The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern PDF Author: Kate Merkel-Hess
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638330X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern PDF Author: Kate Merkel-Hess
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638330X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

Rural Modern

Rural Modern PDF Author: Russell Abraham ASMP
Publisher: Images Publishing
ISBN: 186470487X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
0 0 1 128 732 The Images Publishing Group 6 1 859 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-AU JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria;} The latest from leading architectural photographer and writer, Russell Abraham, Rural Modern presents a tantalising selection of modern country houses in a variety of styles and forms. The 21st century has seen rural residential architecture take ideas from both the Modern Bauhaus design movement and the ever-popular Shingle Style. The result is a style that borrows from vernacular forms and materials, but uses them in new ways. Issues of sustainability and energy conservation are also key to contemporary country house design. Orienting windows to capture heat in winter, but protect the house from the sun in summer is an ongoing design objective. The modern country house is a hybrid of several ingenious ideas blended together to create a modern, sustainable and highly liveable architecture that respects the past and looks forward into the future.

Going to the Countryside

Going to the Countryside PDF Author: Yu Zhang
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Thailand’s Political Peasants

Thailand’s Political Peasants PDF Author: Andrew Walker
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299288234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

One Country, Two Societies

One Country, Two Societies PDF Author: Martin K. Whyte
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
"A collection of essays that analyzes China's foremost social cleavage: the rural-urban gap. It examines the historical background of rural-urban relations; the size and trend in the income gap between rural and urban residents; aspects of inequality apart from income; and, experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants." -- BOOK PUBLISHER WEBSITE.

Gao Village

Gao Village PDF Author: Mobo C. F. Gao
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824821234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives. Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.

Rural Land Takings Law in Modern China

Rural Land Takings Law in Modern China PDF Author: Chun Peng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108126057
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
One of the most pressing issues in contemporary China is the massive rural land takings that have taken place at a scale unprecedented in human history. Expropriation of land has dispossessed and displaced millions for several decades, despite the protection of property rights in the Chinese constitution. Combining meticulous doctrinal analysis with in-depth historical investigation, Chun Peng tracks the origin and evolution of China's rural land takings law over the twentieth century and demonstrates an enduring tradition of land takings for state-led social transformation, under which the takings law is designed to be power-confirming. With changed socio-political circumstances and a new rights-respecting constitutional agenda, a rebalance of the law is now underway, but only within existing parameters. Peng provides a piercing analysis of how land has been used by the largest developing country in the world to develop itself, at what costs and where the future might be.

Shaping Modern Times in Rural France

Shaping Modern Times in Rural France PDF Author: Susan Carol Rogers
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226849
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Challenging the notion that modernization is a homogenizing process, Susan Rogers contends that in the course of large-scale transformations communities often reproduce and strengthen distinctive cultural and social features. To make this argument, she focuses on the French farming community of "Ste Foy" during a period of rapid change (1945-75). Using ethnographic field data and archival material that she collected as a "participant-observer," she finds an intriguing puzzle: an allegedly archaic social form, the ostal, has become increasingly common in the community. The ostal, a type of family farm organized around an extended "stem family" household, is a variant of the stem family systems associated with preindustrial southern Europe. How have Ste Foyans continued to remake this "archaic" mode as their community grew more prosperous and more involved in national and international markets? In showing how the specific identity of a community is reproduced rather than obliterated by modernization, the author reveals dialectical relationships between structure and change, history and culture, and the centralized nation-state and regional diversity. This analysis addresses anthropologists, historians, and scholars interested in local politics and economic development.

Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany

Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany PDF Author: Thomas Robisheaux
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521526876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
For the rural societies of Germany the early sixteenth century was a time of massive upheavals. In this probing study of village life, based upon rich manuscript sources from the old County of Hohenlohe, Thomas Robisheaux seeks to understand how petty German princes, Lutheran pastors, and villagers struggled to create order out of their confusing world. The Hohenlohe region experienced all of the turmoil associated with the sixteenth century, including a peasant near-rising in 1600, the brutal effects of the wage-price scissors, chronic shortages of land, famines, impoverishment, and the destructive cycles of war. By using concepts borrowed from anthropology, Professor Robisheaux looks for the way social hierarchy and discipline countered the disruptive changes of the age. The years between 1550 and 1620 saw new sources of stability and order created in the family; through systematized customs of inheritance; through market relationships; and in the practice of state power within the village.

The New Farm

The New Farm PDF Author: Daniel P. Gregory
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781616898144
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Recent generations of farmers have reinvented the family farm and its traditions, embracing organic practices and sustainability and, along with them, a bold new use of modern architecture. The New Farm profiles sixteen contemporary farms around the globe, accompanied by plans and colorful images that highlight the connections among family, food, design, terrain, and heritage.