rural society
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What is a rural society?
A rural society is characterized by a population that lives on open land, where the primary economic activities involve producing food, fibers, and raw materials. These societies are traditionally recognized for prioritizing farming as a way of life, emphasizing customs, intimacy, and traditional values. Communities are often regulated by kinship and rituals, with land ownership strictly guarded by tradition.
German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies used the term gemeinschaft to describe these characteristics, contrasting them with the impersonal, specialized, and mechanized nature of urban life, which he called gesellschaft. Rural societies typically have higher birthrates, younger populations, larger families, and a higher percentage of males. Children contribute to the family farm, and some eventually migrate to urban areas.
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How is rural society different from urban society?
Rural and urban societies differ in population density, economic activities, and cultural norms. Rural societies have fewer people spread over larger areas, while urban areas have high population densities.
Rural economies focus on agriculture and raw material extraction, whereas urban economies center around industry, commerce, and government.
Sociologists find that rural societies often have strong communities, traditional values, and intimate relationships. Urban cultures are typically fast-paced and emphasize specialization and impersonal relationships. In the past, rural societies had more births and younger populations compared to urban societies.
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What are common features of rural communities?
Rural communities are characterized by a lower population density compared to urban areas, with inhabitants spread across larger expanses of land. Economically, these societies are often centered on producing foodstuffs, fibers, and raw materials, primarily through agricultural activities. Socially, rural societies tend to foster close-knit relationships, strong community bonds, and a commitment to traditional values, with life proceeding at a more deliberate pace. These communities often maintain customs regulated by kinship and ritual, emphasizing the importance of land ownership and care.
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How do social relationships typically work in rural areas?
Rural societies typically feature close-knit relationships characterized by intimacy and strong traditional values. Social connections are often regulated by kinship customs, with significant importance placed on family ties in social and recreational life. These communities often prioritize maintaining traditions and can be resistant to change.
Peasant communities, a category of nonurban society, tend to be small and bound by tradition. Social capital, built through interconnected networks and trust, plays a vital role in rural areas, influencing employment, health, and community well-being. Kinship is central, with extended families often responsible for each other's welfare. Networks of reciprocal obligations are established through various means such as ritualized ties of fictive kinship.
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What are some challenges faced by people living in rural societies?
Rural societies, characterized by agriculture and low population density, face distinct challenges. A key issue is depopulation as younger generations migrate to urban centers for better opportunities, leading to an aging population and potential labor shortages in agriculture.
Historically, rural societies had higher birthrates to ensure enough farmworkers. However, with advancements in healthcare, increased survival rates among children have intensified migration to cities due to limited land availability.
Agricultural development specialists suggest that to halt urbanization, improvements in soil technology, irrigation, and seed stocks are needed. They also advise against large-scale mechanization, advocating for technologies tailored to each area's specific needs.
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How are rural societies changing in the modern world?
Rural societies are undergoing significant transformations in the modern world. Historically characterized by agriculture and close-knit communities, rural life is now experiencing urbanization, with farmsteads adopting more urban lifestyles and automated agricultural practices.
Improved transportation infrastructure, especially the rise of the automobile, has reduced travel times and increased mobility, connecting rural areas to urban centers. While some small towns near highways and urban areas have prospered, others have declined, with businesses disappearing.
These changes contribute to an ongoing equilibrium between urban and rural sectors, impacting the visual aspects of rural America as highways become central routes and functions once confined to local towns spread along major roads.
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rural society, society in which there is a low ratio of inhabitants to open land and in which the most important economic activities are the production of foodstuffs, fibres, and raw materials. Such areas are difficult to define with greater precision, for, although in nonindustrialized nations the transition from city to countryside is usually abrupt, it is gradual in industrialized societies, making it difficult to pinpoint the boundaries of rural places. A second, related problem is that governments do not use the same statistical criteria for rural and urban populations; in Japan, for instance, any cluster of fewer than 30,000 people is considered rural, whereas in Albania a group of more than 400 inhabitants is regarded as an urban population.
In the past, rural societies were typified by their adherence to farming as a way of life. Such cultures were not goal- or achievement-oriented; their members sought subsistence, not surplus. Marked by a high regard for intimacy and traditional values, farming communities were often regulated by kinship customs and ritual, and, in particular, the ownership and care of productive land was strictly guarded by tradition. Collectively, these characteristics are often designated by the term gemeinschaft, an expression introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Tönnies described the contrasting nature of urban life with the term gesellschaft, a state characterized by impersonal bureaucracy, rationalized specialization, and mechanization. Gesellschaft is typically associated with modern industry, where people are employees who perform specific, goal-oriented functions in a rational and efficient, as opposed to a traditional and organic, manner. The two terms are sometimes translated as “community” and “society.” Rural inhabitants work with people they know well and are accustomed to relationships of great intimacy and small scale, whereas urban dwellers know each other in narrow, segmented ways that have little to do with family or friendship. According to Tönnies and subsequent sociologists, all societies are characterized by mixtures of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft; the United States, where even agriculture is almost completely mechanized, is closer to the gesellschaft end of the spectrum, whereas rural India, which is still heavily guided by tradition, is an example of gemeinschaft.
Historically, farming societies have had higher birthrates than urban societies; their populations have also tended to be younger, to live in larger families, and to include slightly greater percentages of males. These phenomena were related: it was to a farmer’s advantage to have many offspring, especially males, who could work in the fields as children and then would support their parents as they grew older. Generally, however, as the children became older, there was not enough productive land for all of them to support their own families, and some would migrate to the cities. In this way, cities have historically absorbed the excess population of the countryside, thus tending to become filled with comparatively older people living in smaller families. With the advent of improved health care in this century, infant mortality rates fell, and the increased number of surviving offspring has swelled the number of migrants to the cities.
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In the industrialized nations the countryside has sometimes been virtually depopulated, to the point that, for example, in 1970 only 6.7 percent of the employed persons in the United States were in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. The result has been a global acceleration of the process of urbanization, which has in turn created vast slums in many urban centres. To halt or reverse this process, agricultural-development specialists have suggested methods of increasing productivity without moving large numbers of farmworkers off the land. Among their recommendations are improvements in soil technology and changes in irrigation, seed stocks, and drainage; they counsel against further large-scale mechanization. The habit of the developed nations to apply their own practices of agriculture to situations where they might not be ultimately beneficial has been yielding to the belief that appropriate technologies must be developed for each area.