role in the policy process following democratic transition in 1992.

This chapter discusses the growth of Quakerism after the Restoration and its decline. An examination of the figures detailing the membership of the movement helps explain why so many of the official pronouncements of the Society emphasized the need to maintain Quaker children within the movement starting from the 1690s onwards. It has been suggested that Quakerism settled in those areas where Puritanism had never been strong. For this reason, it is believed that Quakerism had shallow roots in Essex. The consensus hitherto has been that Quakerism was predominantly a rural movement. In the 18th century, Voltaire hinted that the decline of Quakerism in London was because of the involvement of the members and success in commerce.

This chapter chronicles the decline of Communist-led rural movement in Alabama. The decline cannot be attributed solely to changes in the Party's line or a conspiracy to liquidate the militant sharecroppers' movement. Perhaps if the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) and the Alabama Farmers' Union (AFU) had more resources, or if the federal government had protected rural workers' rights to organize at it had industrial and craft unions', the movement in the Alabama black belt might have had a different outcome. However, Alabama Communists did manage to turn the AFU into a formidable force on the Left and a strong proponent of labor and civil rights in the region. The Party's growing prominence within the AFU also altered the character of its rural support, from poor black sharecroppers and laborers to independent white farmers.

This chapter discusses the two key elements of Vía Campesina's resistance to neoliberal globalization. Neoliberal globalization is considered to be the successful building of unity within diversity, and the deeply political act of articulating a peasant identity. The chapter begins by briefly introducing La Vía Campesina, and continues with an examination of the factors that contributed to the rise, consolidation, and global articulation of this growing rural movement.

This chapter examines how masculinity defined political and cultural struggles through the appropriations of the cangaceiro (backlands bandit) as a symbol of Northeastern identity. In speeches, popular poetry, and newspapers, the Ligas positioned the cangaceiro as an autochthonous guerrilla, building support for the movement through appeals to rural men to protect their wives and daughters from the landowners. Landowners and conservatives who opposed agrarian reform relied upon ideas of the cangaceiro as barbaric, excessively violent, and illegal to bolster arguments for greater state control in the countryside. Filmmakers began producing one of the most prolific genres of Brazilian cinema to date, the Nordestern (Brazilian Western), starring cangaceiros as hybrid cowboy/Indian/bandit characters. The competing appropriations of the cangaceiro as a Northeastern symbol reflect how the Cold War context intertwined with regional historical narratives in debates over Northeastern identities and politics, both reshaping and upholding entrenched narratives of o Nordeste.

Delgado and Rodríguez-Giralt report on how traditional local seeds became a legal entity under the name of ‘Creole’, and had to co-exist with commercial seeds. Creole seeds, which have been developed, adapted, or produced by farmers and landless and indigenous peoples in situ, are by definition not standardized. Because of their ‘ecology’, they remain always adapting and changing as open objects. This chapter details a number of attempts at including Creole seeds within national legal, scientific and bureaucratic systems. It reports on how new forms of ownership and dependencies emerged in the conflictive relations between the State and the Brazilian rural movements. Drawing on Moreira’s discussion of interferences, the authors describe how Creole seeds constantly disrupt what is considered a legally valid entity in the Brazilian context and propose the notion of transient standardizations to conceptualize the disruptive nature of those relations.

This chapter discusses two rural social movement organizations (SMOs) that have waged militant struggles for land reform through nonviolent resistance. First is the Landless Rural Workers Movement in Brazil (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra or MST), while the second is an Indian SMO called Ekta Parishad (Unity Forum). Both SMOs have organized campaigns to mobilize people, raise public awareness about land issues, place land reform on the national agenda, and create alternatives to exploitive political and economic relations. Each SMO is characterized by a defining method: land occupation for the MST, and the extended march or padyatra for Ekta Parishad. The chapter mainly tackles why social movements with radical goals prefer nonviolent resistance, as well as the implementation of particular methods of nonviolent action, and the success rate of nonviolent movements focusing on land reform promotion.

This chapter describes the alliances for land rights between urban and rural workers in the area of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. The authors focus on the community development experience of the Mario Lago land reform settlement or asentamento. The fact that Mario Lago is literally located at the edge of the city, brings into play a wide range of urban organizations together in alliances with the rural Landless Workers Movement (MST), for campaigns and actions on a variety of issues, such as distribution of healthy food, transportation, housing and environmental concerns. Although the Mario Lago community is under constant pressure from the agribusiness complex and from developers, the residents continuously engage in a struggle to create and recreate community life by producing healthy food and protecting the environment. They are an example of how alliances between urban and rural people can help achieve community development based on agrarian reform from below.

Education was of the upmost importance to Dr. Moore and at the heart of his successes. Thus around 1914, Moore began to use his influence to address educational inequality at the government level. The chapter details Moore’s efforts to address educational inequality, including the writing of letters and pamphlets, giving addresses, and his involvement in the Movement to Improve the Negro Rural Schools in North Carolina. The chapter quotes in full pamphlets Moore wrote and correspondence he wrote and received on the subject of education.

This chapter takes a look at certain aspects of Sassoon’s nostalgia within the rural revival movement, which, it notes, slowly gathered strength during the gap between the First and Second World Wars, eventually finding an indirect expression in the pastoral ideals represented in Georgian poetry. The discussion determines that this revival is a response to the traumatic legacy of war.

This chapter explores immigration, race, and religion through the nation’s first Jewish rural cemeteries of the 1850s. These grounds embodied an important duality for Jewish New Yorkers’ social belonging to an emerging white middle class while also safeguarding Jewish particularity and continuity. Still recent Jewish immigrants eagerly participated in the Rural Cemetery Movement, laying out lavish cemeteries and embracing its universalism by setting those grounds in closer proximity than ever before to non-sectarian Christian counterparts. Conversely, Jews of all stripes made sure to cluster together behind clear physical barriers, and nearly all synagogues and Jewish fraternities prohibited Christian burial and maintained old links between interment rights and intermarriage. Aware of increasing acceptance in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers celebrated their costly new cemeteries as symbols of mobility and belonging. At the same time, they doubled down on physical, ritual, and intangible divisions within them to temper that integration.

Chapter 2 zooms in on the province of Formosa, in the north of Argentina, to reconstruct the history of peasant organizations (particularly the Peasant Leagues), the local impacts of neoliberalization, and the pervasiveness of patronage politics. Drawing from the life histories of two peasant women, the chapter reviews the economy and politics of the province as seen from the points of view of peasants and their organizations, introducing the rural communities analysed in the ensuing chapters. While chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into events of contentious mobilization and processes of demobilization throughout a decade (2003–2013), this chapter serves as a broader historical canvas to situate that decade within a longer history of peasant struggles and cotton production in northern Argentina, covering the period between the 1970s (including the military government) and the 2000s.

This chapter details how, by the middle of the decade, American trade was suffering as a result of exclusion from trade with the British empire. National leaders in and out of Congress looked to western lands expropriated from Native Americans as a source of future profit and the foundation of national credit. While thousands of would-be settlers demanded access to the land, and government aid in their war against the Indians, politicians and financiers in the east struggled over the creation of new property rights and the distribution of the spoils of conquest. Banking establishments were central to this process, especially the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, set up in 1781. When the bank came under attack from Pennsylvania's rural egalitarian movement, gentlemen were again put on the defensive. Capitalist economic development seemed to be incompatible with democratic power.