The rationalization of rural life

Arilson Favareto,David Rodgers

doi:10.1590/s1413-05802006000200005

Abstract

The article seeks to establish the conceptual distinction between territorial and traditional approaches to rural development in the social sciences. Based on the emergence of what has come to be known as “the new rurality,” there has been a shift in social content and in the quality of the relationship among its three fundamental defining dimensions: rural-urban relations, proximity to nature, and interpersonal ties. The more important implications of this change are, on the one hand, erosion of the agrarian paradigm that sustained the dominant perspectives of rurality throughout the entire past century and, on the other, an intensification of a long and heterogeneous process of rationalization of rural life.

Highlights

The article seeks to establish the conceptual distinction between territorial and traditional approaches to rural development in the social sciences
Introduction1 Between the medieval saying that “the air of the cities makes people free” (Weber 2000), and the recent observation that, for the majority of Europeans today, “the rural world is more associated with freedom than the cities” (Hervieu & Viard 1996), there is clearly something of a turnabout
Leaving aside authors and approaches that confer no specific explanatory status to the rural world, the contemporary literature has highlighted three fundamental theoretical implications emerging from the new rurality

Summary

Critique of the agrarian vision of rural territories

The study of the relationship between the cities and the rural world was present even before the institutionalization of the social sciences and its various branches of knowledge. the foundations to the approaches that became consolidated in the social sciences, including in this area, were better systematized in the work of two of the great classic authors: Marx and Weber. We encounter situations where the ways in which rural populations conduct daily life are undergoing shifts in their forms of social embedding, moving from a situation previously rooted in tradition and in ties with the agrarian world to the present-day integration of spheres, accompanying the growing disenchantment and rationalization The content of these forms of rationalization of quotidian life is not given beforehand; rather, it is established with the meaning of the social action for the agents, importing both its constituted cognitive structure and the field of possibilities and interactions in which this structure appears, a field determined by the mutual influences between the environment, social structures and institutions. In the Y axis, the variation of positions remains dependent on the degree of concentration and specialization of these territories, since in the new rurality, too, the processes of development partly obey the same rules as other spheres and are linked to the deconcentration and diversification of the social fabrics and the local ecosystems

Traditional agriculture

Findings

Conclusion