Beth Hoffman was living the good life: she had a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home in San Francisco, and plenty of close friends and family. Yet in her late 40s, she and her husband decided to leave the big city and move to his family ranch in Iowa-all for the dream of becoming a farmer, to put into practice ......
A captivating story of environmental crisis and community on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Island environments are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of rapidly rising waters, accelerating ecological crisis. While we often think of this environmental reality in terms of the Global North and South, Alaska, or Micronesian or Indian ......
Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia
The expression "one or two words" is used by the Toraja highlanders of Indonesia to refer euphemistically to their highly elaborate form of political speechmaking. Moving from this understatement, which denotes the meaningfulness of transient acts of speech, One or Two Words offers an analysis of the shifting power relations between centers and ......
'Development' promises higher incomes, better livelihoods, social justice, and emancipation, but decades of good intentions have left hill communities in Northern Thailand with high rates of drug addiction and poverty, and a loss of traditional knowledge and values. A former volunteer and development specialist who spent much of her childhood in ......
Looks into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. This volume offers insight into the lives of peasants and China's complex social processes.
Antipastoral, Agriculture, and the Rural Modern in US Literature
How did rural America come to be viewed as backward and inferior, and how did literary modernism respond to and critique this perception? What happens when rural America-long romanticized in pastoral literature-becomes associated with deficiency, degradation, and decline? Maria Farland's Degraded Heartland is the first critical study of US ......
Antipastoral, Agriculture, and the Rural Modern in US Literature
How did rural America come to be viewed as backward and inferior, and how did literary modernism respond to and critique this perception? What happens when rural America-long romanticized in pastoral literature-becomes associated with deficiency, degradation, and decline? Maria Farland's Degraded Heartland is the first critical study of US ......
Policing and Reform in America's Jim Crow Countryside
In the segregated American South, policing was war. Ungovernable police discretion came to the backroads and cattle pastures of America's rural countryside as ideas of race, property, and belonging reshaped state power. In Mississippi Law, Justin Randolph explores policing's hinterland to explain US racial authoritarianism between the Civil War ......
