Rural World Research Articles

The Images of the Other in Intercultural Interaction: on the Problem of Perception of another Culture in Multinational Tatarstan in the 1930-1970s

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Alien / Another / Different images in the cultural space of the Tatar ASSR in the 1930s - 1970s. Based on the archival documents, oral history materials and the example of the multinational region, the author considered intercultural communication and the problems of perception of another / different culture. Much attention is paid to the study of the socio-cultural space of Tatarstan villages.
 The analyzed material made it possible to find out how the inhabitants of the village and the city perceived the image of the Alien who was once believed to be an Alien in the rural world. The study also revealed how the perception of the Alien had been transformed during the pre-war, military and post-war periods as well as whether there is a difference in the perception of the Alien on the part of locals and newcomers.
 As a result of the research, the images of the Alien were created through the characteristics of alimentary qualities through clothing and appearance, as well as behavioral aspects.
 The author came to conclusion that the image of the Alien was more often formed as general knowledge about the social, spiritual and material culture of representatives of various people living nearby. In intercultural communication, which often took a form of a dialogue, the formula was “ours – another”, not “ours - alien’s”. According to the author, the experience of long-term residence of the people, inhabiting the Tatar ASSR, had a positive impact on the dialogue and interpenetration of cultures.

Gender Relations and Female Agency in Claire Keegan’s Antarctica

Abstract Claire Keegan is one of the most prominent voices within the contemporary Irish short story panorama. Internationally acclaimed, her prose has been praised for its frank and bitter portrayal of a rural world, whose outdated values, no matter how anchored in the past they might be, still prevail in a modern milieu. Keegan’s unsympathetic views on society, mainly on the Catholic Church and the family, are the main targets of her harsh criticism. Issues like gender and sexuality, two social constructs with which to validate an uneven distribution of power, constitute the pillars of most of her plots. Bearing these aspects in mind, my proposal focuses on the analysis of Keegan’s first collection of short stories, Antarctica (1999), in light of gender relations and female agency, in an attempt to find patterns of – often thwarted – female emancipation in the context of the rapid changes of a society that is still adjusting to a globalised world. This article will also engage in the discussion of her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007), and her long short story Foster (2010).

John C. Swanson. Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.

John C. Swanson. <i>Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary.</i>

Georgic Echoes in 'The Long Dry' and 'The Dig' by Cynan Jones

From his debut novel, The Long Dry (2006), to his most recent, Stillicide (2019), the non-human has played a prominent role in Cynan Jones’ fiction. Of Jones’ texts, The Long Dry and The Dig (2014) specifically engage with cultivation, farming, and raising livestock in a Welsh rustic setting. Both novels present a rural world that resists idealised forms of representing nature as some kind of idyll, thus calling into question the separation between human and non-human. Starting from this premise, my working hypothesis is that the relationship between human and non-human constitutes a relevant trope in Jones’ fiction since they are both caught in the very same moment of crisis, change and transformation. To this end, I would like to read The Long Dry and The Dig through Timothy Morton’s idea of the mesh that connects human to non-human. Firstly, I will discuss the generic features of the novels, such as shifting focalisation and temporal disorientation which can be said to favour an encounter between storytelling and material reality. Secondly, I will address Jones’ interest in the erosion of the border between human and non-human, illustrating the affective bonds and sensory ties that connect both dimensions. Taken together, Jones’ novels entail a deep eco-georgic stance in that rural life is recast in terms of a thematic and material space that brings together human and non-human, conflating change and crisis, failure and success.

A Model for the Economic Evaluation of Cultural Ecosystem Services: The Recreational Hunting Function in the Agroforestry Territories of Tuscany (Italy)

Cultural ecosystem services (CESs) are non-material benefits generated by natural and human ecosystems that substantially contribute to human wellbeing. Estimating the monetary value of CESs is challenging because there is no real market for these services and therefore there is no actual market price. This study seeks to define an economic evaluation method for these services, with special reference to a recreational CES that has so far received little discussion: hunting. We conducted an online survey in the province of Siena (Tuscany, Italy). The Consumer Surplus estimate of hunters was made using the travel-cost method with a detailed analysis of the annual expenditure on hunting activities, and a negative binomial statistical regression. The results reflect the nature of hunting activity and show the dynamics that have occurred over recent decades. In fact, whereas hunting used to be strongly connected to the rural world as it was an income supplement for local communities, nowadays it has turned into an elitist and almost exclusively recreational activity. In any case, knowing the economic value of ecosystem services constitutes an essential background for planning effective land management and development policies in the short and long term.

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

Urban Squares in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: a Street View on Ancient Near Eastern Governance

10th EURIPA Rural Health Forum “Understanding our Patients - working closely together”. Abstract Book 23 - 25th September 2021

2021 is probably an important milestone to rural world. Lockdown, social distancing, pandemic, climate change, greenhouse effects, planetary health.... all these key words in the same pot. The consequences of these terrible circumstances are already alarming. We will have to work closely with our patients, working together, thinking together, not only as professionals but also as global citizens. Join us, in the most appropriate way, to share the present and build the future. Jean Pierre Jacquet President of EURIPA

Theoretical Approach to Agroturism and Its Contribution to Local Development

Tourism as a driver of local development. It is also an international practice with results exhibited by countries from various latitudes. Therefore, a tourist management is imposed who allows the identification of gaps in tourist competitiveness, customer satisfaction, increased income, and an improvement in the quality of the population life. Today, city dwellers appreciate the rural world as the corner where tranquility, authenticity, nature, traditions, among other riches, are treasured. This new concept of rural tourism makes it possible for the great tourist currents to seek other spaces that are not only sun and beach destinations, as well as representing an attractive alternative for tourists. The following article makes a reflection on the basis of the main concepts and trends linked to agrotourism as local development strategies in order to facilitate the correct management of this tourism modality. Hence, theoretical methods were used such as analysis and synthesis, historical-logical, systemic structural; and empirical ones such as scientific observation, interview, study of normative documents, among others. As a result, the bases were laid for the theoretical-practical deepening of the research and a group of conditions are proposed that allow rural tourism to develop as an outstanding framework of the agricultural sector, and diversify the offer so that it behaves as a decisive factor in local development. The study has been validated and presented at national and international scientific events with positive results.

Are Public Subsidies to Encourage Young Farmers Effective? Case Study of a First-Time Farm Set Up by a Young Female Farmer in the Valencian Region of Spain

Generational renewal and the incorporation of women into the rural world are fundamental for the sustainability and modernisation of the agricultural sector. Hence the special government protection granted to the sector, which appears in both European legislation on rural issues and in the global strategy of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Rural Development Goals involving a commitment to measures aimed at helping young farmers to set up agricultural holdings and especially at encouraging women to engage in farm management. In the case of Spain, this is nothing new, given that Law 35/2011 on the Shared Ownership of Agricultural Holdings became a veritable revolution in terms of gender in the rural world when it came into force. The results section discusses the practical application of funding for young farmers to start up an agricultural holding through a technical and economic study, and a case study of a first-time farm set up by a young female farmer. The main contribution of this work lies in answering two questions. The first one is to evaluate the efficiency of the subsidies for young people to set up farms in terms of offering a decent, stable livelihood for young men and women in Spain and the Valencian Region. The second one attempts to verify the effectiveness of both European and Spanish active public policies to encourae young men and women to join the agricultural sector.

I will follow? Authoritarian populism, past and present

ABSTRACT Scoones et al. [2018. “Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (1): 1–20] suggests that the contemporary rural world can be characterized as having distinct forms of authoritarian populism. This article argues that key aspects of authoritarian populism are not seen across the breadth and depth of the contemporary rural world, and, as such, the use of authoritarian populism can be politically misleading. Nonetheless, it is argued, the way in which authoritarian populism in the 1980s fostered particular and specific forms of political responses are of use in developing contemporary intersectional counter-hegemonic strategies capable of challenging the regressive political character of the contemporary conjuncture.

Determinants of innovation by agri-food firms in rural Spain: an MCA PLS-SEM analysis

The development of a sustainable rural world must have an innovative agri-food industry as one of its bases. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the main drivers of innovation by small and medium agri-food companies in Spain. A combined multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is performed to identify the key factors among 63 indicators in the domains of the technology-organisation-environmental approach. The results suggest an open field of research. Positively related to innovation are firm capacities and financial resources. Moreover, agri-food firms innovate in products, processes or marketing in order to increase sales, enter new markets, or increase the quality of their products. On the contrary, most of these firms did not innovate to reduce costs or time of response, meet regulatory compliance or maintain employment. Authorities should be aware that smaller and younger agri-food firms face more restrictions to innovate, and firms feel public policies could help to meet market demand as a driving force of innovation. On the contrary, essential objectives of regional development such as environmental compliance and maintaining employment seem to depend solely on public action.

Climate change and agrarian struggles: an invitation to contribute to a JPS Forum

ABSTRACT This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on ‘climate change and critical agrarian studies’. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.

Authenticity and modernity Concepts of past and present that shape music history

This music sounds as if ´was coming from afar. From the world of yesterday. Franz Schubert cuts and paste a popular dance tune – the Austrian Landler – in his advanced string quartet as a sounding symbol of that loss of immediacy that seems to be the an indispensable part of the modern condition. Here, I will start my contribution to our conference’s discussion of the issue of ‘identity of music between authenticity and contemporarity’. The Landler’s dreamlike evocation of a pre-modern rural world where ‘such things as home, nature and immediate life’ still are not uprooted by modernity here stands for the feeling of loss of authenticity that I claim to be ‘inscribed in modernity’. By this, I signal that I focus on a particular aspect of the authenticity debate. What I particularly have in mind is music’s contribution to the discussion of how we in the modern world access our pasts and how our views to the past take part in the negotiation of modern cultural identities

MSA, The French Agricultural Social Protection scheme

As the second largest social protection scheme in France, the Agricultural Social Mutuality (fr. Mutualité sociale agricole, MSA) is responsible for providing all compulsory social security coverage for the entire agricultural population and its beneficiaries, whether it concerns health, family, retirement, work-related accidents or occupational diseases. The MSA is responsible for collecting social security premiums and contributions, but also unemployment insurance and conventional contributions for many organizations1. It differs from other French social security schemes in that it provides a one-stop shop for individuals and companies to deal with a single contact person for all matters relating to their social protection throughout their lives. In addition to its basic mission, it carries out a policy of health and social action adapted to its population and is also in charge of occupational medicine and the prevention of professional risks in the agricultural sector. It can support all actions aiming to promote the coordination and the offer of care in rural areas2. As a mutualistic organization, the MSA is the expression of a responsible and supportive democracy at the service and in proximity of the rural world. The representativeness of its elected delegates, its knowledge of the territories and their stakeholders, and its role as a professional agricultural organization give it an indispensable expertise that allows it to work for the cohesion of the territories while guaranteeing access to quality public services. This expertise also enables it to be present abroad as part of formalized exchanges in European networks and international cooperation projects.

The great agrarian conquest: The colonial reshaping of a rural world, by NeeladriBhattacharyaAlbany: SUNY Press. 2019. 522 pp. $100 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐1‐4384‐7739‐8

The great agrarian conquest: The colonial reshaping of a rural world, by NeeladriBhattacharyaAlbany: SUNY Press. 2019. 522 pp. $100 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐1‐4384‐7739‐8

1968 and rural Japan as a site of struggle. Approaches to rural landscapes in the history of Japanese documentary film

ABSTRACT In the twentieth century, Japan produced an extraordinary documentary film heritage around the rural world which has not received sufficient attention. This article identifies three different approaches to the rural in Japanese film history: first, the wartime interest in place as providing an “authentic essence” of a national identity. Second, the postwar representation of the rural in public relations films (PR eiga), mainly interested in geography. And third, the release of Ogawa’s Summer in Sanrizuka in 1968 which brought a new dimension to a countryside transformed into both a battlefield and an icon of the political protest of the era.

Grief, resurrection, and the Nigerian Civil War in Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash

As part of the third generation of Nigerian poetry, Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash focuses on the Nigerian Civil War experience of 1967–1970, the grief associated with it, and the resurrection of the Biafran agitation. Being a collection that is derived from the rural world of the Igbo cosmology, Diala’s The Lure of Ash portrays the Nigerian Civil War in a sensuous and emotive tone. It accounts for the poet’s belief in the regeneration of the lives of the dead Biafran soldiers. The symbols of fire and ash are significant for interpreting the poet-speaker’s grief in the collection. The collection also succeeds in painting a picture of the Nigerian Civil War experience where the bitter memory of the war resonates, while representing poetry as the healer of the pain and wounds of the war.

The relief of the interwar world. "Marginal and experimental. Gusti Cooperative: two decades of research in the history of sociology ”, Eikon Publishing House, Bucharest, 2020. Coordinators: Ionuț Butoi, Martin Ladislau Salamon

The advent of a new collection of studies dedicated to the „Gusti Cooperative” is an opportunity to recall the ways of referring to our rural world and its research. For a long time the predominance of these referrings have been represented by the ideational sublimination of the so-called visions/mythology, witch is nothing else but resuming romantic themes in today’s world. The investigations of the relief an the detail structure of a complex view, whose diversity and openness are revealed as the study progress, is much more discreet. This is what the team coordonated by Professor Zoltán Rostás does, which marks two decades of existence with this book.

Oilseed Cakes in Italy and France: Opportunities and Difficulties of a Market (late 19th and first half of the 20th Century)

Abstract This paper addresses the trade and commercialisation of oilseed cakes (residues from the extraction of oils) and press cakes in Italy and France during the last decades of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. It tries to demonstrate that the diffusion of oilseed cakes for livestock, a distinctive sign of the intensification of breeding that involved all of Europe, or as organic fertilisers, took place at the crossroads of multiple dynamics. Trade policy of the states, industrial choices and development paths of the different rural worlds help to explain the variations in timing, spatial scale and methods used. The spread of oilseed cakes confirms that the modernisation of European agriculture happened on different and interrelated fronts.

Gender and Environment in the Interior of Santiago Island/Cape Verde: Sand Harvesting From Women Heads of Families.

Cape Verde is an island country and Sahelian, where the climatic conditions cause a rainfall deficit originating dry periods causing a fragile agricultural development. The rural world is facing various problems such as lack of land for cultivation, lack of water and soil erosion. The "apanha de areia" (sand haversting) refers to the extraction of sand and gravel from the sea and rocks. Although it is considered as an environmental crime, the activity is carried for generations and supplies the civil construction business of the country. This study analyze this activity from the perspective of women from the interior of Santiago, in the locality of Charco, in the municipality of Santa Catarina. The research was carried out based on an ethnography of long duration, with spaced field visits, since January 2009 and the monitoring of environmental and gender policies in Cape Verde. As results, we highlight women's agency in the face of a context of growing social inequalities.