Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community - Softcover

Rogers, Susan Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691028583 ISBN 13: 9780691028583

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1991

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

'This book is a refreshing analysis of cultural change that demonstrates the resilience of cultural forms. It is engagingly written and fits well into current debates about the nature of the intersection between anthropology and history, about the way people perceive the relationship between the past and the present, and about individual agency in social action. Rogers's conclusion that the modern world is no more homogeneous than the world peopled by subsistence agriculturalists is extremely powerful and amply demonstrated.'--Caroline Brettell, Southern Methodist University

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691028583
• ISBN 13: 9780691028583
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248