Rural Theory: The Grounding of Rural Sociology.

Abstract

From Galpin (1915) on, defining the 'rural' has preoccupied rural sociologists. Urban sociology recently faced a similar problem, and political economists reoriented the field by looking beyond the city to the social production of spatial forms. A related critique is applied to rural sociology, which has traditionally seen 'rural' as cultural, ecological, or occupational. The two main explanations of rural culture, Gemeinschaft and human ecology, are inadequate. The former is not specifically rural, and the latter obscures the structure of social relations. The recent proposal for a strictly rural ecology also fails to consider underlying political-economic determinants.-from Author