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.
Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria's population has been on the move-out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born after 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians ......
A sublime photographic chronicle of the efforts of several counterculture families to adopt a traditional Nuevomexicano life in the tiny village of Petaca, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. In the early 1970s there weren't many women photographers, and fewer still who used their camera to make ethnographic studies. Lynn Adler was a self-taught ......
Media Rurality investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. From the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural ......
