Space,time and history in the Polish People’s Republic: the trilogy Sami swoi,Nie ma mocnych,Kochaj albo rzuć

Abstract

The article discusses the meanings of popular culture, authenticity and history in People’s Republic of Poland. As an example it uses a popular film trilogy. The trilogy Sami swoi, Nie ma mocnych and Kochaj albo rzu? (‘All friends here’, ‘Take it easy’ and ‘Love or leave me’) was shown in Polish cinemas between 1967 and 1977. The reviews were written just after the premières. The article uses the concepts of time and space elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Doreen Massey to analyze the different chronotopes of the films. It analyses both the films and the reviews as strategies of creating authenticity and creating cultural meanings: the meaning of history and the meanings of rurality. I will show how history and present, memory and society are interwoven in the light of popular production. In addition, I will emphasize the diverse interpretation possibilities resulting from this micro-historical view and the transnational critique of modernism highlighting the small and local which emerged throughout Europe in the 1970s.     

How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear

Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.     

Imag(in)ing ‘good’ Swedish meat: gender,sexuality, race and nation in the sale of higher welfare chicken

Abstract

This article attends to the ways that meat from higher welfare chicken is sold in supermarkets in Sweden. Recognising that the ‘welfare-friendly chicken body is an achievement between the market, the animal and publics’, this article continues these discussions to show how gender, sexuality, race and nation operate within these markets and publics by looking at how welfare is marketed in chicken meat sales, particularly higher welfare chicken, compared to other meat. By attending to the images used to sell chicken, we examine how ideas about ‘the farm’ and ‘the family’ are mobilised in the supermarket. Using images of specific families, they position chicken both in the Swedish rural landscape and in intersecting social categories. These two narratives intertwine and operate as a device in the sale of high welfare chicken meat. This, we argue, hides the dependency on global supply chains and workforce, but also (re)produces ideas about what high welfare is, who cares, and how we should care. Throughout the article, we demonstrate how the narratives of farm, family, and nation operate in relation to species and welfare, as the ‘Swedish family farm’ is imag(in)ed to sell high welfare chicken in ways that contrast with meat from other animals.     

The fallen hero: masculinity,shame and farmer suicide in Australia

The drought-stricken Australian rural landscape, cultures of farming masculinity and an economy of value, moral worth and pride form a complex matrix of discourses that shape subjective dynamics that render suicide a possibility for distressed farmers. However, the centrality of a ‘mental health’ perspective and reified notions of ‘stoicism’ within this discursive field operate to exclude consideration of the ways in which cultural identity is linked to emotions. To illuminate and explore complex connections between subjectivity, moral worth and affect in relation to understanding farmer suicide, this article draws on theory and literature on agrarian discourses of masculine subjectivity and shame to analyze empirical data from interviews with farmers during times of environmental, social and economic crisis. The idealized notion of the farming man as ‘Aussie battler’ emerges from romantic agrarian mythology in which pride and self-worth are vested in traditional values of hard work, struggle and self-sacrifice. However, the structural context of agriculture, as it is shaped by the political economy of neoliberalism, threatens farm economic viability and is eroding the pride, self-worth and masculine identity of farmers. The article suggests that the notion of the ‘fallen hero’ captures a discursive shift of a masculinity ‘undone’, a regress from the powerful position of masculine subjectivity imbued with pride to one of shame that is of central importance to understanding how suicide emerges as a possibility for farmers.     

Constructions of rural childhood: challenging dominant perspectives

This article reviews research on the lives and experiences of children and young people living in rural Minority world environments. The literature reviewed has focused on constructions of rurality in relation to children's experiences, most notably the rural idyll. Alternative constructions of rural childhood, characterised by dullness, horror and deprivation, are also apparent, and associated with insufficient rural activities, resources and transport, marginalisation and social exclusion. The more recent inclusion of children's perspectives on rural living provides a deeper understanding of rural childhood and challenges the dominant perspectives.     

基于县域尺度的江苏省乡村性空间格局演变及其机理研究

基于区域城乡一体的思想构建乡村性指数RI,通过GIS-ESDA空间分析框架,运用空间自相关、空间变差函数等测度模型对20世纪90年代以来县域尺度江苏省乡村性空间格局演变和机理进行了研究。结果表明:1990年以来县域尺度江苏省乡村性表现出较强的空间自相关性,相似地区在空间聚集分布,且集聚的程度不断增强;乡村性热点区空间结构主要以徐州-宿迁-淮安为核心的圈层结构,并且不断向盐城集聚,呈现出明显的地理集中演变特征;县域尺度乡村性空间格局的连续性和自组织性越来越强,由空间自相关引起的结构化分异的机理越来越显著;东北-西南方向乡村性空间差异较小,东南-西北方向乡村性的异质性则十分明显,空间差异较大。     

理性、流动与家庭——村民日常生活语境下的乡村性转型

从乡村日常生活的真实状况出发,本文在个人、家庭、村集体三个维度考察了当前乡村性转型的主要路径。对河南邓州的研究表明,市场经济带来的经济理性与城镇化带来的流动性相互耦合,彻底动摇了传统小农分散、孤立、封闭的特征,但在不同维度上转型速率与方式并不同步。进一步的分析表明,当前我国的一系列宏观政策与促进乡村村民城镇化的初衷之间还存在需要弥合的差距。论文最后对家庭理想与经济理性耦合、个体理性与群体理性差距、有限城镇化的制度困境等理论话题进行讨论。     

乡村性研究综述与展望

乡村性是乡村地理学研究的重要内容,是综合反映乡村发展水平、揭示乡村内部差异、识别乡村地域空间的重要指标。本文通过对国内外现有研究成果分析,深入剖析乡村性的研究进展,从概念内涵、研究方法、尺度关联和应用层面方面进行系统总结与评价。在此基础上提出未来乡村性研究的重点方面,主要集中在乡村性概念的模型构建、微观尺度的分析、社会化的转向和时空过程研究等。加强乡村性的研究有利于拓展乡村地理的研究视角,丰富乡村地理学在乡村性研究的深层次内涵,有助于更深入破解乡村发展的内在机理,也为城乡一体化发展提供理论指导和技术支撑。     

‘Glow worms show the path we have to tread’: the counterurbanisation of Vashti Bunyan

Although ‘counterurbanisation’ is very widely acknowledged and studied, certain elements of this migration-led phenomenon lack detailed scrutiny. These gaps need filling in order to appreciate the full flowering of the phenomenon in specific social-cultural, geographical and historical contexts; to enable comparison between these diverse expressions; and to examine their relationships with contemporaneous rural socio-cultural restructuring. One neglected element is counterurbanisation fairly directly informed by the late 1960s/1970s counterculture, a migration strand quickly stereotyped as the ‘hippie’ ‘getting her/his head together in the countryside’. This paper uses the example of British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan, notably through the gestation and content of her Just Another Diamond Day album of 1970, to illustrate and examine countercultural counterurbanisation. With an additional nod to affective aspects of rurality, it also suggests something of what the lengthy rural journey Bunyan made from London to the Scottish islands, a key inspiration for the 1970 album, provided for her at a difficult, challenging, yet ultimately rewarding period in her life. Indeed, her experiences of (trying to engage with) the countryside on this journey are described as heterotopic, an association which leads the paper to suggest a more general heterotopic status for rurality within counterurbanisation.