Critical Rural Theory Structure, Space, Culture [Paperback]

With regard to the discipline, the authors give a nice overview of the somewhat puzzling retreat from the rural of mainstream sociology in the early 20th century and the resulting urban bias. They focus somewhat less on the parallel development and divergences of rural and regular (urbancentric) sociology as quasi-independent fields, complete with separate scholarly organizations and intellectual orientations. Interestingly they also point to the recent retreat from the rural among departments formerly known as rural, now identified variously as some combination of development, community, or environmental sociology. . . . I found much in the book to recommend. . . . I hope that this book will be of interest and use to a broad range of sociologistsand not only those who are already interested in the rural.Noting that cultural analyses of rural areas are lacking in the scholarly literature, the authors take as their primary task the investigation of culture in relation to political-economy and the organization of space. . . .[The book's] broad theoretical approach to analyzing the urban/rural divide in terms of the interaction of structure, space and culture is a welcome contribution to a general sociological literature that overlooks rural space and a rural sociological literature that often reifies and depoliticizes it by treating it as a categorical variable.The cultural, spatial, and structural mechanisms of urbanormativity illuminated in Critical Rural Theory represent a crucial contribution to rural sociology and broader social science disciplines. Incorporating contemporary theory, rigorous empirical methods, and cultural analyses at the community level, this volume provides a soberingyet emancipatoryaccount of the marginal position of rural communities in the spatial hierarchy.The literature on rural cultures in the United States has languished for years. This book takes a critical, cultural turn and provides a very strong argument for renewedlƒg