This volume examines the effects of rural depopulation as a process on the structure of family and kinship within one small rural area, analysing the spatial relationships of social and economic change. Part One documents these relationships in the context of family farming; the second part is largely devoted to the effects of demographic change on the structure of family and kinship within one small community.

This is an investigation of Western cultural identity. It shows how people's images of themselves and others reflect the power that different groups in a society have to shape these images. The contributors describe these images in Western academic writing, popular Western culture, and societies outside the West, in this counterpart to Edward Said's Orientalism. - ;Occidentalism is an investigation of images of Western cultural identity. Edward Said's Orientalism revolutionized Western understanding of non-Western cultures by showing how Western projected images shaped the Occidental of the Orient, but those who follow Said have not until now reflected that understanding back onto Western societies. Occidentalism shows how images of the West shape people's conceptions of themselves and others, and how these images are in turn shaped by members of Western and non-Western societies alike. The contributors describe and explicate these images in a variety of areas, from Western academic writing to popular Western culture, from societies within and outside the West, to show how power and conflict shape such conceptions. -

Rural Community Studies in Europe presents a study of village societies of the different regions of Europe and their importance to the economic and social life of nations. The book seeks to describe and analyze the local economic and social systems, traditions, power structures, and other aspects of European rural communities, specifically in the countries of Great Britain, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Romania, France, and Spain. The book is divided into four parts: a historical review of the main trends and developments of rural community studies; an annotated bibliography; analytical summaries; and a location map. Sociologists, economists, ethnologists, political scientists, and students in allied fields will find the book a good reference material.

Using an innovative theoretical approach based on 'networks of conventions', the book investigates the 'regionalisation' of the English countryside through case studies of the 'preserved', the 'contested' and the 'paternalistic' countryside.

First Published in 1974. In this collection Colin Bell and Howard Newby have reaped a rich harvest from the sociological field of community studies. The selection from the work in that field presented here should satisfy readers of many different tastes and interests. Specialists in the sociology of community studies will find the authors' brief, informative and succinct survey of the field and the introductory summaries to each chapter as useful for their own teaching and research as the comprehensive selection of articles itself. All those concerned with the welfare of people, whether social workers and nurses or magistrates and local authorities, will find here information about the community aspects of peoples' lives which all too often still fails to find a place in their professional training.