Search

Agritourism has often been framed as a means to revitalize a declining rural economy by improving and diversifying household incomes, forestalling rural flight, and preserving agrarian cultures. We argue, however, that it can also have the propensity to create a different kind of rural revitalization, one that accentuates the production of spectacle, at times at the expense of food production. We draw from qualitative field research to examine the growing agritourism movement in the Philippines, a country with a struggling rural sector. We observe that agritourism sites in the Philippines negotiate space and work in multiple ways and highlight the tensions that farmers increasingly perceive on the ground. Some farmers persist in maintaining the production of food, while others shift more towards the staging of experience and spectacle to serve urbanite imaginations of the rural. We present various tendencies in the process of transitioning from farm to agritourism and argue that attention to the production of rural spectacle is important in understanding agrarian transitions at the farm and community level, and ultimately agritourism’s implications on rural revitalization.

Carbon-based payments for ecosystem services solely consider afforestation and reforestation to assess sequestration. However, political ecology researchers demonstrate that tropical forest...

In this article, we focused on the importance of education in the socio-economic development of the country. We analyzed the government statistics of the Russian Federation, the experience of other countries, and the scholarship of Russian and foreign researchers. Based on this analysis, we established the basic differences in the level of educational service in the rural and urban areas of the Republic of Bashkortostan. We concluded that even though the government objective is to increase the birth rate and keep young professional workers in rural areas, the number of pre-school educational institutions in rural areas is declining, and the infrastructure of rural pre-school education lags behind the urban one. The difference in education quality of rural and urban schools creates unfavorable conditions for rural university applicants. The dire state of rural education increases the rate of rural flight. Young people move from rural areas to the cities of Bashkortostan, other regions (especially to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kazan), and other countries. This contributes to brain drain and creates serious issues in the socio-economic development of rural areas of Bashkortostan.

O presente artigo busca analisar a importância da produção material da agricultura familiar na região central de Minas Gerais, nos municípios de Conceição do Mato Dentro, Alvorada de Minas e Dom Joaquim, e como o projeto minerário “Minas Rio”, levado a cabo pela multinacional Anglo American desde 2008, compromete a disponibilidade de recursos das comunidades atingidas, interferindo nos processos de desenvolvimento rural em bases familiares. Este trabalho é resultado de pesquisa interdisciplinar desenvolvida entre 2015 e 2016 que teve como objetivo assessorar entidade de apoio à agricultura familiar na região a partir da caracterização das comunidades atingidas. As coletas de dados foram realizadas por meio de entrevistas realizadas nas unidades de produção familiares, bem como de agentes de desenvolvimento rural nos três municípios pesquisados. O conjunto de resultados encontrados mostrou que apesar da região ser caracterizada pela presença marcante da agricultura familiar, com potencial para alavancar o desenvolvimento em bases sustentáveis, através de produção rica e processos de beneficiamento tradicionais, o projeto minerário na região afetou as famílias agricultoras no que toca ao acesso aos recursos naturais, sobretudo hídricos, bem como provocou um esvaziamento do campo, alterando drasticamente os rumos do desenvolvimento rural em bases sustentáveis e territoriais. Há, contudo, uma indicação no resultado do estudo de que as famílias desenvolvem estratégias e diversas maneiras de resistir e permanecer em suas terras.

The essay examines the memory of the ‘great transformation’ of Italy from an agricultural to an industrial economy in the postwar years by focusing on the case of the rice belt located around the city of Vercelli in Piedmont. Between 1945 and 1965, a society that for more than two centuries had been organized around the culture of rice experienced abrupt and all-embracing change. The mechanization of farming and the introduction of herbicides overlapped with the exodus of rural workers to the city and factories, transforming a local world – from the natural landscape and built environment to the structures of production, division of labor, and everyday domestic, social and cultural life. Based on interviews with former rice farmers and workers, the essay sheds light on the subjective experience of this far-reaching transition. Its aim is to delineate the contours of a collective representation of historical change. What emerges from these personal narratives of the Vercellese rice fields is a com...

Just before the First World War, German agricultural economists and social-welfare experts constructed a new social category – rural female youth, whose mobility provoked growing alarm. Framing rural flight in terms of gender and generation allowed experts to focus on its demographic, economic, and moral threats, and rural female youth became a target for reform. These debates presaged a wave of popular anxiety over rural female youth that expanded dramatically during the Weimar Republic. However, prewar court testimonies of runaway maids in rural Saxony suggest that some rural girls understood their mobility in terms of ‘getting ahead’, and resisted efforts to restrict their occupational, social, and spatial horizons.

In 1919 Ernst May became the head of rural housing for the province of Silesia in eastern Germany. Silesian agriculture had long suffered from rural flight. The situation worsened in 1922 when the partition brokered by the Allies brought chaos in the mining industry and a flood of refugees. As head of the provincial stabilization effort called interior colonization, May was in charge of settlement programs to aid three constituencies of special concern: the farmworkers, the miners, and the refugees. Between 1919 and 1923, Germany's national rural housing effort employed a contradictory strategy of modernization set within corporative ideology, a "third way" that trumpeted a quasi-feudal social order as a path to political accord. May's Silesian work chronicles the impact of Modernism and corporatism on early Weimar housing: his settlements for farmworkers and miners celebrated their unique cultural traditions, while he experimented in rationalization techniques to increase housing production and reduce costs. With corporatism's decline after Germany's return to economic stability in 1924, modernization was increasingly accepted as an unalloyed virtue, and the veil of corporatism lifted. In 1924, challenged by the circumstances of the refugee housing program just at the moment the corporative compromise came to an end, May engaged in a series of experiments in polychromy, prefabricated construction, mass production, and standardization that reflected a more purely modern approach to the housing problem.

Les anciens Oudmourtes vivaient en grandes familles dans des villages plus ou moins grands. Ce mode de vie a trempé leurs caractères et donné naissance à une vision du monde, un système de vie et une philosophie. Le mode de vie urbain était pour eux bizarre, incompréhensible. Pourtant, ville et village ne peuvent évoluer en vase clos, ils sont étroitement liés et se développent de concert. Depuis les toutes premières œuvres, la littérature oudmourte reflète le point de vue des Oudmourtes sur leur lieu de naissance et sur la ville. Celui-ci a changé progressivement : dans la poésie, les premiers poèmes sont romantiques, la ville y est représentée comme une grande machine. Au milieu du xxe siècle, la ville est vue en poésie comme un grand jardin qui grandit, s’épanouit et montre le chemin. Dans les années 1970, les couleurs s’assombrissent : les poètes oudmourtes commencent à sentir les côtés sinistres de la ville, qui nie l’individu. Dans les années 1990, le héros poétique montre comment il arrive à fuir, à s’échapper : dans cette période, les poèmes expriment la nostalgie du village, de la langue maternelle, d’une enfance heureuse au sein de la nature. The Udmurt from ancient times have lived in big families in small and large villages, helping each other and keeping each other’s lives in front of their eyes. From this way of life their characters become stronger, developing and forming a world view, an order of life and philosophy. The urban lifestyle was far from them, strange and incomprehensible. Nevertheless, the city and the village couldn’t evolve separately from one another from ancient times and today they are closely related and develop together. When talking about these close relations, it is necessary to understand the advantages and disadvantages of both: on the one hand, the city sup­presses small villages, swallows people from villages giving them possibilities, and cuts off their return; on the other hand, generally speaking, cities are developing thanks to villages, which supply them. Udmurt literature from its first books shows the point of view of the Udmurt individual about his or her birthplace and the city. This opinion has gradually changed: the first poems are full of romance in which the city is represented as a huge machine, changing village life. In the poems of the middle of the 20th century, the city is represented as a growing, blooming garden directing the way. In the 1970s the colours gradually become dark as the Udmurt poets started to notice the city’s bad side, rejecting individuals. In the 1990s, the lyrical hero shows his mood to escape, to run away forever; poems of this period miss the village – one’s mother tongue, a happy childhood, the proximity of nature. Today the tra­gedy of a-man-in-a-cage-between-the-village-and-the-city is understandable to the majority of the Udmurt. Az udmurtok mindig is nagy családokban éltek, kisebb és nagyobb falvakban, egymásnak segítve és szem előtt tartva egymás életét. Jellemük, világnézetük, filozófiájuk évszázadokon keresztül ennek az életmódnak köszönhetően formálódott. A városi mindennapok nagyon távol álltak tőlük, az ipari környezetben folyó élet idegen és érthetetlen volt számukra. Mindezek ellenére a városok soha nem tudtak a falvaktól függetlenül fejlődni, és mind a mai napig szoros kapcsolat fűzi őket össze. Itt ambivalens kapcsolatról van szó: egyrészt a város alárendelt helyzetbe hozza a kis falvakat, különböző lehetőségeket kínálva, nyújtva magába csábítja a falusi embereket, elzárja az ő visszaútjukat, másrészt viszont az ipari területek sok szempontból a falvaknak köszönhetően fejlődnek, a vidék ellátja őket. Az udmurt irodalom a kialakulásától kezdve az udmurt emberek vidékhez és városhoz fűződő kapcsolatát és érzelmeit tükrözi. Ez a kapcsolat az évtizedek folyamán megváltozott: az első versek, amelyek bemutatják a két szférát, tele vannak romantikával, a város ezekben a művekben a szegény, elmaradott életet megváltó nagy gépre hasonlít. A XX. század közepén született versekben a városról szóló sorok folyamatosan növekvő, virágzó, előre utat mutató kertre utalnak. Ezek a színek az 1970-es évektől kezdve fokozatosan sötét árnyalatokba borulnak, ugyanebben az időszakban az udmurt írók először hozzák szóba a város rossz, embert nyomasztó, életet keretek közé szorító oldalát. Ha az 1990-es években megjelent verseket nézzük, ott a lírai alanynak egyenesen a menekülni vágyása lepleződik le előttünk, a múlt század végén világot látott művek tele vannak hiányérzetekkel – a hősök fizikailag és lelkileg is távol állnak az anyanyelvüktől, boldog gyermekkoruktól, a tőlük karnyújtásnyira lévő természettől. A falu és város közötti ketrecbe került hősök tragédiája napjainkban egyre több udmurt ember számára válik személyes, mindennapi érzéssé.