Rural Myth Research Articles

Determinants influencing recruitment in the Houston toad programmatic safe harbor agreement

ABSTRACT The importance of private lands conservation (PLC) for endangered species continues to grow as habitat is increasingly lost or fragmented. In Texas, nearly 98% of all property is privately owned, rendering PLC critical for protecting endangered species. Despite case studies regarding factors leading to stewardship outcomes for endangered species, a knowledge gap exists regarding PLC for endangered species. To help address this gap, we situate findings from 30 key informant interviews and two focus groups within a novel stewardship framework to understand how PLC interventions for the endangered Houston toad (Anaxyrus houstonensis) appeal to landowners. Our approach revealed that local changes in conservation norms and networks can build relationships between resource-deficient landowners and practitioners that increase awareness and trust, combating barriers to PLC. Enhanced networks and cultural transformation facilitated by demographic changes and decentralized governance can allow stewardship obligations to supersede culturally embedded rural myths and attitudes of anti-government sentiment.

Representations of sustainability and environmental welfare in Country Calendar

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of sustainability and environmental welfare in episodes of the iconic Aotearoa New Zealand television programme, Country Calendar. It initially locates the programme within the rural idyll myth and then outlines different understandings of sustainability while highlighting the normative basis of sustainability. The analysis identifies different portrayals of sustainability across episodes from the 2019 series, ranging from sustainable development, where sustainability practices are incorporated within existing economic and industry regimes, to more substantive expressions of sustainability that evoke different ways of living on the land and which more directly challenge dominant values of consumer capitalism. The analysis then reveals the ‘content’ of sustainability, ranging from enhancing soil quality to reduced plastic usage. Finally, the analysis also identifies the significance of social and cultural features of sustainability, ranging from community mobilisation to educational strategies that are put into practice on the farms.

Jaka jest reprezentacja formalna wsi w Polsce? Studium wojewódzkich programów odnowy wsi = What is the formal representation of the rural in Poland? The case of rural renewal programmes

The paper presents results of the research concerning formal representations of the rural in Poland. K. Halfacree’s (2006) research model of rural space was applied. Theoretical framework of the study also comprises debate on defining the rural under post-structuralism and some considerations of rural renewal. The research employed content analysis of rural renewal programmes in Poland. The outcomes were interpreted and discussed in relation to a broader process of socio-economic and cultural transformation and the notion of change in the rural space. It was explained how the formal representation of the rural is created in the rural renewal programmes. The formal representation of the rural in rural renewal programmes does not vary in regional terms, often being chaotic and incoherent. The rural is perceived through rural community and rural space separately, and as a broader concept opposite to the urban. Representation refers to, first and foremost, rural identity. However, it does not specify what defines such identity. It merely reproduces certain tags and slogans about the rural, and thus it is based on the rural myth. It also dissociates itself from agriculture as an economic function, but not as a culture-forming one.

‘We’re Getting so Far Away from the Land’: Disrupting the Traditional Rural Literacy Myth through Ohio Farm Stories

The Ohio Farm Stories (OFS) project began with a grant from the Ohio Humanities Council with a goal of collecting and showcasing narratives that focus on family farm life and the ways in which agriculture has and continues to shape lives and local Ohio communities. Integral to these narratives are ideas of how farming practices and values have evolved to meet societal demands in the 21st century. This article situates OFS research within Royster and Kirsch’s (2012) three-step inquiry framework, layered with a discussion of what is often understood as traditional rural literacy within the context of public memory. Two OFS video montages are included within the article, so that readers might listen ‘deeply, reflexively, and multisensibly’ (20) to the words and images of the project. These words and images evoke questions regarding myth, education, agriculture, and societal change. The article closes with a discussion of how the rhetoric of farming disrupts the rural literacy myth and positions farmers as powerful advocates in shaping the future as well as future understandings of where and how our nation’s food sources are grown and harvested.

Ethnography beyond the country and the city: Understanding the symbolic terrain of rural spaces

The 2012 London Olympic Games opening ceremony presented onlookers with a carefully choreographed vision of the British countryside. There were sheep, hillocks, trees, hedgerows and even working rainclouds. It was familiar, homely and bucolic and, according to the artist Danny Boyle, was intended to represent a humorous ‘picture of ourselves as a nation’ (Boyle, cited in Magnay and Heath, 2012). Condensing like the water droplets from the fake rain clouds suspended overhead, a moment of British culture was coalescing on the grass and tarmac of the east London Olympic Park; a stadium that was constructed painstakingly and expensively on the sanitized remains of centuries-old industrial brownfield that still smelled of wet coal (O’Hagan, 2012) and resonated with the echoes of long-closed warehouses and works. In place of ‘derelict and weedy’ came ‘green and pleasant’ – animated, magnified and given vibrant life against the roars and camera flashes of the assembled crowds. Despite the contemporary significance of the digital, virtual and the post-industrial, this pastoral spectacle served a timely reminder of the enduring significance of the rural landscape to identity and culture. A throwback to a simpler period of history, perhaps – a time when communities appeared to be more stable, authentic and ‘real’, or a time when people lived in close proximity with the land and other animals. Of course, many have questioned whether the countryside has ever really been a ‘green and pleasant land’. But this is to miss the point. Rural myths are both real and imagined – a juxtaposition and a blending of the ‘somatic’ and the symbolic; the fleshy and the representational – and they are given life through praxis, the many and varied doings that constitute human life-worlds. This is where ethnography – turning a Janus face to both naturalistic social interaction and academic rigour – makes its unique contribution.

A rural myth? Sources and implications of the perceived unfairness of carbon taxes in rural communities

Since British Columbia's carbon tax was implemented in 2008, local interest groups and municipal politicians have claimed that the tax places an unfair burden on rural communities. We investigate the sources of this perception of unfairness and its implications for policymaking. We examine the distributive effects of British Columbia's carbon tax using a computable general equilibrium model of the Canadian economy. We find that the rural population would indeed have experienced a disproportionate burden had the carbon tax been introduced without redistributive measures, but that the revenue recycling program introduced in parallel with the tax was sufficient to balance the inequity. Hence, the Northern and Rural Homeowner Benefit Program, a transfer program introduced later in response to public protests, was unnecessary. Additionally, analysis of polling data shows that the new program failed to increase support for the carbon tax in rural communities, despite making these households better off on average than households in large urban centers. We therefore conclude that this ongoing opposition is based on a rural myth. Policymakers should carefully investigate distributive impacts of carbon policies and address evidential inequities. Yet, before overcompensating groups that still feel disadvantaged, policymakers should address the myth of unfairness at its source.

A Rural Myth? The Perceived Unfairness of Carbon Taxes in Rural Communities

There is a widespread perception that a carbon tax hits rural households disproportionally hard due to the greater dependence of these households on car travel and increased fuel needs for home heating. Yet remarkably little analysis of the regional welfare impacts of carbon taxation exists, which begs the question: Is the alleged unfairness toward remote communities merely a 'rural myth'? We investigate the distributional effects of the carbon tax in British Columbia (BC) using a computable general equilibrium model of the Canadian economy. Since implementation of the tax in 2008, municipal politicians and local interest groups have claimed that it placed an unfair burden on rural communities. However, our results suggest that the revenue recycling scheme introduced in parallel with the tax was sufficient to compensate rural households, and that the Northern and Rural Homeowner Benefit Program, a transfer program that was introduced later in response to public protests, was neither necessary nor effective in stopping the injustice claims from tax opponents. We conclude that the regional incidence of a carbon tax must be analyzed carefully to support the design of adequate revenue recycling programs and to minimize the risk of overcompensating household groups based on a 'rural myth'.

Clinical trial recruitment in rural South Carolina: a comparison of investigators' perceptions and potential participant eligibility

Participation in clinical trial (CT) research can help decrease health disparities in rural communities. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of principal investigators (PIs) regarding CT participation barriers and recruitment efforts in rural South Carolina, USA and to assess the actual pool of potential CT participants in rural and urban South Carolina. The ultimate goal was to evaluate the fit between PIs' perceptions and the pool of eligible participants in rural South Carolina. An online survey was conducted with 119 CT PIs from South Carolina's five main academic medical centers located in urban areas of the state, for a response rate of 31%. Secondary data analyses were also conducted using data from government health insurance plans, including the 2009 South Carolina Medicaid, the 2009 State Health Plan (SHP) data, and census data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey (ACS). Both parametric and non-parametric statistics were used to analyze survey and secondary data. Principal investigators perceived greater recruitment barriers in rural areas than in the general population. They indicated having difficulty finding CT participants in rural areas compared to the general population (t= -2.985, p=0.004). Rural residents were significantly more likely to be perceived as lacking knowledge and understanding about CT than the general public (t= -2.105, p=0.038), having significantly lower literacy than the general public (t= -2.058, p=0.043), lacking information about available CTs (t= -2.913, p=0.005), and having limited accessibility to trial sites compared to the general population (t= -4.380, p=0.000). Patients' insurance coverage, however, was not found to be a significant barrier for CT participation (t=0.418, p=0.677). Secondary data variables were aligned with these barriers. Data revealed that rural residents have slightly lower educational attainment than urban citizens >t=5.384, p=0.000), and more people live below poverty level in rural areas (23%) than in urban areas (15%) (t=4.86, p=0.000). The secondary data analyses also showed that the majority of rural citizens covered by the SHP and Medicaid are eligible for CTs. ACS data revealed that 75% of people in rural areas meet one or more basic eligibility requirements to participate in CTs compared to 83% in urban areas. Some important barriers hinder CT enrollment of rural participants, such as accessibility to trial sites, poverty, lack of knowledge about CTs, among others. Data suggested that insurance coverage, however, is not a barrier to CT participation. Although CT PIs are correct in considering these barriers in rural areas, there still exists a large pool of potentially eligible CT participants in rural South Carolina. PIs, who were recruited from urban academic medical centers, may therefore be perpetuating unhelpful rural myths about CT eligibility in rural communities. Despite their remote locations, rural citizens should take part in medical research. Greater communication between PIs and rural participants and better education of PIs on communication strategies are needed to enhance CT participation in rural South Carolina.

‘I Contain Multitudes’: The queer chronotopes of Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’

Abstract This article will explore Annie Proulx’s treatment of the expansive Wyoming setting and the characters’ traumatic lives in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as factors that would seem to militate against the generic limits of the short story form. Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will argue that Proulx represents memory and geography in images in which time and space coalesce or are torn asunder to signify a love that literally dare not speak its name because it would be lethal to do so. The story’s central theme of queer love between two novice shepherds has a concomitant effect on what constitutes the normative in Wyoming’s fiercely patriarchal and machismo world. This results in a range of chronotopes in which heteronormative space and time undergo queer revision. Drawing upon queer theory tropes such as futurity and counterpublics, I suggest that Proulx’s queering of the literary form of the pastoral recalibrates notions of domesticity and the family. Proulx’s imagery thus reveals an alternative ethic secretly at work in the story’s milieu that narrative discourse opens to the reader even if its secret significance is sullied and even silenced by rural myth and history in its represented world.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sport and Ethnicity in New Zealand

Author's IntroductionThis article discusses why scholars are reconsidering the notion that Rugby Union was a central factor in generating a distinct identity for New Zealanders of British ancestry (Pakeha). The belief that Rugby acted as an agent of integration between Maori and Pakeha has also been questioned. Sporting clubs and events administered by New Zealand's ethnic minorities do, however, provide a means by which these groups can engage with the wider community while maintaining their own identity.Author Recommends:Chris Collins and Steve Jackson (eds.), Sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand Society (Albany, NY: Thomson, 2007).A useful overview of sport in New Zealand, particularly the chapters ‘Maori Sport: Pre‐Colonisation to Today’ by Brendan Hokowhitu and ‘Treaty Principles and Maori Sport: Contemporary Issues’ by Farah Palmer.Farah Palmer, ‘State of Maori Sport’, in M. Mulholland (ed.), State of the Maori Nation: Twenty‐First Century Issues in Aotearoa (Auckland: Reed, 2006), 261–75.An excellent overview of Maori participation in sport, commencing with a historical overview and proceeding to data drawn from the 2005 survey by Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC). Includes useful comparative tables on Maori and non‐Maori participation on sport at the grassroots and elite levels.Greg Ryan (ed.), Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society 1854–2004 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2005).Contains eleven chapters exploring the connections between Rugby and New Zealand society. Two chapters, Greg Ryan's ‘Rural Myth and Urban Actuality: the Anatomy of All Black and New Zealand Rugby 1884–1938’ and Caroline Daley's ‘The Invention of 1905’ reassess the extent to which Rugby Union generated Pakeha identity. Maori participation in rugby and its role in race relations are explored in two chapters by Greg Ryan: ‘The Paradox of Maori Rugby 1870–1914’ and ‘Anthropological Football: Maori and the 1937 Springbok Tour of New Zealand’.S. Thompson, P. Rewi and D. Wrathall, ‘Maori Experience in Sport and Physical Activity: Research and Initiatives’, in C. Collins (ed.), Sport in New Zealand Society (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2000), 241–55.Explores the experiences of Maori women in sport. The sections discussing the cross‐cultural issues between Pakeha coaches and Maori players and spectators are particularly useful.Online Materials: http://www.sparc.org.nz/ The Web site of Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) has extensive material on participation in sport and government policies on sport. It contains considerable material on Maori participation in sport, including reports from Te Roopu Manaaki, an independent body who advise (SPARC) on Maori participation in sport. http://www.nzchinese.org.nz/ Information on the Easter Sport tournament organised by the New Zealand Chinese Association can be found on this Web site. http://www.wisc.org.nz/ Web site of Wellington Indian Sports Club, the earliest Indian sports club established in New Zealand. Web site includes details of history and current news. Other Indian Sports Club Web sites with historical content include Auckland Indian Sports Club, http://www.aisc.org.nz/; Christchurch Indian Sports Club, http://www.cisc.org.nz/; and Pukekohe Indian Sports Club, http://www.pisc.co.nz/.Focus Questions What are some of the difficulties in defining ‘ethnicity’ in relation to sport in New Zealand? Why has the sport of Rugby Union been so closely associated with issues of ethnicity in New Zealand? Why are scholarly views on this changing? What factors have helped and what factors have hindered participation in sport for New Zealand's Maori, Pacific Island and Asian communities?

Black Orpheus, Myth and Ritual: A Morphological Reading*

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro; M. Camus, 1959) drew on classical myth and ritual to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Yet no one has analyzed the film with reference to its classical background. This paper argues that the film closely follows two narrative patterns (Separation-Lirrunality Incorporation and the Heroic Journey) employed by the myth of Orpheus and Eury dice, and related stories. This morphological approach reveals the cinematic Euridice as a "female adolescent initiand" whose loss of virginity and death are foreshadowed from her first scene. The film's setting of Carnaval promotes Euridice's adolescent ini tiation as it duplicates ancient Greek Dionysian festivals. Orfeu emerges as not only a shamanistic hero, but also an associate of Apollo and, antithetically, an avatar of Diony sus and substitute sacrifice for the god. Finally, the film not only replicates but also reinvents the ancient, rural and European myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by resituat ing it in a modern city of the Africanized "New World."

ANTHROPOMORPHIC TAXIDERMY AND THE DEATH OF NATURE: THE CURIOUS ART OF HERMANN PLOUCQUET, WALTER POTTER, AND CHARLES WATERTON

MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIESwas a small Victorian museum that contained unique anthropomorphic tableaux made by the taxidermist Walter Potter (1835–1918). Its glass cases were crammed with small “stuffed” or “mounted” animals, such as birds, squirrels, rats, weasels, and rabbits, wearing miniature clothes and placed in models of the human settings of Potter's time. They play sports, get married, fill schoolrooms and clubs, but they also illustrate well known sayings, rhymes, and rural myths. From the 1860s the tableaux were displayed in Bramber, Sussex, in the southeast of England. In 1972 the Museum was sold and relocated to Brighton and two years later to Arundel, in Sussex. In 1985 it was sold again and moved to the Jamaica Inn – a Daphne du Maurier inspired tourist attraction on the edge of the bleak Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The collection was finally dispersed in an auction sale in 2003. This sale attracted some media attention and several campaigns attempted to preserve the museum intact. The artist Damien Hirst claimed he had offered to buy the entire collection, but the auction went ahead (Hirst). Hirst was perhaps only the most high profile of those campaigning to keep Potter's collection together. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed hardly surprising that this unusual museum stood more chance of being rescued by an artist whose work often uses animal corpses to speak of mortality and the processes of preservation and decay, than it did of being bought by any public museum.

Race, Paternalism, and "California Pastoral": Rural Rehabilitation and Mexican Labor in Greater Los Angeles

In Southern California, regional and national myths of agrarian life as pastoral became entwined with paternalistic policy and racialized visions of the Mexican laborer. Re-worked in the context of the New Deal and increasing strike activity across California after 1928, these rural myths and policies shaped plans for the resettlement of Mexican-American workers in self-sustaining villages within Los Angeles County. Under the direction of government officials, reformers, and employers, these plans articulated diverse ideologies and agendas: the New Dealer's commitment to reform and rehabilitation through planning and paternalism, and the employer's drive to segregate and racialize labor under a pastoral ideal. Yet the village schemes foundered; weakened by employers' lack of commitment to worker welfare and fears of rural sedition, by the inconsistencies of the New Deal rehabilitation policy, and by an inability to manipulate the realities of agribusiness. This failure bore testimony to the mythic nature of an agrarian tradition in California.

Race, Paternalism, and “California Pastoral”: Rural Rehabilitation and Mexican Labor in Greater Los Angeles

Abstract In Southern California, regional and national myths of agrarian life as pastoral became entwined with paternalistic policy and racialized visions of the Mexican laborer. Re-worked in the context of the New Deal and increasing strike activity across California after 1928, these rural myths and policies shaped plans for the resettlement of Mexican-American workers in self-sustaining villages within Los Angeles County. Under the direction of government officials, reformers, and employers, these plans articulated diverse ideologies and agendas: the New Dealer’s commitment to reform and rehabilitation through planning and paternalism, and the employer’s drive to segregate and racialize labor under a pastoral ideal. Yet the village schemes foundered; weakened by employers’ lack of commitment to worker welfare and fears of rural sedition, by the inconsistencies of the New Deal rehabilitation policy, and by an inability to manipulate the realities of agribusiness. This failure bore testimony to the mythic nature of an agrarian tradition in California.

Nationalism, primitivism and the golden age in Othon Friesz's Autumn Work (1908)*

Abstract. This paper focuses on a detailed analysis of the Fauve artist Othon Friesz's painting Autumn Work (1908) within the contextual juncture of nationalism and primitivism. The painting occupies a unique position within this framework as it elucidates a point a convergence between nationalist ideologies and the primitivist turn towards peasant cultures as a repository of the past. This interpretation also identifies how Friesz's fusion of the Virgilian golden age with the contemporary, rural myth disrupts the Self/Other framework of primitivism via the lens of national identity. Friesz's employment of classically influenced and avant‐grade aesthetics further underscores the ways in which the painting references not only his personal artistic negotiation between tradition and modernity, but also the significance of ancestral myths and temporal oppositions in both nationalist and primitivist discourse.

Love Generation, Sleeping Forest , and the Urban "Dream": Rural Myth in Japanese TV Dramas

Tucked into one of signboards in MTR (underground trains) in Kong there is this slogan: Hong Kong, Asia's City. In a recent effort to boost its threatened international image as well as its tourist trade, Kong has highly publicized a newly designed city logo--the calligraphy of Kowloon in form of a flying dragon. The design cost Kong taxpayers 9.2 million. The semiotic inference from this logo is that the city, bearing intrinsically its Chineseness, is also vibrant as an international city, well exemplified in its Kong characteristics. The HKSAR Government's painstaking attempts to promote it as an internationalized city focus on advanced commercial and technological development, despite fact that Kong has not genuinely recovered from Asian economic crisis. With economy still struggling, high unemployment, and mounting competition from rapidly developing cities in China (such as Shanghai), Kong is striving to show the that it's still your favourite place for investment by boosting its cosmopolitan image. Hence rhetoric of World city in Asia. Apparently World-ness of Kong was deemed more commercially suggestive than more predicable description of city as international. In another of Asia's world cities, Tokyo, prominent news accounts

人々のもつ「農村像」の特徴

This paper presents an account of the associations made, in a variety of questionnaire responses, by university students with the term‘rural’in the Japanese context. Here, it pays special attention to the discursive process over space and representation, and to the role of language for mediating them, and for producing and reproducing collective meanings of rurality. Thus, the respondents were asked to make texts which account for what two words remind them of: No-son (an agricultural village in the literal sense) and Den-en (a paddy field and a garden), both being generally used as referring to physically non-urban areas. The percentage of respondents mentioning key words related to 29 items-landuse, physical and built environment, ways of life, social and cultural features, and so on-is illustrated (Figs. 1 and 2), and the texts themselves are examined, being focussed upon what representation they make with rurality. In conclusions, the component of respondents' representations of the rural contains many aspects of the‘rural idyll’or the‘rural myth’. In particular, in spite that some point out‘problems’around the current rural area, nevertheless, aspects of the (agricultural or industrial) production process are evidently absent from most if not all responses, and instead there are dominant romanticized views of farming and idealization of a (patriarchic) family and/or a village community. Further, there is certainly difference between two sets of imaginary countryside associated with those two words: that in term of Den-en tends to be more idyllic. The authors finally argue that lay discourse of the rural is interrelated to that of the policy of the government and the mass media, which have increasingly tended to be in the post-productivist direction at least from the early 1990s onward.

From Soldier to Peasant? The Land Settlement Scheme in East Sussex, 1919—1939

The English rural myth suggested that being close to the rhythms of nature, as opposed to being immersed in the irritations and pollution of city life, would create a settled, healthy, content, and loyal population. By the inter-war period the rural myth depicted an appealing image of self-sufficient, independent peasants living an uncomplicated lifestyle based on agricultural pursuits. In the aftermath of the First World War this picture of a golden countryside was popular and admired by social reformers, members of the government, and the general public. The coalition government incorporated this myth into its post-war social legislation and created in 1919 a land settlement scheme for newly demobilized soldiers aimed at establishing a new base of smallholding agricultural workers to populate the countryside. The myth may have been appealing, but it turned out to be economically not self-sustaining and politically it got little more than lip service. A myth cannot be attained through mere legislation. This article examines the land settlement scheme in East Sussex during the inter-war period and argues that even in an area seemingly well-suited to such a program, the scheme was neither practical nor successful in its attempt to put the myth into practice.

From Soldier to Peasant? The Land Settlement Scheme in East Sussex, 1919—1939

The English rural myth suggested that being close to the rhythms of nature, as opposed to being immersed in the irritations and pollution of city life, would create a settled, healthy, content, and loyal population. By the inter-war period the rural myth depicted an appealing image of self-sufficient, independent peasants living an uncomplicated lifestyle based on agricultural pursuits. In the aftermath of the First World War this picture of a golden countryside was popular and admired by social reformers, members of the government, and the general public. The coalition government incorporated this myth into its post-war social legislation and created in 1919 a land settlement scheme for newly demobilized soldiers aimed at establishing a new base of smallholding agricultural workers to populate the countryside. The myth may have been appealing, but it turned out to be economically not self-sustaining and politically it got little more than lip service. A myth cannot be attained through mere legislation. This article examines the land settlement scheme in East Sussex during the inter-war period and argues that even in an area seemingly well-suited to such a program, the scheme was neither practical nor successful in its attempt to put the myth into practice.

Modernization and Intellectual history: An interpretive model for the history of unified Italy

Abstract The starting-point for my research on modernization is Fascist ruralism. Italian historiography divides itself between those who consider ruralism merely as an aspect of Fascist propaganda, and those for whom it has a more substantial importance. I tend to side with the latter position, and find the intrinsic meaning of the myth of rural Italy in Fascist ruralism. As such, and because of this virtue, that is by being devoted to the cult of the earth, the Italian nation could regain strength, vigour and purity. In the history of the Fascist regime, the rural myth partly fulfilled the role of the blood myth in N ational Socialist Germany. The myth that the fertility of the Italian earth was ultimately capable of sustaining the entire population living on Italian soil was the ideological basis of some of the economic and cultural campaigns of Fascism. If the battaglia del grano [grain battle] - aiming at self-sufficiency in food production for the nation — was the first strong expression of Fascist ruralism, the campaign for population growth was its by-product. The values supporting these programmes were quite coherent: fertility of the earth = purity = growth = strength = virility. Even femininity became a value, albeit one linked to population growth and to traditional values (the guardian of the domestic hearth as mother and wife).