Rural Studies
From UoWiki
!! Are you sitting comfortably...?
On the top floor of a multi-story office building sits a large heap of tents in various shades of green and brown, propped up on desks, irregularly stacked, tumbling in drifts down fire escape stairs or precariously balancing between the photocopiers, hat stands and other pieces of decaying office furniture. A river of water cooler bottles snakes through a valley of gore-tex.
Since transport links into and out of the city were cut, and every shop except for the camping equipment store in the basement shopping mall had already been looted, this seemed like the best way for the sales and accountancy team to spend the weekend they would have been on their long-awaited 'outbound' motivational course.
And it would be a bit warmer too. Wouldn't do to get your little breadhead tootsies cold would it?
!! Thoughts
The Pastoral mode - poetry that celebrates the virtues of rural life - is undoubtedly an urban invention.
Some argue that any positive representation of rural life is urban romanticism. Life in the countryside is, by dint of proximity to nature, nasty, brutish and short. The city is the place where people can fulfil their potential, escaping the constriction of small communities, and where the limits of human possibility are extended. The city embodies the hope of bettering yourself, escaping the cycle of gruelling labour that has enclosed your family's lifeworld for generations.
Others point to the role of outside economic forces in pushing people off the land and out of traditional ways of living. The move to the city may represent the best option for many people under present conditions, but those conditions may be ultimately unsustainable. The dependence of the city on the countryside is often suppressed in the discourse of an urban centred society. And damage results from the social disruption caused by the migration of the active male population of rural areas to shanty-towns, leaving behind lopsided communities, bringing back sexually transmitted diseases.
Still others emphasize the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture as critical in the human relationship with the natural world. Some even see a reconnection to hunting/gathering in the improvised lifestyle of certain groups in the twenty-first century city. How this relates to the dramatic rural-urban population shift we're living through and the long-term sustainability of a society based on an instrumental, extractive relationship to nature... requires more work.
The following discussion began as an exchange of emails on this subject between England and India.
Here is an article by John Pilger about the contributions made by IMF policies and industrial farming to the gigantic loss of life in the tsunami disaster.
Back to In(ter)disciplines
