Winner of the Margaret Mead Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology
The farm crisis of the 1980s was the worst economic disaster to strike rural America since the Depression—thousands of farmers lost their land and homes, irrevocably altering their communities and, as Kathryn Marie Dudley shows, giving rise to devastating social trauma that continues to affect farmers today. Through interviews with residents of an agricultural county in western Minnesota, Dudley provides an incisive account of the moral dynamics of loss, dislocation, capitalism, and solidarity in farming communities.
Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland
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painful descriptions of loss in the heartland If you’ve ever gone through hard times and felt like the world was standing in judgement, you have a sense of what the people in this book went through losing their farms. I grew up in farmland and have some sense of how fully peoples lives were tied up in their farms. For all those who see the modern economy as cool darwinian survival of the fittest, Dudley offers up a more plausible alternative: failure is often arbitrary or–worse–prompted by poorly thought out policies. The resulting…