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This opening section of the book offers some provocative examples of the relations among women, modernity, and rurality, and lays out the central questions of this study, including: How have assumptions about the mutually constitutive relations between modernity and urbanity obscured rurality’s importance in the modern American cultural consciousness? In what ways did received attitudes about rurality and nostalgia enable special links between women and the rural? How did actual changes in agriculture open up interpretive connections between the farm and modernity, and between the farm and women? How did rurality—traditionally a locus for conservatism—serve as a site for challenging orthodox ideas about gender, race, class, commodity consumption, and women’s reproductive rights? This section also rehearses relevant scholarship in rural history, sociology, and literature.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which women’s rural fiction was heavily implicated in conversations about the encroachment of middlebrow culture, and discusses the remarkable popularity of best-selling rural fiction by women. It analyzes the economy of literary prizes and the prominent placement of these novels within that economy, and attempts to unpack the presumed relations among women, sentimentality, and rurality. It also reads closely several best-sellers—by Edna Ferber, Martha Ostenso, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Gladys Hasty Carroll—both for what they demonstrate about the relations among women, rurality, and the bookselling industry, and to refute the assertion that women’s farm novels of the period were trite, or that they evaded engagement with the pressing concerns of modernity.

This chapter extends women’s engagement with rurality and modernity into the visual arena, discussing how women photographers performed and sustained their own modernness by photographing a preindustrial rural other. It considers the camera as a quintessentially modern instrument, one that registers both evidence and perspective and that thereby wields enormous influence in the mediation of rurality for a modern urban audience. It analyzes closely the rural photography of two women, Doris Ulmann and Marion Post, and the philosophical attitudes—toward technology, toward visual evidence, toward rural communities—that shaped their perspectives.

This chapter argues that in the presence of abundant minorities—of rurality, of poverty, of race, and of region—the corporate form has made a majoritarian feast of the people of Burke County. Letting the moral economy of democracy reign requires escaping the clutches of the state, which has failed the democratic ethos. Some turn to the forest to practice direct justice, others turn to God to transcend oppression. In either case, the state is something to be overcome, rather than a venue for reform. Hope for all can abound by allowing the moral economy of democracy to reign. Then, the best of intentions—a freedom to do—could inform the structure of society, and people would not need to constantly reposition themselves for defense against the latest attack.

This chapter opens with a recounting of how small farmers and other residents in Morocco's southeastern oases actively engaged with broader economic and political processes to invest new resources and meaning in their rural roots. It investigates how these investments defied the pessimism about the viability of rural life that had marked dominant narratives and government policy since the French colonial period. Through an ethnography of land, labor, and community, the chapter also looks at how small farmers and other residents crafted a new rurality by reshaping the institutions that govern collective life. This politics of the commons drew on a tradition of legal and political pluralism in the Mgoun Valley, offering new visions for communal governance while also producing contestations over belonging, political representation, and subsistence rights. In arguing for an agrarian rurality constituted through rather than cordoned off from global engagements, the chapter ultimately questions the assumptions about the kinds of politics that can promote land and food sovereignty.

This chapter presents the three main fieldwork sites by relating how different groups' efforts to reimagine communal governance simultaneously drew on and challenged customary tenure practices. As migration and other changes transformed agrarian rurality in the region, the chapter argues that customary land tenure remained a key site for contesting these historical inequalities and negotiating new approaches to communal governance. The chapter also chronicles what changed between the time Qlaʿa's notables rejected the French request to turn the village path into a road and the time, nearly a century later, when the residents of el Harte began to use that same path to transport their goods to market. The micropolitics of the path offer a window on the larger transformations throughout the Mgoun Valley. By considering the different ways residents of the valley invoked customary tenure in their struggles over collective life, the chapter complicates a common perception that integration into capitalist markets represents a “powerful solvent of the ties that connect locale and 'community'.”

This chapter concludes by situating a half century of transformation in the Mgoun Valley in global debates about supporting rural livelihoods and social life at a time of unprecedented political, environmental, and economic pressures. It recounts individual stories of making do, collective mobilizations asserting new claims, and the gradual reworking of the landscape as social, political, and agricultural acts. The accounts do, however, represent a genealogy of the present, an analysis of how residents in the Mgoun Valley have refigured a vibrant, if conflicted, rurality. The chapter also identifies more durable dynamics informing how people in this rural space constructed their social and economic worlds as fundamentally political projects. Ultimately, the chapter contributes to rethinking political agency and common action in rural North Africa and the Middle East by attending to the quotidian complexities of rural politics and land conflict.

Popular conceptions of rurality are not accidental, nor are they natural representations of fact. Rather they are transforming social constructs, based on received remembrance of a past, and on antipathy to the dual opposite of the urban set against idealisations of the rural. The media through literature, film, painting, radio, and newspapers have enforced and transmitted these idealisations. Rural spaces and places have also permeated to images and coffee table books which showed myriads of woodland villages and romanticised Shakespearean countryside. These images served as picture-perfect illustrations of rural idyll on a pantomime state than reality. Such constructs of the rural spaces are powerful because they shape views on what countryside is actually like and what it should be like. This chapter discusses the British countryside. It explores how different actors have shaped, and are empowered, and constrained by the rural idylls.

This chapter investigates the meanings involved in the valorization of a rural heritage. Characterized as “simple,” “plain,” and “unpolished,” the attributes of the region’s music are integral to the ways in which it is technical described, practiced, lived, staged live or displayed on CDs, taught, and recorded. The alleged technical simplicity of this music can be deceptive, however, and presents its own particular set of challenges. The insistence on fun and an approach that presents this music as a way of life combine to constitute a set of codes, rules, and expectations. The representation of the “new” Zydeco sound encapsulates the oppositions between rural and urban and black and white that Zydeco musicians seek to reconcile in order to achieve respectability through their music. Finally, this chapter examines how French Louisiana music is grounded in a profound attachment to place, and more broadly to regional identification with south Louisiana.

In his analysis of ‘rurality’ and its role in obstructing modernization, Tom Nairn (1997) sees a connection between seclusion and agricultural growth and provides insights on how seclusion reinforces national identities. Drawing upon the experience of the arid state of Rajasthan in India, this chapter argues that despite best efforts to diversify the income base in the rural areas, the issue of redistribution of benefits of growth has yet to be addressed. Moreover, environmental degradation exacerbates the depletion of public goods in Rajasthan. Although the World Trade Organization Agreements have provided opportunities to sections of Indian agriculture, India’s advantages in the realm of environmental sustainability have not been utilized to improve global market access. This chapter highlights the role of information and communication technology in promoting future trading for agricultural commodities as a complementary step that could boost the position of India’s agricultural sector in the world trade order.

To set the scene for the rest of the book, this chapter discusses the evolving discourses of the rural and the urban, the exploitation of this discourse by some political parties, and the rise of the heritage industry. It then proceeds to survey the literature, in both anthropology and geography, on north European immigration into rural Western Europe: who these people are, when they arrived, what effects have they had on the social, economic, and political life of the places they chose to settle in. Since this material is relatively scanty, I have also relied on material within popular travelogues. I then discuss, in a similar manner, the nature and consequence of labour migration from North Africa and Eastern Europe to these areas. I conclude by considering the roles anthropologists can play today in today’s countrysides, in the development of rural life and the formulation of rural policy.

Chapter four examines how barbecue is a Southern cultural institution that sends rhetorical messages about Southern history, gender, race, class, ritual, and fellowship. Barbecue is a type of cultural synecdoche that continues to bring different types of people together, telling stories that simultaneously shape and express contemporary Southern identity. If Southern food helps shape identity, barbecue provides a perfect example of this process because its rhetoric and ritual incites profound identification with regional styles. Tussling about which barbecue is best engages identity forming behavior that serves a rhetorical purpose in gradually knitting groups of people together over their shared love of a particular food tradition. Barbecue conveys identificatory messages of authenticity, masculinity, and rurality, stretching casuistically to still be descriptive of the South’s character. The chapter explores how (and whether) perceptions of traditional Southern foods like barbecue stretch to broaden and deepen the narrative about Southern food.

This essay examines “country music,” its fans in Norway, and its complicated message about “Europeanization.” It shows how sporting “American” symbols such as cowboy hats and U.S. flags was common practice among fans of “country music” in Norway at the turn of the 21^st century, and argues that these acts represent a rural Norwegian embrace of the U.S. as a way of protesting “Europeanization.” Solli is careful to argue that it never meant embracing U.S. foreign policy in general nor an urban Norwegian pro-Americanism, but she does suggest that taking Norway as a case study is helpful in thinking about many forms of ambivalence, including the transatlantic conflict over the Iraq War. Norwegian discourses about “America” and “Americanization” she argues, must be understood in relation to the European Union and not just in relation to the U.S., but rural-urban conflict in Norway about Norwegian-ness also plays a central role in processes of “othering” that are key in the phenomenon of Norwegian “country music” fandom.

The way we think about older people’s lives at the intersection of dementia and rurality, and our recognition of the importance of their world, is crucial to ensuring the delivery of more effective public supports that can enable them to realise full personhood and citizenship, connected to the people that they love and the places where they live. This chapter uses a social exclusion conceptual framework to unpack complex and multiple challenges facing rural older people with dementia and highlights the importance of adopting a multifaceted holistic approach to support full societal participation. The analysis provides an argument for the recalibration of current dementia policy towards a genuine social production model for rural dwelling people with dementia; one that focuses on supporting them to continue to enjoy active and connected lives in rural communities through practical social policies, such as additional home supports, innovative psychosocial provision and integrated transport arrangements.

Recent sociophonetic work on /s/ reveals that sex, gender, and sexual orientation strongly structure variation in the acoustic signal. This chapter acoustically analyzes /s/ production for fifty-one speakers from an inland community in Northern California. It is found that the speakers generally conform to normative patterns (e.g., straight women have fronter /s/ than straight men). At the same time, while /s/ realizations for gay men and lesbians fall within the ranges of their straight counterparts, we find significant differences between straight and LGBT speakers. Moreover, the different gender/sexuality groups in the community in this study produce more extreme variants of /s/ than do their counterparts in urban studies. For example, men and women are even more acoustically distinct from each other, and gay men exhibit much backer /s/. The chapter concludes that political and religious conservativism in the community polarizes gender distinction and pressures sexual minorities to adhere to normative gender patterns.

The introductory chapter lays out the blueprint of the study along with methodological and field details. Pauperism and pauperization are widespread phenomena in India today. This observation will be empirically substantiated in this chapter, through a collection of case studies based on spells of fieldwork recently conducted by the author in rural and urban locations or at sites in between. At the bottom of economy and society in India a huge mass has become disembedded from their earlier habitat in village or city. To the author, they are a vast army of reserve labour at the heart of the predatory capitalism that emerged so virulently on the subcontinent of South Asia in the second half of the twentieth century. Remaining footloose and being prepared for shorter or longer sorties nearby or far away is not conditioned by an innate inclination to vagrancy, of which paupers stand accused, but rather propelled by the dire need to scratch around for work hoping that the return will net enough for sheer survival.