Janel Curry (Calvin College), "Community Worldview and Rural Systems: A Study of Five Communities in Iowa" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000), 693-712.
* Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.furman.edu/stable/1515439
Abstract
Rural geography has gone through profound changes over the decades. Dissatisfaction with traditional emphases on population distribution, landscape features, labor markets, and economic restructuring has led to a recent focus on the construction of meanings associated with rural landscapes and social constructions of rurality. Included in this new turn is a willingness to consider the concept of worldview, or metaphysical frameworks, in geographic study. These new studies, however, often address culture and religious constructs apart from more traditional topics of rural geography. This study of five Iowa farm communities attempts to put such metaphysical frameworks in the context of their everyday settings and connect them to rural agricultural systems. Each of the five communities had a particular vision of society, challenging the monolithic assumptions about rural places. Fundamental to these communities' worldviews was their range from communitarian to individualistic. Communitarian groups tended toward more diversity in their agricultural systems, articulated alternative agricultural values and perspectives, and had smaller farms. The metaphysical community-level understandings expressed by the five groups in this study shaped spatial patterns, creating places that express the fullness of the intertwined nature of worldviews, legal constructs, relationships with nature, and ethical systems. While each community or place may have a unique configuration of these elements, the processes and forces are similar.
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(694) Citing Roy Clouser, _The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories_ (1991), she discusses "what people believe to be "just there" or what is so fundamental that it is not dependent on anything else for its existence." [This, I note, is not unlike Marxism's unspoken assumptions or what Gosling calls "behavioral residues."] These include questions such as "what is the nature of mankind, what are the most fundamental problems facing society and ourselves? What is the nature of evil? On what do we place our hope for these problem's solutions?
(p 695) prior research has identified community ethnocultural values as critical to (1) Farm enterprise capitalization, (2) land-tenure change patterns, (3) commercialization of agriculture, (4) land-tenure change patterns, and (5) farmer's risk reduction strategies.
(p. 695) Cites Swierenga's Ag. History presidential address to say that religion may be essential to understanding rural society, more than class, race, and gender.
(695) Curry looks at five communities with different dominant religions, to see if there are differences in "land use, social capital, and agency." Focuses on small populations with dominant theologies.
Scales: individualistic to communal (which latter she distinguishes from associational, calling communal "primary group interaction at the level of family and friends." Definition of autonomous independent self vs. network of family and friends.
(696) cites Cronon's New England book as example of how communal orientation, perceptions of property rights, and attitudes toward nature were linked; also addresses "Tragedy of the commons" and its critics.
(696) Cites Salamon's work on "ethnic differences in Farm Family land transfers" and other works that contrast "Yankee" versus "Yeoman" farmer styles. Prairie Patrimony, Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest.
Salamon: Yankees: Farms as business, economic and geography mobility. Yeomen: Continuity, intergenerational farm preservation, strong community attachment.
(296) Curry offers up a (sort of strange) contrast between "traditional" farming (business, commodification and monoculture for world markets, techno-scientific) versus "alternative" (farming as lifeway, skepticism, diversification, cooperation).
(697) Cites Giddens and then M. Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91 (481-510) on the decline of "space-time embeddedness." G. says that such embeddedness is essential to formation of trust that is, in turn, rooted in proximity and community. Likewise, B. Harrison "Old Wine in New Bottles?" _Regional Studies_ 26 (1998), 469-83 links trust to mutuality and intimacy. (Versus atomic model of enlightenment rationalism responding to market signals.)
(697) Equates this contrast to neoliberal versus sustainable practices.
Also cites research by T.A. Lyson and R. Welsh, "The production function, crop diversity, and the debate between conventional and sustainable agriculture," _Rural Sociology_ (1993), 424-39. to this connection between diversity, crop flexibility, and a communitarian critique of neoliberal commercial agriculture.
[This begs the question of I vs. M, in a new light. Was Indiana some sort of middle ground between hyper-commercial staple crop agriculture and the radical self-sufficiency of the back-country, and thus the Hartzian central position?]
Used content analysis of focus group transcripts, plus survey questionnaire.
draws on model of Yinger, who claims the core issues
of religion are (1) Evil exists, and (2) Humans can be saved from evil [that seems Christian-centric, but okay.]
Study carefully controlled for age, sex, education, etc.
She found many differences between communities once these were controlled for, and very little value difference between men and women. Finally, these were matched against different farm types.
(699) The Mormons were settled on the poorest soils, had the largest non-agricultural uses, and the most concentration of landholding.
(699) The Dutch Reformed, German Mennonite, and RLDS communities had the highest sense of communal vision.
(702) In contrast to the Dutch Reformed and LDS sense of creation and stewardship of nature, the Mennonites were much more pragmatic, even viewing the suffering associated with nature as part of the punishment for sin.
(704) [Paradoxically, I think] The Quaker communities were much more individualistic and materialistic, but were also much more likely to be associators in local organizations. Result of rugged individualism of "Inner Light"? [I can see the opposite being true, too.] This Curry ties to a faith in human goodness and the efficacy of reform in the secular present world.
[704-5] Gave them the most complex view of nature, rooted in "reverence for life" and a belief in nature's goodness if left alone.
[705] German Reformed (pietistic rather than Calvinistic) led them to have the most materialistic, individualistic, Whiggishly progress-oriented, laissez-faire viewpoints -- mainstream Protestant evangelical culture.
They "drew social boundaries around each farm unit. Cooperation was not expected to extend beyond these boundaries." Neither town nor social service oriented. Utilitarian view of nature. But high degrees of associational membership.
[The differences here are fascinatingly subtle. The high degree of individualistic associationalism seemes very tribal, but very different from the sense of duty and public obligation of the Dutch Reformed and LDS.
(705) Curry finds that although crop types seemed to match soil types, "the diversity and number of animals per acre shows a distinct difference (as much as 6x) between individualistic and communitarian groups, with the latter having much more diverse animal menageries. But she leaves open the question of why.
(706) communal groups emphasized agriculture as a way of life, not just a business. This she connects to agriculture as a separatist community's charge, duty, or vocation, and were less technologically enthusiastic.
(706-7) Small farm sizes are associated with communal groups, who sought to preserve their family properties from market consolidation, versus the individualists, whose land was concentrating rapidly.
(Cites Blomley, 1992, on myth of frictionless, placeless migration)
(708) Curry interrogates those who would see the holders of metaphysical viewpoints as being "impediments to progress."
(708) Cites Michael Walzer _The Idea of Civil Society_ (1991) on social capital, interestingly noting that while MW celebrates civil society and social capital, this is understood in (neoliberal?) terms as free association, freed from weight of family, tribe, nation, or religion, "but for the sake of sociability itself," not in terms of a "parochial worldview" rooted in metaphysical understandings.
(708) "yet of the communities studied here, the communal groups had the fewest associational ties, and yet exhibited the least individualistic characteristics, questioned the status quo, and saw structure and agency as intertwined wholes."
(708) In pondering this paradox, Curry contrasts the critical agency of the groups willing to separate from society as being perhaps more effacatious in revitalization than the associationalists, who are more likely to conform to the status quo. [Lots of subtle textures here.]
(709) Raises questions about how "ethical value systems are intertwined with physical space," and "how the local has its own epistemology."
posted by Lloyd at 9:29 AM 