Rural Modernity Research Articles

Beatrix Potter in Cumbria: Pastoral Pleasures, Classic Commodities, Rural Modernity

ABSTRACT This article claims Beatrix Potter, author of the children’s classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), is a woman writer of and for rural modernity whose complex relations to rural and urban places, national and regional identities, fine and commercial arts, raise important questions about the gendering of green places, landscapes, and geographies in constructions of canonical modernism and children’s literature. Analysing research by biographers, rural historians, geographers, art historians, and critics of modernist and children’s literature, it argues that Potter’s acute measurement of the commercial possibilities that lay in the divide between rural real and rural ideal made her one of the most successful women writers of her generation and contributed to the early achievement of classic status of her twenty-three animal Tales (1902–1918). Enlisting close readings of Potter’s words and images in her Tales for an interdisciplinary feminist literary-geographical project, the article situates Beatrix Potter at the centre of studies of rural modernity and rural modernity at the centre of early twentieth-century women’s writing.

‘On the Perimeter and Fringe of War’: Norman Nicholson, Rural Modernity and Wartime

The author Norman Nicholson is an exemplary writer of rural modernity, acutely conscious of the need for rural areas to remain ‘living and organic communities’, as he puts it in his topographic book Greater Lakeland (1969). Here I argue that his position in his lifetime home of Millom, an industrial town on the periphery of the tourist Lake District, gives his writing a unique, revisionary perspective on both modern/ist and war poetry: he is a non-combatant rural poet who focuses not on contested ground overseas, but on the rural and wartime industry on the north-western English coast. Born in 1914, his life was profoundly shaped by war, and while not often considered in these terms, he was inspired by modernist poetry, particularly that of his editor at Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot. Reading Nicholson’s early writings ‘on the perimeter and fringe of war’ (‘Waiting for Spring, 1943’) during the Second World War, engaging with his editing, periodical contributions, and early poetry up to and including his debut collection Five Rivers (1944), enables us to see the multiple ways that the traces of war in his poetry have previously gone unrecognised, displaced, by the widely-theorised struggle of both combatants and civilians to articulate the experience of war, into dates, locations, events and depictions of the body. I conclude by examining Nicholson’s response to war after the Second World War, and commenting on the implications for more general theories of wartime.

Preparatory labor for chemical fertilizer: Rural modernity and the practices of South Korean farmers in the 1960s.

This article examines preparatory labor practices that South Korean farmers had to undertake to use chemical fertilizers in the 1960s. Preparatory labor, such as learning about and acquiring fertilizers, that came prior to the use of chemical fertilizer in the field was mundane and often invisible. However, it was this logistical and emotional labor that was essential for the maintenance of South Korea's chemical fertilizer system. In the system, which was part of the government's efforts to establish rural modernity through increased crop productivity, the state looked down on farmers as the subject of edification. Nevertheless, the farmers were crucial maintainers of the state-led agricultural reform, realizing the government's vision of modernity. To reveal the hidden relationship between farmers, technology, and the state, this article extensively uses diaries written by two farmers - Yoon Heesoo from Daecheon Village and Shin Kwonsik from Daegok Village. By doing so, this article aims to shed light on the voices of farmers and their roles in the agricultural reform of 1960s South Korea and, more broadly, of the Green Revolution.

Ovine invasion: sheep as protest objects and animal agents in the Larzac campaign

Abstract In their posters and in their protests, the peasants of the Larzac deployed sheep to help them fight back against the French Army’s plans to expropriate them from the land as part of the expansion of a local military base. In Paris, as in regional courtrooms, sheep served as a visible and disruptive contrast to urban modernity, emblematized in ovine invasions which invited animals to make themselves heard (and smelt) in courtrooms, townhalls and even beneath the Eiffel Tower. This article considers sheep as objects and agents of protest in the Larzac campaign, showing how they embodied contested visions of rural modernity, offered both opportunities for and shaped new methodologies of protest, and came to characterize the way in which this pacifist campaign resonated internationally.

Rural Modernity, Rural Modernism and Deindustrialisation in Norman Nicholson’s Poetry

ABSTRACT This article argues that the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson (1914–1987) is an exemplary writer about rural modernity, whose work also enables us to conceptualise a rural modernism. Nicholson lived all his life in his home town of Millom, an industrial town excluded from the Lake District National Park at its creation. The sharp contrast between the idealised beauty of the Lakes and the labour and grime of the town brings into focus the relationships which characterise rural modernity. While Nicholson’s poetry is, for the most part, highly specific in its writing of place, and has been disparaged for provincialism, the interpersonal relationships, and the relationships between humans and work, are highly typical. From his earliest publications he is conscious of the impact of deindustrialisation, and this essay brings together for the first time discourses of rural modernity and deindustrialisation, concluding with readings of Nicholson’s two poems on the closing and dismantling of Millom’s ironworks. Reading Nicholson and Millom as exemplifying rural modernity enables us to discern aspects of form and content which define rural modernism and develop the field. I conclude by reflecting on the enduring impact of rural deindustrialisation in the twentieth century.

Аграрная политика и смена технологических укладов в СССР: проблемы соответствия

The paper offers an explanatory model that reveals the nature and mechanisms for the implementation of agrarian policy throughout the Soviet history. The basic elements of the concept were chosen: the theory of changing technological patterns, the integral-institutional paradigm of civilizational development and the consideration of society as an open system. Within the framework of the managed crisis strategy, the periodization of agrarian policy in the USSR is presented as a succession of phases of adaptation of the economic, social and information environment of the rural community to the tasks of forming and changing technological patterns. The author analyzes factors and obstacles for the implementation of the technological revolution project (mechanization and electrification) in agriculture, the contradictions of the formation of rural modernity, reviews the unique experience of approbation and implementation of the practices and attitudes of freed labor.

Inheritance and reflection: \u201cre-study\u201d of three anthropology fieldwork sites in China\u2019s Yunnan Province

This article is a research report involving three anthropological studies conducted during the period of “Kuige” and their “re-studies.” By narrating the project, I set forth my views on the connections and differences between Chinese anthropological explorations from two historical periods. These anthropological explorations refer to the study of Lu Village conducted by Fei Xiaotong, that of “West Town” (Xizhou) by Francis L. K. Hsu, and that of “Pai-IPai” (Dai) villages by Tien Ju-Kang. They were all completed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Each writer extracted a framework to analyze the land system, ancestor worship, and the relationship between humans and gods from the writer’s own field experience. Despite the difference in research methods, all three studies noticed the cultural differences between rural society and modernity. Since 2000, Peking University and Yunnan Minzu University have launched a “Province-university Cooperation Project.” During the project, a research team formed of several young scholars revisited Lu Village, “West Town” (Xizhou), and Namu Village. These writers’ works were based on the data acquired in their fieldwork and drew upon the opinions raised by global anthropologists on “re-study” in recent decades. Considering the dual effects of social change and shifts in academic concepts around “follow-up research,” the scholars put forward several points of view with their ethnographies, which all featured the characteristics of inheritance and reflection. Based on the results of the three “re-studies,” this article emphasizes the importance of the study of public rituals for the research of rural society. This article also attempts to re-examine the methodology of “human ecology,” which profoundly impacts Chinese anthropology and sociology.

Martyrs of Development: Taiwanese Agrarian Development and the Republic of Vietnam, 1959–1975

In 1959, the Republic of China (ROC) government on Taiwan enacted its first international agrarian development mission to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The mission began modestly to assist primarily with crop improvement and farmers' associations. But by the fall of the RVN in 1975, Taiwanese development constituted a global project of the authoritarian Guomindang (GMD) regime to redefine Taiwan's place in the world. This article explores the sixteen-year span of missions to Vietnam, drawing on reports by Taiwanese agricultural team leaders, oral history interviews with Taiwanese technicians, Taiwanese and Vietnamese policy documents, and visual and propaganda materials published by the GMD and overseas Chinese. Agrarian development became a platform through which the ROC represented Taiwanese success at agricultural science and rural modernity. Taiwanese technicians showcased high-yielding crop varieties, large and luscious green vegetables, and rationalized agricultural implements. Simultaneously, Taiwanese teams also emphasized their rural roots, through an expertise in forming farmers' associations that appealed to RVN leadership seeking to battle communist insurgency. These representations of success and sacrifice allowed the GMD regime to portray the ROC as leading a global vanguard of developing nations, all toward the goal of securing its legitimacy at home as a developmentalist regime.

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention ed. by Kristin Bluemel, Michael McCluskey

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention ed. by Kristin Bluemel, Michael McCluskey

The Jiangbei-Hechuan Railroad and market transformation in the Sichuan mountains

In recent years, academic circles have leveled a number of critiques against G. William Skinner’s regional marketing theory, arguing that the theory gives insufficient attention to nonplains regions, nonagrarian societies, non-numerical distances, and other factors. The author uses the example of the first railway built in Sichuan, the Jiangbei-Hechuan Railway, to examine the relationship between traditional markets and modern markets in a mountain society in the course of industrialization. Unlike Northeast China and the coastal regions, where railways and coal mines were often controlled by imperialists, despite drawing on cross-regional knowledge, technology, and population flow, the construction and operation of the Jiangbei-Hechuan Railway were controlled from start to finish by the local society, providing a rare indigenous perspective for the discussion of modern economic transformation. Similar to Skinner’s observations, following the construction of the railway, the markets in the mountainous region were not in conflict with the traditional markets: instead, they experienced extension, development, and growth following regional restructuring. In contrast with his observations, the modern markets in the mountainous region of eastern Sichuan were not standard markets in a regular hexagonal shape, but rather extended along the river and the railway, presenting a linear form. In the modern transition from an advanced organic economy to a mineral economy, regional and national economic ties in the mountainous region of eastern Sichuan grew closer, and the Western pattern of clear separation between industry and agriculture, urban and rural areas, and tradition and modernity did not emerge.

Food Sovereignty, the Irish Homestead, and the First World War

At the outbreak of the First World War, George Russell (Æ) published a series of editorials in the Irish Homestead calling for Ireland to secure food reserves against the demands he predicted Britain would make upon Irish agricultural sectors to fuel the war effort. Irish agriculture, Russell writes, is part of a peculiar market shaped by empire: ‘Ireland is a food producing nation’; and yet ‘a machinery of export […] automatically deducts’ Irish cattle, pork, butter, milk, poultry, and eggs, ‘week by week’, while ‘week by week’ bacon, meat, flour, and other goods are imported. The machinery of war, it is implied, could easily disrupt these trade channels and trigger a scarcity crisis. Such an event would not be caused by an actual food shortage but by the unpredictable pressures of wartime markets, in which what Russell calls ‘famine prices’ would deplete food reserves. By analyzing Russell's strategic deployment of the language of colonial economics, this article argues that Russell recirculates the cultural memory of Ireland's Great Famine within Revivalist discourse in order to protest the conscription of Ireland's food reserves, rallying support for co-operatives as a matter of national defense. Co-operation dispels perceptions of Ireland as a quaint backwater of sleepy farms and reveals a competing vision of rural modernity that contrasts sharply with the terrifying military technologies and sense of a traumatic break with the past that typically anchor understandings of modernity in the era. For Russell, securing food sovereignty through self-sufficient, decentralized cooperatives could secure political sovereignty for the modern Irish nation, providing a blueprint for a new social order as geopolitical categories were re-constellated by global conflict.

Rural modernity in post-war Southern Italy: the La Martella village in Matera

By the 1930s, the city of Matera in southern Italy and particularly its most ancient districts, the Sassi, were widely depicted as a ‘national shame’ because of the poor living conditions of their inhabitants. After the Second World War, the joint interventions of the Italian-American organisation UNRRA-Casas and the regional Land Reform Authority elaborated a project for partial evacuation of the Sassi and resettlement of the population in a newly-built rural village named La Martella. This article focusses on the relationships between the surge of anthropological and sociological interest in southern Italian society’s exoticism and the La Martella design process, as well as on how the political aims of the project’s promoters affected the choices made by the team of designers. The peculiar reinterpretation that La Martella designers offered of the neighbourhood unit principle—seen as a means to give substantial continuity to traditional forms of communitarian life while also fostering social, economic and physical modernisation—is interpreted as symbolic of the Italian post-war ideal of rural modernity.

Rendering rural modernity: Spectacle and power in a Chinese ethnic tourism village

For residents of Upper Jidao, a Miao village in Guizhou Province, China, the past decade and a half of tourism development in the region can be boiled down to one single suggestion: make a spectacle of yourselves. The spectacle of the rural and the ethnic in tourism – the finely dressed performers, the renovated village architecture – is usually considered the necessary means to the desired end result of boosting local economies. In this essay, I examine how architectural renderings constitute a world-making practice of and in rural ethnic China and how they illuminate underlying ideologies about sociocultural difference. By analyzing these drawings alongside ethnographic observations from long-term fieldwork in the village, this essay sheds light on the embedded relations of power and agentive potential enabled by this kind of spectacular development.

Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture, by RosemaryShirley, Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015. 173 pp. $95.20 (cloth). ISBN: 978–1‐4724–3143–1.

Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture, by RosemaryShirley, Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015. 173 pp. $95.20 (cloth). ISBN: 978–1‐4724–3143–1.

Lessons for Modern Living: Planned Rural Communities in Interwar Romania, Turkey and Italy

Lessons for Modern Living: Planned Rural Communities in Interwar Romania, Turkey and ItalyThe desire to modernise the rural world was a defining feature of the period between the two World Wars. The combination of modernisation in the guise of «development », and the national state-building ideology, formed a unique vision of modernity specific to the interwar period. This article compares three instances of rural planning in three countries – Romania, Turkey and Italy – in order to understand whether or not common traits of this underlying vision of rural modernity existed beyond the countries’ respective political, social and economic differences. This comparison also serves to shed more light on the wider implications of rural planning in the interwar period.

Keeping Up with the Dutch

Elizabeth B. Jones is Associate Professor of German and European history at Colorado State University. Her recent publications explore state-led initiatives to ‘improve’ the German countryside with special emphasis on peat bog reclamation and colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how poor rural Germans embraced, adapted, or rejected these endeavors. Previous publications include Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871–1933 (Ashgate, 2009) and articles on gender and generational conflicts and agrarian politics in Imperial and Weimar Germany. In 2010–2011, she was a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich and in 2015–2016, she will be on research leave in Berlin. E-mail: elizabeth.jones@colostate.edu

Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England

‘Rural Modernity and the Wood Engraving Revival in Interwar England’ brings analysis of a specific kind of visual-verbal text, wood-engraved books about the English countryside, and the means of these texts' production, to bear upon debates over rural modernity -what is it, where is it, who owns it-in order to more thoroughly engage literary and arts scholars in debates over the meaning of modernity for rural England and rural England for modernity. Framed by analysis of the work of social historians and cultural critics of rural England and ‘Englishness’, it takes as its supporting case studies two mass-marketed books: A. G. Street's Farmer's Glory (1932), with wood engravings by Gwen Raverat, and Francis Brett Young's Portrait of a Village (1937), with wood engravings by Joan Hassall. I argue that these and other books with wood engravings have a special story to tell about the relation of this interwar ‘flood’ of printed matter to rural England, serving as uniquely productive meeting places for interwar writers, illustrators, publishers, and readers to participate in the paradoxical crisis of England's rural depression and modernisation.

“Their Song Filled the Whole Night”: Not Without Laughter , Hinterlands Jazz, and Rural Modernity

This essay reads the rural Midwest as a modern space in which the sounds and material apparatus of early-twentieth-century jazz music compose the cultural field of Langston Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter . It argues that Not Without Laughter does not attempt to supplant the more conventional urban modernities of Harlem and Chicago. Rather, the novel constructs a rural alternative that forms ambivalence through accumulation, both filling and exceeding the novel’s spaces and the experiences of its characters. Approaching Hughes’s novel through the sonic ambivalences of modern rurality evidences how some authors transgressed the supposed boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance by locating their texts outside conventional narratives. It also demonstrates how modernist turns to the rural space do not stop at exploring folk narratives and forms but can be seen to propose rural and regional modernities that accumulate materials, stories, and sounds.

How Modern was Chinese Modernity?

“Modernity” continues to be a useful historiographical tool, however, it is tension-laden both theoretically and empirically. Conceptually, “modernity” can denote either a quality (“modern-ness”) or a condition referring to a specific period in history. With regard to empirical research, the essay takes a look at the recent history of China, arguing that although there exists a line between what is modern and what is not (between modernity and its Other[s]), this often appears fuzzy when we look at concrete historical manifestations. Two case studies bear this out: The first looks at the possibility of locating a rural modernity, challenging conventional scholarship that has situated the modern almost exclusively in China’s cities. The second case study elucidates the relationship between “Chinese” and “global” modernity, striking a balance between universalistic and pluralistic understandings of modernity. In sum, the essay shows that it is essential to incorporate the paradoxes inherent in the modern condition into the analytical framework.

“They Played it on Saturday Nights in a Barn.” Gramophone Practices and Self-Made Modernity in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s

This article studies rural gramophone use in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s, based on source material of written memories related to the long Nordic tradition of folklore surveys. The characteristic rurality of the Finnish pre-war and war-time society offers an opportunity to study the non-urban appropriation of modern technology and to approach rural modernity as locally produced on the one hand, but crucial to the societal and cultural modernisation processes on the other. The article uses a practice theoretical approach and argues for an understanding of grass-root modernity as a dynamic system of practices combining old and new elements. By scrutinising the material elements, meanings and competencies linked together in rural gramophone practices, the article describes and analyses diverse forms of rural activity and innovativeness around the gramophone, peaking in the popular phenomenon of secret dances during the Second World War.