Rural Way Of Life Research Articles

“A Ray of Sunshine on French Tables”

The French citrus industry in Algeria grew rapidly in terms of land area and fruit production from the 1930s until Algerian Independence in 1962. This article contends that technical expertise regarding citrus cultivation played a role in colonial control of Algeria’s territory, population, and economy. The French regime enrolled Algerian fruit in biopolitical interventions on rural ways of life in Algeria and urban standards of living in France. Technical manuals written by state-affiliated agronomists articulated racial distinctions between French settlers and Algerian peasants through attention to labor practices in the groves. A complex legal, technological, and administrative infrastructure facilitated the circulation of citrus fruit across the Mediterranean and into metropolitan France. This nexus of scientific research, economic profit, and racial hierarchy met criticism during the Algerian War for Independence. In the aftermath, expert discussions about citrus production reflected uncertainties and tensions regarding Algeria’s future. Citrus’ place in scientific, technological, and economic changes in twentieth-century Algeria illuminates the politics of technical expertise under colonialism and during decolonization.

Exploring the lived experience of one Rural Teacher in Indigenous context in Chilean Northern Territory: A narrative inquiry

The high rates of teachers’ attrition in Chile, particularly in Indigenous schools, requires an understanding of how the experiences of teachers working in these contexts impact on their professional practice. Through the teachers’ lens, using a narrative inquiry design, this study seeks to understand how educators face the challenges of teaching in rural and Indigenous settings. Findings of this study show Chilean teachers’ lack of knowledge about Indigenous culture and tradition. Teachers do not know about Indigenous students' characteristics and this is affecting teaching. Also was found that some elements are causing teachers’ exhaustion in rural and Indigenous context. These are teachers’ wrongs expectations about rural lifeways, extreme living conditions, emotional and geographic isolation and the lack of professional recognition.
 The finding of this study may contribute to future research and education stakeholders and universities that are in the process of finding improvements to teaching practices and teachers’ education programs.

‘We are inheritors of a rural civilisation’: rural complexity and the ceramic economy in the Indus Civilisation in northwest India

ABSTRACTWhat role do villages play in ‘an urban civilisation’? Although it is likely that most of the populations of South Asia’s ancient Indus Civilisation would not have lived in cities, it is not clear what their rural way of life would have encompassed. Using ceramic assemblages excavated from Indus-period villages in northwest India, alongside ethnographic records on village organization and rural craft production, this paper argues that Indus villages were characterized by rural complexity. This comprised a range of activities, including craft production, as well as short- and long-distance socio-economic links. Drawing on historical narratives, we show how South Asian villages have been essentialized and presented as either ideal or conservative extremes. We argue for the importance of a better understanding of the breadth and nuances of the rural sphere, and for a greater research focus on village life in the Indus context.

(Re)Interpreting Fieldwork: Jos Koning in East Clare

(Re)Interpreting Fieldwork:Jos Koning in East Clare Helen Shea (bio) In the early summer of 1975 a young man rode his bicycle into Feakle, the County Clare village tucked into the southern slopes of the Sliabh Aughty mountains that border County Galway, about twenty miles northeast of Ennis. Jos Koning was then a graduate student in anthropology and ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam, beginning what was to become the first ethnomusicological study of Irish traditional dance music. Koning observed in Feakle a population diverse in age, socioeconomic status, and aspirations. He documented their participation in various dance-music genres, from pub sessions and dances to competitions and céilithe. His aim was to account for that multiplicity, to discover the relationships between groups of people and their musical participation, and to explain how these had developed over time. This approach was new to studies of Irish traditional music, and it challenged the assumptions of cultural continuity and cohesion in rural Ireland that are at the core of received narratives of Irish traditional music. These assumptions derive in part from the harmonizing nativist discourses of cultural nationalism and folklore studies, which informed the work of the most influential anthropologists of rural Irish life, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball. County Clare's status as the reputed "home of traditional music" similarly draws on nativist discourse that locates the heart of Irish culture in the rural west, among Irish-speaking, religiously devout, and hard-working small farmers. The county's reputation also derives from George Petrie's fascination with its music in the early nineteenth century (Breathnach, Folk Music; Stokes; Petrie), a status more recently boosted by tourism, the work of folklorists and broadcasters, and an ever-expanding number of traditional-music festivals. These include the annual festival in Feakle, referred to as "the very heart of Irish music" ("Feakle Festival"), where the renowned fiddle player Martin Hayes [End Page 188] and concertina player Mary MacNamara pay tribute to the men who inspired and mentored them. These musicians include P. J. Hayes, Martin Rochford, Paddy Canny, Mikey Donoghue, Bill Malley, and Joe Bane (Hayes, "Liner Notes"; MacNamara), all of whom feature in Koning's research. Drawing on Koning's records of this project, including two doktoraal scripties (master's theses), field journals, recordings, and published articles, which he generously donated to the Clare Library's Local Studies Centre, this article considers the significance of his study for our understanding of the diverse and changing social meanings and sounds of Irish traditional dance music. I outline Koning's findings that musical participation and values were aligned with social status and discuss the implications of social change for both musicians and their music as they split into two stylistically different groups. Later, I turn to Koning's published articles—a reflection on the roles available to an outsider musician ("Fieldworker") and an analysis of fiddle playing among Feakle musicians born in the early twentieth century ("That Old Plaintive Touch")—which indicate that the musical performance and values of these older musicians differed from those of visiting musicians from the urban revival, while their opportunities to play in public declined with the rise of modern instruments. Conrad Arensberg and the Lure of Authenticity The work of distinguished American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball provided both a baseline and a template for anthropological studies in Ireland up to the 1970s (Gibbon; Wilson) and remains a touchstone for representations of a typically Irish rural way of life. More widely read, at least in the United States, than their coauthored Family and Community in Ireland (Byrne et al. 48), Arensberg's Irish Countryman focused on rural communities in County Clare, while Kimball wrote about the townsfolk (Family and Community xlvi). Two features of their work in particular shaped the ways in which the two studies influenced subsequent scholarship and especially the tendency of their findings to valorize rural cultural life. The anthropologists were heavily informed by contemporary theoretical approaches to anthropology and folklore studies, and they drew from (and reinforced) the discourse of cultural nationalism. Arensberg and [End Page 189] Kimball introduced their joint study as a test of the basic...

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction Paul Feigenbaum and Veronica House As we look toward the third Conference on Community Writing, taking place in Philadelphia in October, we can't help but marvel at all the extraordinary work happening across the United States and beyond. Community literacy, in all its variety, takes us on a journey through different communities in order that we learn from them about the complexity and beauty of human existence. In this issue, we move between a prison cell, a physical therapy retreat, a kitchen table, an archive, a writing center, and a classroom in order to explore the many ways in which writing encourages healing, self-revelation, and transformation. Our first peer-reviewed essay, "Typing Corrections: An Exploration & Performance of Prison (Type)Writing" by Alexander Rahe and Daniel Wuebben, is a rather atypical looking journal article. For reasons that will become clear as you read, the piece's co-authors wrote their respective sections on Swintec 2410cc typewriters while simultaneously employing an astonishing array of typing-related metaphors in order to compose an original and (literally) impressionable reading experience. In turn, the editors—in consultation with the authors and the journal's publisher—decided to publish the essay in its original typeface and with minimal copyediting. For one reason, a traditional copyediting process would have posed considerable material challenges. But perhaps more importantly, we decided that to "correct" the handful of mechanical errors sprinkled throughout the manuscript would in many respects undermine both the integrity and the spirit of the essay itself. After all, among the many insights articulated in Rahe and Wuebben's compelling and provocative piece is that errors are part of the human condition. Their article also asks us to recognize that for a number of material, social, and political reasons, some errors are much more easily corrected than others; indeed, the process of correcting an error can be quite complex and uncertain, and many errors can never be entirely corrected. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes leaving an error uncorrected might make the most sense. Beyond reflecting on the "chain of corrections" in prisons, the manuscript offers an illuminating firsthand account of the constraints faced by writers on the inside as they pursue various writing-related goals, from personal expression to connectedness to advocacy. Kate Vieira's article, "Writing's Potential to Heal: Women Writing from Their Bodies," explores how writing can be used as a healing tool in community-based group settings. Vieira delves into writing produced by women seeking therapy for physical ailments. Through participant interviews, observation, and powerful examples of the participants' writing, she studies writing as an embodied and social practice that aids in the experience of physical healing. Ultimately, Vieira understands the curative potential of writing as a tool that can amplify the way people experience the healing effects of body-based therapies. [End Page 1] In "Writing From 'The Wrong Class': Archiving Labor in the Context of Precarity," Jessica Pauszek analyzes an ambitious, transnational effort to establish print and digital archives of working-class community publications associated with the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) in England. Having participated as one of the leaders of this project over several years, Pauszek reflects on the joyful discoveries, the intimate acquaintances, the physical and emotional labors, and the logistical and material challenges she and numerous collaborators experienced as they negotiated a rather daunting task—namely, to collect, sort, and curate the massive array of materials composed over several decades by FWWCP members. As Pauszek details, many of these materials were previously un-archived and scattered through much of England. Through these reflections, Pauszek conceptualizes a theory of archival precarity, and she considers the implications of this theory for community-literacy practitioners who partner with, and seek to archive the work of, marginalized populations. Nancy Reddy's "'The Spirit of our Rural Countryside': Toward an Extracurricular Pedagogy of Place" studies a wide array of archival documents from the Wisconsin Rural Writers' Association (WRWA), founded in 1948, to examine how rural people across the state have used creative writing to record and preserve the history, culture, and folklore of a rural way of life. Reddy's study of these "extracurricular literacies" examines...

Editor's Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Luciana Namorato This issue of Africa Today presents five scholarly pieces that call our attention to ways individuals and communities think about and act on their civic identities. These essays invite us to think beyond the conventional dichotomies of the local and the global, tradition and modernity, and individuality and community, in order to better understand current topics in fields as different as education, healthcare, law, religion, and leisure. The five essays also urge us to recognize the major role of (not rarely unreliable) official accounts and outsiders’ gazes in shaping conversations about these topics. In “‘Silent Exclusion’: Transnational Approaches to Education and School Participation in Ghana,” Sampson Addo Yeboah and Marguerite Daniel discuss the “uneven progress” that characterizes access to formal schooling in Ghana. Yeboah and Daniel highlight the existence of a dual system in which formal education and traditional education (i.e., children’s participation in family production) coexist and describe it as the main cause of “silent exclusion” of children from formal education, which manifests itself in the form of poor attendance, as well as high attrition and dropout rates. The authors invite us to face the compelling reasons behind parents’ apparent lack of interest in formal education by calling attention to the disconnection between foreigners’ generalizing claim that formal education equals increased income and Ghanaians’ daily reality. A similar problematization of an international, or outsider, interpretation of national problems is found in Amy S. Patterson’s article, “‘To Save the Community’: Carework as Citizenship during Liberia’s Ebola Outbreak and Zambia’s AIDS Crisis.” Patterson examines the private actions of careworkers as acts of citizenship and explores the way they engaged in protests and lobbied governments and private donors to defend the rights of the individuals under their care. Three of the scholarly pieces that comprise this issue center on the artistic representation of, and engagement with, relevant social issues. In “Story of a South African Farm Attack,” Adriaan Steyn discusses white rights activism and violent crimes through an analysis of Darrell Roodt’s feature film Treurgrond (Soil of mourning, 2015). The cinematic treatment of farm attacks, Steyn claims, reproduces the Afrikaners’ fear that their traditional, rural way of life, as well as their language and culture, are no longer valued and welcome in South Africa. The clash between tradition and modernity is also central to “Local Renditions: Variegations of Cosmopolitanism in Taarab Music of Lamu, [End Page ix] Kenya.” In this article, Caleb Edwin Owen argues that Lamu taarab provides a compelling articulation of what anthropologists have termed “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” serving as a space where tradition and cosmopolitanism meet. Taarab, for instance, provides the space to talk about romantic love in a largely Muslim society and somehow embraces consumerism by allowing tourists to fill the role of patricians when it comes to patronage of musical groups. “Allegories of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Three African Novels,” by Lori Hartman, closes the scholarly section of this issue of Africa Today with a comparative study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Sahle Sellassie’s The Afersata (1968), and Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood (1962), three novels in which criminal activity and trials figure prominently. Hartman argues that, in these works, crime is understood as a rupture in a relationship; for this reason, punishment cannot be fully understood if confined to just an individual or a community. Hartman’s comparative analysis challenges our dichotomous thinking of individual and community, as well as of modernity and tradition, and helps us better understand the outcomes (and perceived shortcomings) of judicial processes that take place on African soil, under international, watchful eyes. In his 1964 novel, Arrow of God, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe reminds us, “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.” We invite you to delve into this issue of Africa Today and fathom a few more facets of this rich and complex continent. [End Page x] Copyright © 2019 The Trustees of Indiana University

The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala

Reviewed by: The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History by Asko Nivala Thomas L. Cooksey, emeritus Asko Nivala. The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History. New York: Routledge, 2017. viii + 273 pp. Friedrich Schlegel is commonly identified as a writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. Though much of his work focused on Greek and Latin classics, Schlegel thought of himself as a historian, engaged in what he characterized as Kulturgeschichte (though admittedly not in the modern sense of the term). Inspired by Hesiod and the book of Genesis, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models of history followed a triadic pattern, positing a problematic present as a fallen or undesirable age, between an idyllic primitive Golden Age in the past, and the possibility of a utopian Golden Age in the future. Asko Nivala challenges the commonly held reading that Schlegel and the Romantics believed that a Golden Age had any basis in history. He further proposes to complicate the view that Romanticism be understood in terms of a nostalgic yearning for such a lost Golden Age. Rather it is a fluid trope that allowed Schlegel to critique the cultural present. Schlegel's "Romanticism" here refers to the historical period in German cultural history at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with the final stages of the Enlightenment. Its early proponents include the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel. This book focuses on Schlegel's early writings, literary fragments, and letters until his conservative turn and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Nivala, a cultural historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, teases out and drills down into Schlegel's complex and shifting treatment of the conception of a Golden Age, proposing to reconstruct his philosophy [End Page 333] of history. For Schlegel, the Golden Age is often deployed ironically. He rejected claims that it represented an age of greater authenticity, a position Nivala compares to Adorno's critique of fetishizing the genuine. Noting the complexity of Schlegel's conception of the Golden Age, Nivala suggests that he is ripe for various contemporary readings, including the postmodernist, the transhumanist, and the ecocriticial. Deploying a broadly chronological and biographical organization, Nivala first examines Schlegel's writings on classical poetry, arguing that he distinguishes between the myth of the Golden Age and primitivist myth, too often conflated in the critical literature. Primitivism is understood as the idea of a past epoch based on a rural way of life, closer to the rhythms of nature, a way of life more authentic than the modern, an "original" related to concepts resonating with Schiller's naive or Rousseau's "noble savage." In contrast, Schlegel sees the Golden Age in Hesiod or Genesis as an ancient trope or narrative pattern that challenged the notion of primitivism. He turns to the antiprimitivist myths of Prometheus and Orpheus, to explore a harmony between nature and technology. Schlegel also treats the myth of Atlantis as the embodiment of an anti–Golden Age. Rejecting the notion of a Golden Age as period of authentic harmony with nature, Schlegel instead posits an age of "blossoming" (Blütezeit), shifting from the mathematical metaphors of the Enlightenment to biological and chemical ones, to suggest a creative and organic relationship between the polis and the rural environment. For Schlegel, the culture of Athens—especially that expressed in Attic theater—exemplified an age of blossoming, while that of Alexandria, a culture of decline. The notion of a blossoming culture challenges the idea that humans represent something fixed and autonomous, opening the possibility of the transhuman. Nivala next explores Schlegel's studies of various cultural attempts to recreate a "national Golden Age," especially those of Augustus's Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Louis XIV's France. This in turn informs Schlegel's political thinking about the cultural prospects for the still fragmented German-speaking regions of Europe, and his sympathies for the Athenian model. Underlying this is what Nivala terms a Chiliastic reading of history, a millenarian and messianic vision of the Golden Age as the Kingdom of God. Responding to dramatic historical changes, especially in...

Contemporary Mari Belief: The Formation of Ethnic Religion

Abstract In this article* I describe the process of developing of Mari ethnic religion based on the tradition of animistic beliefs. I aim to consider two areas of contemporary Mari religion, the activities of the official religious organisation and the vernacular tradition as practiced by people in the countryside. The Mari vernacular belief system has been seen as one of the components of Mari ethnic identity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mari religious tradition has played a role in strengthening national identity, and so the religious organisation has been officially registered. Today there is an attempt to adapt Mari religious practices to the conditions of the religious market, in the face of which vernacular tradition seems to lose its connection with the ethnic worldview and rural way of life. My analysis of research material from fieldwork conducted shows the existence of belief rituals that are followed independently from the official Mari religious movement. Contemporary Mari religious tradition has two layers and can be described as a process of transformation from vernacular belief to ethnic religion with its religious institutions and group of experts.

The Influence of Social Capital on Farm Household’s Borrowing Behavior in Rural China

This paper evaluates whether social capital affects the ability of farm households to obtain formal and informal loans. We test for the impact of two measures of social capital. The first measure, kinship, captures the traditional aspects of bonding social capital in rural areas that might affect the probability of getting informal loans. As the economic reforms in China have changed the traditional rural way of life and weakened the role of kinship, more mobile farmers are likely to develop a different kind of social capital also based in the Chinese tradition but not focused exclusively on kin. This friendship social capital is hypothesized to affect farmers’ ability to get both formal and informal loans. We use the Chinese Household Finance Survey data from 2013 and estimate the probability of obtaining credit, while also accounting for the reverse causality. In addition, we use the Heckman selection model to establish how social capital affects not only the probability of getting loans but also the size of the loan. Empirical results suggest that social capital affects borrowing by farm households. In particular, the friendship social capital has a positive effect on farm household’s ability to get formal loans, and has a substitution effect on informal borrowing, while kinship has a positive effect on farm households’ ability to get informal loans. Friendship and kinship are positively associated with the amount of a farm household’s formal and informal loans, respectively.

Historical review of threshing operations and their archaeological signatures in the Midwest and Plains

Nineteenth and twentieth-century grain threshing operations left imprints on the rural landscape and social fabric of midcontinental North America. Traces of threshing activity are seldom recognized archaeology, despite the importance of this activity to the history of agricultural development and rural lifeways in the Midwest and Plains regions. Changes in threshing technology followed a chronological sequence with inter-regional variability. Different stages of the technology can be identified and dated through specific archaeological signatures, which are discussed here.

Improving the structure of the labor market of agricultural territories by developing agricultural green tourism enterprises

The subject of the research is the structure of the labor market of rural areas through the development of enterprises of rural green tourism. The purpose of the work is to identify problems and trends of employment of rural population and to substantiate the organization of alternative types of employment in rural areas through the development of rural green tourism enterprises. Methodological basis of the article became general scientific methods of cognition, generalization, method of comparative analysis, statistical and other methods of research. Results of work The labor market in the countryside is characterized by the curtailment of job offers through the holding of agrarian production, its modernization. There is an increase in labor productivity, the release of large masses of the rural population, a decrease in the levels of its income and life. This leads to the search for and justification of alternative types of employment in the countryside. One of them is the definition of rural green tourism and its enterprises. Moreover, the organization of small tourist enterprises and agro-villages in the village does not require significant investments and special professional training of workers. They are based on the use of material resources of farmers, personal peasant and households, as well as the traditions of hospitality and the rural way of life of Ukrainians. The field of application of results. The results of the study can be used by the state executive authorities in improving the structure of the labor market of rural areas. Conclusions With the purpose of developing the rural economy and expanding the labor market for rural residents, we proposed the development of rural green tourism enterprises. The organization of new types of economic activity in rural areas is intended to increase the incomes of rural population. With the active development of unique and competitive destinations for rural green tourism, for which rural areas are used as an advantage, rather than treated as a disadvantage, it is possible to reach a sufficiently high level of profitability. This will give impetus to the further development of the countryside and the emergence of adjacent or serving businesses.

The Rural Population of Siberia

Based on sociological research conducted in 2014–2015 (Novosibirsk Oblast), the article analyzes the problems of rural employment in the agricultural sector and other spheres and argues that a new agricultural policy must be adopted, which focuses on villages, supports farming, and encourages the rural way of life.

Quality of Rural Life. Editorial 16 June 2018

Abstract The paper discusses the concept of the quality of life and its measuring. It tries to explain its peculiarities in the rural space considering different levels of education, professional activities, mobility, ways of dwelling, access to the social and technical infrastructure. The subjective perception of both urban and rural people to the rural quality of life can be manifested in moving in and moving out. The main shortages of the rural quality of life can be seen (by rural people) in a poor access to the prestigious and well-paid jobs and to a richer social life. The main advantages of the rural way of life are generally evaluated (by urban people) by better access to the nature. A promotion of the local identity is considered as an important tool for improving the rural quality of life (besides of a solution of infrastructural problems), considering the enormous difference among European rural areas of a big differentiation of the European countryside. The last part of the paper summarizes the contributions of the special number.

The Drivers of and Barriers to Rural Reindustrialization

The article presents the results of a short-term field study of Maslyaninsky Raion, Novosibirsk Oblast. The study focused on the continued monitoring of the socioeconomic processes of a Russian village, the nature of the Maslyaninsky miracle, the shifts in the economy of the region, and several salient features of the rural way of life.

Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest by Jason Weems

Reviewed by: Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest by Jason Weems Marcel LaFlamme Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 368 pp. $35. In 1936, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration embarked on an ambitious aerial survey of farmland in the United States. New production controls and soil conservation measures demanded accurate measurements of individual farm fields, and aerial photography would allow the agency to collect these measurements on a scale that made ground-based surveying impractical. Agency representatives spread the photographs out on their desks to interpret them, but they also carried the images out on farm visits and pored over them alongside farmers planning the next year’s crops. Public responses to this technique for visualizing the countryside were varied: critics grumbled about government “sky snoops,” even as the agency was beset by requests for additional copies of the photographs. Beyond their usefulness as technical artifacts, these aerial views became charged with sentiment as landowners proudly framed and displayed them as keepsakes. In Barnstorming the Prairies, Jason Weems highlights the ways in which the view from above enables and yet exceeds panoptic fantasies of control. He’s read the strand of scholarship that emphasizes “the authoritarian aspects of aerial imagery, and specifically, its role in fueling modernist aspirations to synoptic vision, rational planning, and spatial order” (xi). But it’s his attunement to homespun details like the black-and-white photograph hung in the sitting room that allows him to tell a more nuanced story. This story, for Weems, is a distinctively midwestern one: he argues that elevated views, real and imagined, helped the region’s inhabitants to make sense of an open and seemingly featureless landscape. Learning to live on this land meant learning to see anew, as a nineteenth-century English traveler quoted by Weems poetically observed: “There are no organs of perception, no faculties as yet prepared in this country” (6). Of course, such faculties had been cultivated by Native peoples living in what we today call the American Midwest before settlers started arriving en masse in the early nineteenth century. Barnstorming the Prairies has little to say about this history of encounter; while Weems offers a detailed discussion of the Land Ordinance survey that carved the region into a grid and gave rise to early overhead views like plat maps, it is as though he takes the project of westward expansion and the settler colonial society that grew out of it for granted. The Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, who appears throughout the book as a foil to the modernizing farmer of the 1920s and 30s, is never [End Page 108] placed in dialogue with the hunters and horticulturalists whose displacement made his presence on the land possible. This prevents Weems from seeing, in the framed aerial photograph, a naturalized history of dispossession. Yet it opens the visual archive that Weems has gathered to a rereading that would effect, in the words of literary scholar Mark Rifkin, “a sensuous realignment of perception in which settler personhood and placemaking might come into critical focus.”1 As an art historian, Weems is at his best when interpreting particular images: the chapter he devotes to the Iowa-born painter Grant Wood is a tour de force. Weems persuasively shows how Wood’s early paintings pay homage to nineteenth-century genres of elevated looking like the atlas and the bird’s-eye view. With the help of the full-color plates at the book’s center, Weems offers strikingly original readings of works like Death on Ridge Road (1935), in which an aerial view of an impending collision dramatizes anxieties about changing rural lifeways. Even familiar images like The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa (1931) take on new meaning, as an oblique perspective on the future president’s boyhood home comes to evoke the airplane that might have afforded it. This eminently teachable chapter models an approach to visual culture that takes the social significance of technology seriously, and it traces a hitherto unacknowledged throughline in the work of an important midwestern artist. Other chapters feel more diffuse: one on what Weems calls “Jeffersonian urbanism” gets off...

Estudo descritivo do perfil sociodemográfico da população urbana e rural no estado de Minas Gerais

Este artigo teve por objetivo compreender como as variáveis relacionadas ao tipo de trabalho, à renda, ao acesso a bens de consumo, a serviços e tecnologias da informação e da comunicação manifestam-se no perfil das famílias que habitam o campo no Brasil. Utilizou-se dados da Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD), referentes ao estado de Minas Gerais. Observou-se, em termos dos resultados finais, que o processo de mudança do modo de vida rural se dá de forma mais visível nas variáveis relacionadas ao consumo, no que se refere ao acesso à bens e serviços de origem urbana.

Locating Optimal Countryside Settlement Sites for Nomads in Northern Khorasan

Locating Optimal Countryside Settlement Sites for Nomads in Northern Khorasan

The contribution of agroecology to the persistence of family agriculture in Panama

ABSTRACTFamily-based agroecological agriculture has historical antecedents registered from: the life stories of the precursors of the different “agro-cultures” practiced; the experiences of design and implementation of agroecological systems; and the social activism of people and organizations aiming to stop the neoliberal politics that undermine the sustainability of rural ways of life. The general objective of this study was to reconstruct the recent past and the current situation of agroecological initiatives in Panama. The results show that agroecological reconversions portray the contribution of the incorporation of agroecological practices in the general persistence of small-scale family agriculture in Panama.

Coming Full Circle: New Ruralism

Particularly in areas of Africa and Asia, efforts are being made to accommodate new economic development without obliterating the rural way of life. Termed ‘New Ruralism’, the approach involves architects cooperating closely with local communities, ensuring that projects respect their cultural heritage and empowering them to actively participate in shaping their environment. The process is as important as the form in driving sustainability. Guest‐Editor Richard Garber explains the principles and illustrates them with a project in China by his own firm GRO Architects, and one in Kenya by his former employers SHoP Architects.

Перспективи аграрної галузі в контексті інтеграційних процесів з ЄС

У статті проаналізовано перспективи нарощування експорту вітчизняної продукції аграрного сектора в країни Європейського Союзу та можливості розширення збуту вітчизняної аграрної продукції на цьому ринку. Особливість співпраці між Україною і країнами ЄС полягає у скасуванні більшості мит на експорт продукції, запровадженням тарифного квотування. Для успішного розв’язання завдань євроінтеграції аграрний сектор економіки України має достатньо передумов: багатий природно-ресурсний та експортний потенціал, вагомий людський капітал, поступово зростаючу інвестиційну привабливість, збережений уклад сільського життя та багатовікові традиції ведення сільського господарства. У публікації подано алгоритм дій, який дає можливість налагодити співпрацю із іноземними партнерами та вказано напрями підвищення ефективності аграрного виробництва. Наведено основні групи продовольчих товарів, з якими конкуруватиме вітчизняна продукції на внутрішньому і зовнішньому ринках у результаті спрощення умов для товарообороту між Україною і країнами Європейського Союзу. Основними вітчизняними експортними продуктами є зерно, насіння соняшника, олія, корми для тварин, добрива. В статті описано умови, які необхідно виконувати для реалізації продукції на експорт в ЄС. Завдяки гарантуванню якості та безпеки нашої продукції на рівні європейських стандартів вітчизняний сільськогосподарський виробник зможе ефективно конкурувати на ринку Європейського Союзу. Оскільки доступ на ринок Європейського Союзу може бути отриманий після проходження процедур сертифікації та отримання відповідних дозволів.