From „the Peasant” Gcmeinschaft to the Rurality

Some Key Issues of the Past Thirty Years of International Rural Research

Abstract

In the present writing I was trying to argue that the assumption o f the „Gemeinschaff’-nature of the organisation of rural society was given up in the 60s and 70s and researchers of the countryside have oriented themselves in different theoretical directions. Change can be grasped as a shift in the interpretation of the country: rural researchers of the 60s and 70s (either representatives of modernisation theory, students of peasantry, or exploring the political economy of the agrarian domain), interpreted the country as a type different from urban social organisation, going back to earlier beginnings. Whereas from the 80s onwards such a view has become generally accepted according to which it was expedient to challenge and even suspend such an assumption and research should focus on social practices (and also interpretations), as a result of which the meaning o f the rural areas, and the legitimate forms of action, linked to the countryside, emerge. After the 'cultural change' of rural research now the country primarily appears as a type of social space, the interpretation of which is rather debatable, and it is just the study o f these disputes of interpretation which may yield scholarly results most