Frontier spaces of vulnerability: Regional change,urbanization, drought and fire hazard in Santarém,Pará, Brazil

Fire hazard is a mounting concern in tropical rainforests of the Brazilian Amazon and has raised awareness within the science community of the links between agricultural fire use, drought and accidental fire. As a result, fire is being addressed as a crisis event with mitigation focused on those who light fires, particularly smallholder agriculturalists. Little attention is paid to the historical and ongoing ways in which Amazon landscapes and peoples have been made more susceptible to fire. Frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon serve a variety of functions within the larger Brazilian society, including as extractive reserves for economic development, as social safety valves to reduce population pressures, and as areas to support urban regional integration. Each of these functions has impacted frontier environments in ways that create more flammable landscapes and/or shape the vulnerability of people to fire hazard. This paper uses a case study inthe Brazilian Lower Amazon to understand how vulnerability to fire hazard develops. It argues that if fire mitigation remains centered on fire as a crisis event, an understanding of what constitutes frontier spaces of vulnerability, both in landscape and in populations, will be limited.     

‘My land,your social transformation’: Conflicts within the landless people movement (MST), Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) is one of the best-known and most prominent rural social movements. The unequal distribution of land in Brazil, and the neglect of this problem by successive Brazilian governments contributed greatly to the organisation of rural movements striving for the implementation of land reform in the country. The struggle for land therefore frames the MST collective action and legitimates its raison d’être as a social movement. The MST framing process, carried out mainly by the movement leaders and organisers, intends to unify the social movement by articulating private beliefs, interpretations and preferences into shared values and meanings. However, this process of framing does not take place without competition or/and conflict: leaders are many times forced to compete with other institutions, with the media, or even with inherited cultural understandings which provide alternative frames. This paper focuses particularly on the conflicting process of framing internal to the MST. More specifically, the present paper looks at how the MST leaders/organisers frame, and interpret, community and land differently from the MST settlers/followers whose lived experiences and inherited cultural understandings naturally informed their perceptions both on community and land.     

'For the sake of the deer': land, local government and the hunt

Political activism by local government is a well known phenomenon in Britain. Less known are the interests affected. In this study, Somerset council's decision to ban hunting clashed with the long standing activities of the Quantock Staghounds. My discussion focuses on the conflict between hunt and council as a conflict of governance in which land rights provided both terrain and techniques of struggle. For the hunt, land rights functioned as a foundational basis for the hunt's authority and legitimacy. For Somerset, their decision to attack hunting through land ownership not only reveals the complex relationship between land and rural state governance, but also placed Somerset's own authority in jeopardy as the courts declared they could not ban hunting on moral grounds. Somerset's land rights were construed by the courts as dependent on pursuing management objectives. Similarly, the hunt's political credibility was also dependent on demonstrating their role in deer management. The paper concludes with the problems of discursively fusing management and governance.     

The Land Question in the Food Sovereignty Project

Abstract

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world's rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession. The circulation of food is compounded by global financial flows into enclosing land for industrial agriculture and/or speculation, challenging small producer rights across the world. Under these conditions, the terms of struggle for the food sovereignty movement are shifting towards a human rights politics on the ground as well as in global forums like the FAO's Committee on World Food Security. This includes in particular the need to develop a discursive politics to reframe what is at stake, namely the protection and support of a production model based on social co-operation, multi-functionality and ecologically restorative principles.     

Social Capital,Organic Agriculture,and Sustainable Livelihood Security: Rethinking Agrarian Change in Mexico*

Abstract This paper explores the relevance of extra local market linkages and local‐level social capital to sustainable livelihood outcomes in two agrarian communities on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Contextualized by the specificity of Mexico's transition from state‐directed rural development to neoliberally‐guided rural development in the 1990s, findings suggest that market linkages can intersect with pre‐existing social capital to both create new and destroy preexisting social capital, thus shaping the direction of development and inequality outcomes. The nature of a community's social fabric is often a result of long‐standing historical legacies. In the communities presented, the quantity and quality of social capital was intricately connected to their history of state‐sponsored or market agriculture; the nature of local institutions, with particular emphasis on the formation and evolution of the ejido; and the access to and availability of natural resources, namely land and water, which are both intricately connected to market access options. Moving beyond a simple demonstration that social capital matters, this analysis explores the complex and dynamic interaction between local‐level social capital and extralocal market linkages. In doing so, it contributes to the larger debate on how the historical legacy of populist reforms and the social and political institutions created during state populism have nuanced the trajectory of neoliberal development in Mexico.     

Tourism-driven urbanization in China’s small town development: A case study of Zhapo Town, 1986-2003

This paper investigates the process of tourism-driven urbanization as a local strategy of town development in China. Existing literature has highlighted the role of industrialization in the urbanization process of China’s small towns, but here it is suggested that tourism - a development initiative based on the creation of space for consumption, rather than production - can also foster significant expansion of urbanized built environment and remarkable transformation of local socio-economic structures. The case study suggests that, in contrast to the recent process of industrialization-based urbanization in China’s small towns, tourism urbanization in Zhapo Town, Guangdong Province has been a highly localized development initiative characterized by the absence of foreign capital investment. Tourism-driven urbanization in Zhapo has involved several processes whose joint effect has reproduced the local socio-spatial organization: the rapid of expansion of urbanized built environment; a unique pattern of land use and land development; the booming of tertiary economic sectors; and the emergence of a flexible regime of labor force. In the meantime, the research also contests Mullins’ (1991) classical theorization of tourism urbanization, and suggests that recent tourism-driven urbanization process in Zhapo Town is not the product of the post-modernization of urban cultural manifestations, but is situated within the context-specific space of China’s modernity and is based on relatively standardized provision of tourism-related service and the mass consumption of nature.     

对我国城市化健康发展的理论思考——城乡统筹发展的视角

本文简要回顾了我国近10年来城市化快速发展的理论和政策背景,指出快速城市化进程中存在土地、能源等自然资源过渡消耗和浪费问题,也存在重城轻乡等突出社会问题;采用人口供需平衡的方法,分析评价了我国人口城市化水平同经济发展水平、工业化水平和土地城市化的关系;对城市化加速理论进行剖析,认为我国当前工业化技术体系不适用于机器技术体系下城市化加速的经验规律,应该结合我国新型工业化的要求走资源节约型的新型城市化道路;建议适当降低城市化发展目标与速度,纠正城市化过程中＂城市偏向＂和＂以物为本＂的做法,体现国家赋予城市化带动农村发展的重任,实现城乡统筹发展。     

Land conflict in Nepal1

This paper examines the agrarian social relationships between peasant farmers and local feudal landlords. Using land conflict as a basis of analysis this paper explores the basic characteristics of a Nepalese power skewed rural society and its relation with land. A case study was conducted using key informants and semi-structured interviews, focus group discussion, questionnaire survey, and observation to examine the agrarian social relations. The paper highlights that reformative rules and regulations alone do not always govern the behaviour of powerful people in rural communities. Rather, context and time-specific, persistent local resistance movements force changes to their behaviour and associated power relations. The paper concludes that organized peasant movements could non-coercively change existing patron-client relations in agrarian society. Rural families and tenant farmers are able to establish their identity when they realize their strengths. Este papel examina las relaciones sociales agrarias entre campesinos y propietarios campesinos feudales locales. Usando el conflicto de la tierra como base del análisis, este papel explora las características básicas del poder asimétrico de la sociedad rural nepalés y su relación con la tierra. Se llevó a cabo un estudio de caso utilizando un informante clave y entrevistas semi-estructuradas, discusiones de un grupo muestra elegido y la inspección y observación de cuestionarios para examinar las relaciones agrarias sociales. El papel subraya que el comportamiento de la gente poderosa en la sociedad rural no siempre está gobernada sólo por las normas reformativas y por las reglas. Más bien, el contexto y los movimientos específicos y persistentes de resistencia local hacen cambiar su comportamiento y sus relaciones asociadas al poder. Se concluye que los movimientos campesinos organizados pueden cambiar sin coerción las relaciones existentes entre cliente y patrón en la sociedad agraria. Las familias rurales y los arrendatarios son capaces the establecer su identidad cuando se dan cuenta de sus fuerzas.     

Black-Korean Relations:

Relations between African Americans and Korean Americans have been defined mainly by those interactions between Korean merchants and Black consumers in urban communities. The nature of this conflict has resulted in angry attitudes that have escalated the conflict to boycotts of Korean business interests, beatings due to mistaken identities, deaths on both sides and, as we noted in the recent urban uprisings, looting and burning of targeted-Korean businesses. Although the conflict appears to stem from econmic and cultural differences, it is not possible to undertand its roots without examining and understanding the results of years of Euro-centric white racism and the struggle of the two principals to the conflict as its victimes. This paper suggests using a strategy of dialogue between memebers of the two groups, at all levels, in order to reduce or resolve the conflict even thought the factors which might contribute to the conflict have not been or can not be eliminated.     

IT'S ALL ABOUT POWER:

What happens to rural communities in remote raw materials-rich regions when their definitions of the region's natural resources are confronted with competing and incompatible definitions presented and enforced by external actors? The social constructionist approach in environmental sociology provides an essential counterbalance to environmental determinism, but this article argues that in many contexts social construction is actually a process of the imposition of external actors' material interests over the objections of local groups. New historical materialism, via an interdisciplinary and multimethod research strategy, analyzes the changing definitions and uses of the Brazilian Amazon as a revelatory case study of the political economy and ecology of this process and its consequences for nature, rural communities, and indigenous peoples.     

Land use dynamics and ecological transition: the case of South Florida

This study examines the process of land use change in South Florida. Through this discussion, a conceptual model of ecological transition is developed and presented. The model is built on the general principles of neoclassical economic theories of land rent, behavioral models of resource use, and an historical geographic account of environmental change. Central to the paper is the specification of the theoretical link between demographics, market and service demands, land use, and ecological change. This study focuses on the nature and drivers of environmental change that has occurred in South Florida since 1900. The region studied includes the southern Florida Everglades and the surrounding area. The analysis determines that massive land useland cover has taken place in the region, particularly since the end of World War II. These landscape changes are conceptualized by a model that links regional demand for both agricultural and residential land through the agency of hierarchical forces. In this model, landscape evolution and natural areas encroachment are articulated as a dynamic process in which the regime of interaction between human systems and land use changes. Three main time periods for regional ecological transition are defined: (1) frontier closure (2) articulation of a system of cities with coupled agricultural hinterlands serving national and international markets. Differing land use change dynamics are identified as specific to each time period.     

When Work and Family Merge: Understanding Intragroup Conflict Experiences in Family Farm Businesses

Family farms represent a huge portion of agriculture in the United States today. These family farms may struggle to balance both family relationships and business concerns, which can cause conflict among members. Some of this conflict may be derived from the independent, self-reliant nature of family farmers. These characteristics may influence how family farm members are able to deal with conflict, and how they choose to communicate during conflict interactions. This project used intragroup conflict theory and family communication patterns to explore the impact of everyday conflict on job satisfaction, communication satisfaction, and profitability in family farm businesses. Survey data were collected from family farm members (N = 204). The results of structural equation modeling showed conversation and conformity orientation significantly predicted relational, process, and status conflict in the model, yet only status conflict significantly predicted communication satisfaction. These findings suggested family farm members struggle with communication, which influences status conflict experiences and communication satisfaction.     

Broadening the Land Question in Food Sovereignty to Northern Settings: A Case Study of Occupy the Farm

Abstract

Land access is an accepted corollary to food sovereignty, long promoted by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC). LVC's land access politics have evolved with increased incorporation of diverse perspectives, but remain largely focused on achieving ‘integral agrarian reform’ in the global South. Here, I take a case where food sovereignty activists (‘Occupy the Farm’ (OTF)) occupied land owned by a public university in California, the USA, in order to broaden food sovereignty's land access considerations beyond the South, and to analyze conditions where political actions (including occupations) can help achieve changes in land access regimes. The OTF action was successful in challenging cultural norms about property and achieving access, partly due to the occupation having foregrounded multiple appealing narratives that invited participation and wider support. These narratives included agroecology versus biotechnologies; community/public access versus privatization; participatory versus bureaucratic governance structure; and green space/food production versus urban development. The article tests the use of the ‘land sovereignty’ frame in expanding food sovereignty's land politics, to encompass land contestation contexts globally and deal with the particular conditions surrounding lands. The case indicates that land occupations in the North are potentially useful—but uncertain, and very context-dependent—tactics to promote land and food sovereignty.     

REGARDING IRELAND IN A POST-COLONIAL FRAME

This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or ‘revisionist’. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the ‘hybrid’ nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as ‘traditional’ and new forms of colonial state institution that are summoned into being by anti-colonial practices, for which the model of an advanced state coming to bear on a backward population is clearly inadequate. The essay draws from the history of agrarian movements in Ireland and banditry in the Philippines and from contemporary techniques of state surveillance and resistance to it in Northern Ireland.     

Family Therapy with Adolescents: Giving Up The Struggle

This paper examines problems in adolescence from the perspective of a power struggle between parent(s) and teenager. The structural approach of Minuchin and the strategic approaches of Haley, Madanes, and the Mental Research Institute (M.R.I.) are considered in relation to the significance they attribute to power and power struggles in families with adolescents. It is argued that the M.R.I. approach has certain therapeutic advantages for working with problematic adolescents, primarily because of its focus on understanding and intervening in the power struggle itself. A focus on the power struggle as the ‘problem’ reminds the therapist of the circular nature of parent-adolescent interactions. This awareness assists the therapist to design indirect interventions that are less likely to become absorbed into this vicious cycle. It also encourages a therapeutic stance that prevents the therapist from becoming involved in a power struggle with family members.     

Reframing agrarian citizenship: Land,life and power in Brazil

This paper investigates the changing relationship between land, citizenship, and power in Brazil, where land-related policies have historically served to situate political and economic rights in the hands of an elite land-owning minority. In response, contemporary grassroots movements in Brazil, including the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) advocate the substantive transformation of what I develop here as a new form of “agrarian citizenship”, in which political participation, local food production, and environmental stewardship redefine the ongoing constitution of the relationship between land, state, and rural society. Based on extensive interviews, participant observation and document analysis from 2004–2006, this ethnographic study examines the contours of how changing notions of agrarian citizenship are negotiated among members of a growing body of social groups demanding land redistribution and reasserting agrarian culture in Brazil. By developing and enacting new forms of political participation that involve the transformation of personal and collective values and practices, rural activists such as the MST envision the redistribution of land as a material right, but also view the transformation of the land-society relation as an equally public responsibility.     

Export Agriculture and Development Path: Independent Farming in Comparative Perspective

Abstract This paper compares 'regions of "recent settlement' (Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand) and Argentina to help assess the conditions under which export oriented agrarian regions and societies adopt a development path oriented to industrialization, focusing on the 1860s through the 1930s. The paper surveys the available literature to trace how agricultural export sector expansion shaped land tenure, class formation, and agrarian political participation in these societies. It sketches the class alliances and related structural conditions shaping the development path adopted. The regions of recent settlement tended to share a pattern of agrarian social structure and mobilization characterized by a high incidence of family operated farms, relatively little landlord predominance, strong farmer mobilization, and a class alliance and polity adhering to a consensus on industrialization and basic policies. Argentina represents a contrasting case in which landlords prevailed. The paper contributes to broader theoretical debate by relating the impact of export agriculture to the internal organization of the export sector.     

Survival and change: Social work with angry men

Abstract

This paper discusses the risk elements in encounters with six angry male clients of a social services neighbourhood team. Their preoccupation with basic survival needs produced an identification of the worker with an elusive “stolen object”; this leads to a discussion of how we also felt we had become identified with an image of persecuting parent, rooted in their childhood experience. The key notion of our “struggle” with them is linked to that of “boundary-setting” and the therapeutic value of the characteristic escalation of client/worker conflict is examined. The worker's survival is seen as a confirmation of the client's personal integrity. The process of disengagement is then analysed with particular attention to the material transactions between client and worker that served to mark the end of the engagement. We acknowledge the minimalist nature of our strategy with these men, and attempt to examine outcomes.     

The Ecological-Evolutionary Typology of Human Societies and the Evolution of Social Inequality

Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary typology of human societies, based on the level of technology of a society and the nature of its physical environment, is a powerful predictor of various dimensions of social inequality. Analysis of comparative data shows that while some dimensions of the stratification system (such as measures of social complexity) exhibit a monotonic trend of increasing inequality with level of technology from the hunting-and-gathering to the agrarian type, others (such as measures of freedom and sexual inequality among males) exhibit a pattern of "agrarian reversal" in which inequality increases from the hunting‐and‐gathering to the advanced horticultural type but then declines with the agrarian type. Theoretical and empirical implications of the agrarian reversal pattern for the study of social inequality are discussed.