Poster power: rural electrification,visualization, and legibility in the United States

This article examines graphic visualization and visuality in Lester Beall’s 1937 series of posters for the United States Rural Electrification Administration. The posters are commonly thought of as raising public awareness of the benefits of electricity in the rural America, but what was meant by public and awareness in 1937 in terms of rural reform in the United States has remained unclear until now. This article posits that to understand how these posters were seen in 1937 requires an acknowledgment of how Beall’s posters graphically visualized the complexities of rural electrification, and how graphic visualization was contiguous with bureaucratic communication and the visual sensitivity of a public.     

ELECTRIFYING AFRICA: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY WITH POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The European Union anticipates alleviating future energy shortages and fulfilling renewable energy mandates by importing “green” electricity from Africa. Historical precedent and environmental consequences have largely been ignored. This article presents an environmental history of African electricity generation at a continental scale, tracing its parallel developments with colonialism, as well as its pursuit in the independence eras of development assistance and neoliberalism. Initially electricity served European interests. Independent governments' development policies involved electrification primarily for industrial development; in North Africa, universal access was also a priority. Recurrent themes and cycles of environmental constraint, environmental disruption, and displacement of consequences from one ecosystem to another are addressed. Highlighted are inter‐relationships among electricity generation, fuel supplies, ecosystems, and water cycles. Late twentieth century technologies and globalized markets re‐valued African rivers and deserts as potential energy sources. Mega‐engineering projects were rejuvenated or proposed. Rural electrification was labelled uneconomic social welfare unrelated to economic development policies of selling power through national, regional, continental and intercontinental interconnections. Historical analysis suggests new areas of research for sustainable development and alternatives to declensionist narratives. Decentralized, small‐scale plants offer models of electricity supply for industrial and domestic needs, while investment in rural electrification produced measureable economic benefit at national levels. Will the EU renewable energy mandate simply displace Europe's environmental problems to Africa? Can Africa afford another water‐intensive export commodity? Will the New African Century follow well‐established patterns of exploitation, or take new, sustainable directions?     

Echoing the Environment in Kam Big Song

Kam big song is an important genre sung within Kam (in Chinese, Dong) minority communities in southeastern Guizhou, China. It has traditionally served as a medium for transmitting historical, philosophical and ecological knowledge. Since the 1978 reforms, this region of Guizhou has been increasingly drawn into the national labour economy and has experienced a surge in economic development. The ensuing youth migration to urban centres, growing school attendance rates, and a marked rise in television viewing have led to a decline in Kam singing amongst younger generations. Nevertheless, in recent years certain forms of big song have featured increasingly in staged Kam cultural performances intended for broader audiences. Kam big song was recognised as a form of National Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in 2006, and was included on UNESCO's Representative List of the ICH of Humanity in 2009. This study draws upon various big songs that I learnt during almost twenty-four months of musical research in rural Kam regions from 2004 to 2011. It illustrates the cultural and ecological significance of this musical tradition, and the importance and complexities of its maintenance at a time of social transformation.     

Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea: Place,Personhood and Exchange

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on ‘Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea’ reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.     

Development narratives and the uses of ecology: malaria control in Northwest Argentina, 1890–1940

This study traces the evolution of social–environmental models of malaria control in Northwest Argentina. Beginning in the 1890s, the rationale for malaria control hinged on a narrative that placed malaria as the root cause of the Northwest's chronic backwardness. Insalubrious rural and urban landscapes, underutilized agricultural potential, unproductive labor, and even racial decay were all bound together as a public health problem. The framework for understanding malaria in the environment was derived from miasmatic theory and medical geography, anchoring the disease firmly in particular landscapes. Wetlands, representing both economic waste and a public health hazard, were singled out as targets for reclamation. Thus ‘environmental sanitation’ techniques, especially wetland drainage, became the preferred strategy for the federal government's malaria campaign, initiated in 1907. The ‘socio-ecological’ orientation of the Italian malaria campaign under Fascism, in which large-scale wetland reclamation for malaria control seemed to produce a comprehensive transformation of rural land and life, had a strong influence in Argentina, further entrenching environmental sanitation methods. By the 1930s, however, it became apparent that Italy's wetlands served poorly as landscape analogues for Argentina's Northwest. In particular, the main mosquito vector in the region turned out not to be a stereotypical ‘swamp breeder,’ rendering pointless most wetland drainage efforts. A counter-model, which adopted the framework of ecological science, proved to be more sensitive to the behaviors and microenvironments of different mosquito species, while disentangling malaria control from the broader and mostly unrealistic social development goals of the older model.     

Singing about the Land among the Biangai

This paper examines Biangai (Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea) expressions and transformations of environmental imaginaries through women's mourning songs (yongo ingi) and the songs of string bands. Biangai personhood, once intimately connected to garden lands and trees, hunting and forest paths, is increasingly influenced by global capitalism. Through their songs, they betray an increased tension between acting as an individual person and acting in terms of kin based relationality. While yongo ingi still memorialize the social spaces and land rights of the deceased, they also express conflicts in Biangai engagement with gold mining. Biangai string bands emerged just prior to Papua New Guinea's Independence in 1975, with the first band recording and releasing a national cassette in 1982. Dominated by young men, they depict the intersection of local music with a Melanesian modernity composed of compensation payments, gold mining, love, travel, and marketing. Both yongo ingi and string bands inform each other and provide insight into how local music engages images of both global economy and global ecology. By examining the uses, meanings, and performative contexts of these songs, this paper contributes to our understanding of the role of such expressive forms in connecting persons and their environment.     

Female Migration and Urban Labour Markets in Tianjin

The spontaneous, large-scale population movement from the countryside to the cities witnessed in China since the early 1980s has drawn increasing attention in academic circles. However, research has tended to focus on quantitative macro-level data collection and interpretation rather than on the experiences of those involved in the migratory process. Using qualitative research methods, this article presents the experiences and perceptions of the Chinese rural female migrants as narrated by themselves. It attempts to identify by this means the major forces behind rural women's out-migration and the institutional changes and structural barriers that have shaped women's lives and experiences in the migratory process. The author argues that women are actors and agents in this unprecedented economic and social transformation. Through their active engagement in the urban labour market, female migrants have challenged both the traditionally defined gender roles and the spatial and socio-economic boundaries that have been structurally designated to them. Their actions may catalyse a radical rearrangement of the social, political and sexual orders.     

A FAREWELL TO ‘RURAL BLISS’

The article discusses health policies towards school children in Norway from 1900 until the Second World War. It is concerned with dominant definitions of health threats against children and the variables used in defining the groups conceived as most vulnerable to poor health. A distinct change took place in the period. Whereas in the early 1900s poor and working‐class children in urban surroundings were considered to be under severe threats, in the 1920s a less specific category of ‘children’ were conceived as threatened. Eventually rural children were singled out as the important target group for health measures. The shifts had medical as well as political motivations. Another prominent feature in the period was that poverty took on a new meaning in the dominant medical discourse on children: from having been conceived as a material reality impinging upon health, it came to be considered mainly a cultural problem. Especially medical officers within the social democratic camp contested this argument although they did not rule out education and cultural transformation as a means to promote children's health. Despite the conceptual shift, however, social benefits and equal access to health services – measures that lay at the heart of the post‐war welfare state – remained in the 1930s an essential part of promoting children's health.     

The taming of psychoanalysis in geography

In the last decade, social and cultural geography has experienced a 'psychoanalytic turn': geographers have used insights from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Kristeva and others to deepen and re-orient our understandings of subjectivity and socio-spatial formations. In this paper, I argue that in the process, psychoanalytic geography has tended to render psychoanalysis compatible with the imperatives currently driving social and cultural geography (such as the demand to theorize resistance and develop particular understandings of politicized subjectivities and spatialities). Many of Freud's founding insights, however, work at odds with such imperatives: Freud's formulation of the unconscious points to a realm that is not malleable in terms of cultural resignification, and that conceives the individual as subject as much to inertia and repetition as to progressive transformation. The paper demonstrates how geography has worked to tame psychoanalytic theory by downplaying its more politically unpalatable aspects. In so doing, it argues that the time is now right for those aspects to be brought to light.     

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth‐century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so‐called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re‐embedded in an alternative set of institutions.     

Determinants of Net Migration to Rural Areas,and the Impacts of Migration on Rural Labour Markets and Self-Employment in Rural Sweden

Abstract

Across most of Europe, the countryside seems to show a polarized development in which large districts are depopulating, while certain areas, mainly around big- and mid-sized cities, are increasing in population. The latter development is often described in concepts of “rural gentrification” and “rurbanization”, symbolizing a transformation of rural communities to communities with urban values and lifestyles. Most studies of the effects of these processes have focused on social and cultural consequences, as e.g. the displacements of lower-income households with higher-income residents and of rural culture and values with urban ones. This paper examines the phenomenon from another perspective, namely the effects of the “rurbanization” processes on countryside's labour markets and economic life. This paper aims at analysing the determinants of net migration to rural areas in general and to different types of regions, and the impacts of in-migration on rural labour markets, self-employment and other socio-economic conditions in Sweden for the period of 2003–2005. We find that net migration into rural areas increases with the size of adjacent local and regional centres, whereas net migration decreases with the average commuting distance of workers in the rural areas. When comparing in-migrants to rural areas with rural area stayers, our results indicate that the former has lower incomes, a lower employment ratio and a lower degree of entrepreneurial activities. These differences could—at least partly—be explained by the fact that rural area stayers were on average 6 years older than rural area in-migrants, i.e. the two groups were in different stages of their life cycles.     

中国地理学对乡村发展的多元视角研究及思考

乡村发展是一个综合性和复杂性的问题,具有多元化的观察视角。本研究从地理学出发,选取空间、转型、功能、制度四个视角,对当代中国乡村发展研究的现状进行系统化梳理,并分别对四个视角下的研究内容进行评述,发现我国地理学研究呈现多元视角融合的趋势,且存在缺少多元理论指导、对城乡关系关注不足的共性问题。基于此,结合国内外乡村发展研究最近成果及我国实情,尝试提出中国地理学对乡村未来发展研究的导向：推进城乡一体化为导向的乡村空间重构研究、加强新型城镇化背景下的城乡发展网络研究、加强城乡统筹理念下的乡村多元发展路径研究、推进城乡等值化理论指导下的乡村规划和管理研究。     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Tourism development,rights consciousness and the empowerment of Chinese historical village communities

In recent years, China's tourism researchers have started to pay attention to the empowerment of rural communities. Current theoretical research and social practices reflect that tourism needs to seek localized empowerment with respect to different types of tourism destinations. This paper, taking Furong Historical Village in Zhejiang Province as a case study, examines a special kind of Chinese historical village community in which the villagers’ consciousness of their rights is weak and tourism development is only in its initial stages. Based on the field surveys, this paper points out four roots of such a community's disempowerment: (1) the failure of political institutions to ensure the community's public interest; (2) accusations of historical villages ‘damaging protection’; (3) information asymmetry in the relationship between rural leaders and villagers; and (4) a sense of powerlessness in the daily lives of rural residents. Based on these findings, this paper suggests several empowerment paths: (1) placing the enhancement of psychological power as the core of community empowerment; (2) addressing villager empowerment needs according to different types, rather than generalizing a community as a whole; and (3) including a diversity of subjects in the process of empowerment. These empowerment paths would be a moderate extension toward increasing community empowerment, based on this empirical study.     

国外乡村聚落地理研究进展及近今趋势

乡村聚落地理的研究是乡村地理学的重要研究领域。本文通过对大量的文献资料分析,系统梳理了国外乡村聚落地理的研究动态,将其研究历程划分为:萌芽起步、初步发展、拓展变革、转型重构四个阶段。对乡村聚落地理的研究内容体系进行归纳总结,主要集中在聚落布局、聚落形态与分类、聚落景观、聚落用地、聚落生态等方面。在此基础上对近今乡村聚落地理的研究趋势及发展方向进行了分析,发现乡村聚落的人文社会化和乡村重构的研究趋势。以期能对国内乡村聚落地理的研究提供借鉴和参考。     

Analyzing Fertility and Attraction in the Paleolithic: The Venus Figurines

Countless hypotheses have focused on the enigmatic “Venuses”, but most are not testable. The current authors investigate a hypothesis suggested by R.D. Guthrie involving the waist-to-hip ratio. This measurement determines fertility, beauty, and health in modern females; a 0.7 indicates cross-cultural beauty and fertility. Guthrie argued that the statuettes share an average waist-to-hip ratio of 0.655, indicating that Paleolithic males preferred curvier women. We sought to test this and analyze regional data. Our mean was significantly different than Guthrie's and we found evidence for regional differences. While some statuettes may have served as Paleo-erotica, it seems unlikely that they all did.     

Women's collective economic strategies and political transformation in rural South Africa

This article examines the economic processes and socio‐political institutions that shape women's involvement in community projects. Feminist materialism and postcolonial theory provide the framework to analyze these livelihood strategies as they are grounded in the material conditions of women's lives. The empirical study is based in a rural northern province of South Africa where colonialism and apartheid have contributed to extreme economic and social hardships. Fieldwork was conducted in Limpopo to analyze how community projects contribute to livelihood strategies. In an area where migrant remittances remain one of the main sources of income for rural households, women have increasingly engaged in collective economic strategies such as pottery making, sewing, and agricultural production. These strategies are embedded in a complex set of patriarchal institutions that reinforce unequal access to resources and have historically marginalized rural black women. Despite these barriers, findings from this study demonstrate that community projects provide the potential for economic and social empowerment, especially among rural women.     

Rural drinking water governance politics in China: Governmentality schemes and negotiations from below

This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed official documents and conducted interviews in a village in Shandong Province to investigate the RDWSP's rationale and practices, as well as how water access and management were negotiated by rural water users. The paper argues that (1) confronted with a decline in local governance capacity and in an effort to rectify the mistakes of the supply-driven, technocratic paradigm, the RDWSP attempted to integrate social, environmental and economic concerns but did not achieve that goal; (2) the decline in local governance capacity and people's pragmatic everyday strategies contributed to an individualized approach to solving water problems, reflected in people's disengagement from the government project and local participation, an effect that may sustain people's marginalization and exclusion from good-quality water access and management. Using the Chinese water project as an example, the paper contributes to the debate on state-induced water control versus civil society “counter-conduct” formed by daily interactions. Furthermore, it enriches the study of politics in general by presenting the state as a site of contested institutionalization and ongoing negotiations, confronted by everyday narratives and encounters with marginalized citizens that go far beyond and are far more complex than overt resistance or covert weapons of the weak.     

The Intersection of Gender,Caste and Class Inequalities in Child Nutrition in Rural India

While studies have investigated inequalities in child nutrition along single axes of social power such as, gender, caste and class, there has not been any study that has examined the intersection of the different axes in determining nutritional outcomes of children. This paper examines the intersection of gender, class and caste in determining children's nutritional outcomes for rural north, rural south and rural India as a whole. The paper investigates the intersectionality of the three axes in rural India and focuses on regional differences. The results show that children with particular disadvantageous group affiliations often find significant compensatory benefits from other beneficial identities. Class inequality dominates caste inequality and caste inequality dominates gender inequality in rural North India for all levels of stunting. In contrast, caste inequality dominates class inequality which in turn dominates gender inequality for severe stunting in rural South India.     

西方乡村绅士化研究进展

绅士化概念自1990s年代被拓展应用到乡村地区的转型重构以来，引起地理学、社会学等学科的广泛关注和重视，已经成为乡村领域一条卓有成效的研究路径，而国内相关研究甚少。针对此，本文在研读西方相关文献的基础上，从概念和内涵、原因和动力、影响和效应等方面对西方乡村绅士化的研究成果进行系统梳理和归纳。然后从与城市绅士化的区别、与逆城市化的细微差异、认识的不断深入以及研究方法的演变等方面开展了乡村绅士化研究述评。最后指出西方乡村绅士化研究对我国的启示，尝试提出我国该领域亟需解决的问题及未来研究的方向，以期丰富和完善我国乡村领域的研究视野和内容体系，为顺利实施我国乡村振兴战略提供科学依据和经验借鉴。