This year I'm trying to write on this blog more frequently, both about books and music, and I also want to do more to publicize the academic reading challenge. If you're looking for ideas for things to read for the different categories, I'm going to post a set of recommendations for each one as regularly as I can.
Since I am better read in some of these categories than others, I'm not going to go in numerical order by prompt. Today's prompt is category 7: A book about a rural location or rural life in general (in any country)
Since a lot of the books I found are about the integration of rural areas into broader global economic circuits instead of being seen as isolated and remote, I thought Lucinda Williams' classic "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" would be a good into to this entry.
For me the first thing that comes to mind when I think of academic books about rural life is Marxist literature on peasant societies, but of course, there are many others types of books one could read. Here are some interesting ones, both academic and not. Note: I have not read all of these!
William Garriot, Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America, I read this several years ago and wound up using a chapter of it in a class I teach on prisons that is organized around rural, urban and suburban settings. It's both academically rigorous and easy to read - a short ethnographic account of the impact of meth policing in Appalachia.
Navied Mahdavian, This Country I haven't read this one, but someone in my social media networks is reading it, and it looks pretty cool. It's a graphic memoir about an Iranian-American cartoonist's move from San Francisco to rural Idaho with his wife, a documentary film-maker. The link goes to his website, where you can see samples of the artwork.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood is a classic novel set in a village in post-colonial Kenya. Originally published in 1977, it led to the author's imprisonment by the Kenyan government, and an international protest campaign on his behalf.
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act I read this book for the 2nd year of the reading challenge - though I don't now remember what category. I am a huge fan of E.P. Thompson, as most left historians are. This book is about rules of property and criminal law in 18th century England, and it's just an excellent book about class and criminal justice.
Also about rural England, I have it on good authority that Vron Ware's Return of a Native is "fabulous" from cover-to-cover. Here's a cool video of her talking about it with another great scholar and writer.
Another of my favorite historians, Robin D.G.Kelley's book, Hammer and Hoe,is not entirely about rural life, but is mostly so. It is a fantastic history of Alabama activists in the Communist Party during the Great Depression.This was and still is a hugely influential book in American left and labor history - and Kelley is another historian who's influenced by the work of E.P. Thompson.
Speaking of Thompson's Whigs and Hunters, I recently saw it cited in a book I read for the challenge last year -for the category "a book about the natural environment that draws on academic research." That book was Lyndsie Bourgon's Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods. The rural life in this described is mostly in the Pacific Northwest, as her main subject is timber poaching around the Redwood National Forest. She also has a brief discussion of the impact of the timber industry and poaching practices in the Amazon.
In my search for books about Africa by African scholars, I came across Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob Dlamini, which looks really interesting. Dlamini is from South Africa and won the AHA's Martin Klein Prize for best book in African hisotry in 2021 as well as the University of Johannesburg Book prize for this book.
If you're interested in African history, the Ohio University Press's "New African Histories Series" includes a number of fascinating titles. Alice Wiemers' Village Work looks like it would be an interesting one for anyone interested in village life with an emphasis on the state. There are another couple of books in that series that might be about rural life, though it's hard to tell from just the titles and brief synopses. Check out the series page. An older book by one of the series founders (but with a different press) is Jean Allman's I Will Not Eat a Stone: A Woman's History of Colonial Asante,
I found several other interesting sounding books by searching for prize-winners in rural sociology and anthropology, and doing some keyword searching for book reviews on JSTOR.
Coffee and Community by Sarah Lyon won a prize from the Society for Economic Anthropology. It's an analysis of a Mayan farm cooperative in Guatemala as a case-study analysis of the fair trade movement as it is experienced by producers. Kristen Phillips won the same prize for her study of Tanzanian subsistence farmers, An Ethnography of Hunger. Another prize-winner from this organization is Sarah Besky's The Darjeeling Distinction which is about fair-trade tea plantations in India. (note - any of these three books could be read for the "book that won an academic prize" category if you're looking for something for that category, but then they can't count for the "book about rural life" category.) Not a prize-winner in this category, but in a similar vein is Sarah Osterhoudt's Vanilla Landscapes which is an ethnography based on vanilla farming in Madagascar. Another book about rural economies is Kathleen Schwartzman's intriguingly titled The Chicken Trail which follows migrant workers across the Americas through the poultry industry.
For work on USian farmworkers of various types, a good friend suggested Frank Bardacke's Trampling out the Vintage as the best book on the United Farm Workers. Other recommendations from this friend on American rural labor include Jarod Roll's Spirit of Rebellion and H.L. Mitchell's classic, Roll the Union On about the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Conversely, if you're looking for a book on rural conservatism, you might want to read Katherine J. Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. This book came out before Trump was elected and is among the most prescient of the books on "red state America" that have come out in recent years.
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