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Rural Sociology Commons

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Articles 1 - 10 of 10

Full-Text Articles in Rural Sociology

Paranormal Activity In West Virginia, Marty Laubach Mar 2018

Paranormal Activity In West Virginia, Marty Laubach

Marty Laubach

Follow the Mountain State Spirit Seekers Society as they hunt ghosts at Moundsville State Prison; bigfoot hunters in Dolly Sods with Virginia Sasquatch Watch; and Point Pleasant's mysterious Mothman.


"So Long As I Can Read": Farm Women's Reading Experiences In Depression-Era South Dakota, Lisa Lindell Feb 2016

"So Long As I Can Read": Farm Women's Reading Experiences In Depression-Era South Dakota, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

During the Great Depression, with conditions grim, entertainment scarce, and educational opportunities limited, many South Dakota farm women relied on reading to fill emotional, social, and informational needs. To read to any degree, these rural women had to overcome multiple obstacles. Extensive reading (whether books, farm journals, or newspapers) was limited to those who had access to publications and could make time to read. The South Dakota Free Library Commission was valuable in circulating reading materials to the state's rural population. In the 1930s the commission collaborated with the USDA's Extension Service in a popular reading project geared toward South …


Exploring Paradox In The Local Foods Movement: Challenges In Uniting Ideology And Practice, Justin Schupp, Rebecca Som Castellano Jun 2015

Exploring Paradox In The Local Foods Movement: Challenges In Uniting Ideology And Practice, Justin Schupp, Rebecca Som Castellano

Justin Schupp

Throughout the United States, there is a discernible movement towards a more localized food system. Asserting that movement practices can minimize detrimental effects to the environment while providing benefits to human nutrition, community well being and social justice, those promoting food system localization engage in practices which aim to resist the globalizing and industrializing food and agriculture system. Despite these aims, however, the discourses and practices of the movement could be veiling inequalities which limit opportunity for participation in food system localization. Many scholars have pointed theoretically to the ways in which food system localization is not a priori more …


Why Aren't There Any Turkeys At The Danville Turkey Festival?, Howard Sacks Jun 2015

Why Aren't There Any Turkeys At The Danville Turkey Festival?, Howard Sacks

Howard Sacks

Twenty-five years ago, my in-laws came to visit us in central Ohio. They were city folks from Philadelphia who couldn’t understand why my wife, Judy, and I had moved to the country. We timed their visit to coincide with Knox County’s Heart of Ohio tour. Each fall, this selfguided driving tour along the area’s scenic back roads features stops at farms, grange halls, and other sites that offer a glimpse into local rural life. This particular tour included a local turkey farm outside the town of Danville. Danville was well known for its many turkey operations; we were always thankful …


China's Agrarian Reform And The Privatization Of Land: A Contrarian View , Qian (Forrest) Zhang, John Andrew Donaldson May 2013

China's Agrarian Reform And The Privatization Of Land: A Contrarian View , Qian (Forrest) Zhang, John Andrew Donaldson

John Donaldson

Many reporters and scholars outside China advocate the privatization of land ownership in China as a necessary step for the transformation of China's agriculture system into a modern, large-scale, market-oriented and technology-intensive one. Chinese scholars advocating land privatization, for their part, typically argue that land privatization would better protect farmers’ rights and interests. We present a contrarian view to these calls for land privatization. Under China's current system of collective land ownership and individualized land use rights, agriculture has modernized rapidly in China in a way that has avoided privatization's many downsides. Land privatization, by contrast, would only exacerbate class …


Comparing Local Models Of Agrarian Transition In China, Qian Forrest Zhang May 2013

Comparing Local Models Of Agrarian Transition In China, Qian Forrest Zhang

Qian Forrest ZHANG

The development of markets and the penetration of capital into agriculture have started the agrarian transition in rural China, which is transforming smallholding, household-based agriculture into various forms of capitalistic production. This again raises in a new historical and social context the long-debated question in the agrarian transition literature: Can family farms survive the onslaught of capitalist agriculture based on wage labor and what shapes the confrontation between family farms and agro-capital? I argue that it is the local political economy—rather than some natural obstacles in agriculture to the penetration of capitalism—that shapes this confrontation and gives rise to a …


Gender Disparities In Self-Employment In Urban China's Market Transition: Income Inequality, Occupational Segregation, And Mobility Processes, Qian Forrest Zhang Dec 2012

Gender Disparities In Self-Employment In Urban China's Market Transition: Income Inequality, Occupational Segregation, And Mobility Processes, Qian Forrest Zhang

Qian Forrest ZHANG

This paper presents the first quantitative analysis of gender disparities in self-employment in urban China. It documents the extent of gender income inequality in self-employment. By disaggregating self-employment into three occupational classes, it shows the gender segregation within self-employment—women were concentrated in the financially least rewarding segment—and identifies it as a main source of the gender income inequality. It examines a range of determinants of participation in self-employment—family structure, family background, and career history—and how their gender-specific effects contributed to gender segregation. Although using data from a 1996 national survey, this study captures two key processes that shaped the structure …


The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh Nov 2011

The Seven Spices: Pumpkins, Puritans, And Pathogens In Colonial New England, Michael Sharbaugh

Michael D Sharbaugh

Water sources in the United States' New England region are laden with arsenic. Particularly during North America's colonial period--prior to modern filtration processes--arsenic would make it into the colonists' drinking water. In this article, which evokes the biocultural evolution paradigm, it is argued that colonists offset health risks from the contaminant (arsenic poisoning) by ingesting copious amounts of seven spices--cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, vanilla, and ginger. The inclusion of these spices in fall and winter recipes that hail from New England would therefore explain why many Americans associate them not only with the region, but with Thanksgiving and Christmas, …


Rural-Urban Differences In Infant Mortality In The State Of Indiana, 1988-1992: A Proportional Hazards Analysis, Katherine Novak Jul 1998

Rural-Urban Differences In Infant Mortality In The State Of Indiana, 1988-1992: A Proportional Hazards Analysis, Katherine Novak

Katherine B. Novak

Paper presentation at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. August, 1998. San Francisco, CA.


99 Years Is Almost For Life: Punishment For Violent Crime In Bluegrass Music, Kenneth Tunnell Dec 1991

99 Years Is Almost For Life: Punishment For Violent Crime In Bluegrass Music, Kenneth Tunnell

Kenneth Tunnell

The roots of Southern American music are located in the music of the eighteenth-century English, Irish and lowland Scots who migrated to North America. As they settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Cumberland Gap of Appalachia, they brought their songs that had been a part of their oral histories and cultures for at least two centuries. The commonly shared ways of life and social class among Appalachian mountain-dwellers not only inform about the early formative stages of bluegrass music but its growing popularity. As bluegrass music was removed from its insular setting and exposed to a wide variety …