The global countryside: peasant women negotiating,recalibrating and resisting rural change in Colombia

This article utilises a gender lens to consider the notion of the ‘global countryside’ through a case study with four peasant Colombian women living in the mountain town of Toca, Boyacá. In seeking a bottom-up understanding of rural globalisation, as it is experienced in the everyday lives of peasant women in Colombia, we drew on a methodology that included participant observation and photo elicitation interviews. Data reveal the inflections and incursions of the global into women’s work and family lives, in particular, gendered implications of the emergence of a globalised countryside. At the same time, the results demonstrate women’s agency in recalibrating and resisting discourses of globalisation as they create places and strategies for subsistence based on peasant values and economic strategies. Finally, based on our results, we problematise the universalising tendencies of urban/Western feminist critiques of rural women’s lives which have been embedded in assumptions about modernity, development and liberalism.     

Observations on the open fields: the present position of studies in British field systems

Debate over the orgins and development of field systems in the British Isles continues within the framework provided by a collection of studies published in 1973. Some of the criticisms made by reviewers of that collective volume are answered here but this discussion paper focuses principally on two sets of arguments which have given a different emphasis to the debate on field systems during the past six years. This paper considers first McCloskey's view of open fields as products of behaviour towards risk and then Dodgshon's re-interpretation of the evolution of field systems in relation to changes in law.