Speech Genres And Other Late Essays

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Power And Powerlessness Quiescence And Rebellion In An Appalachian Valley

The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

Introduction 1. The Emergence of an Instrumental Conception of Law 2. The Transformation in the Conception of Property 3. Subsidization of Economic Growth through the Legal System 4. Competition and Economic Development 5. The Relation between the Bar and Commercial Interests 6. The Triumph of Contract The Equitable Conception of Contract in the Eighteenth Century The Rise of a Market Economy and the Development of the Will Theory of Contract Custom and Contract Tort and Contract 7. The Development of Commercial Law The Rise of Negotiability The Law of Insurance: The Development of Actuarial Conceptions of Risk Usury Swift v. Tyson: The Rise of a General Commercial Law 8. The Rise of Legal Formalism Notes Index

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The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860

Popular discourse today so weds rurality and conservatism together in the United States that one does not seem quite at home without the other. But what is it really about the rural that beckons slapjack labels of conservatism? Scholars and practitioners, only a handful of them rural sociologists, have suggested a variety of explanations: antigovernmentalism, religion, lack of education, manual labor, poverty, primitivism, and a culture of poverty, among others. Each of these approaches, though, misses a sustained agent of rural dispossession and depopulation: the state. This article theorizes rural politics through pro-state, stateless, and anti-state positions. I bridge literature that documents the state as an agent of industrialization, extraction, exploitation, consolidation, and corporatization in rural America and literature on politics and the rural. In the process of my review, I suggest anarchism can help explain the significance and potential of the stateless and anti-state positions in rural politics.

Rural Conservatism or Anarchism? The Pro‐state, Stateless, and Anti‐state Positions

Tyranny of the majority and rural environmental injustice

Daniel Imhoff’s edited volume The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, is a powerful documentation of the horrors beheld in animal and aquaculture factories, the factors that lead to their proliferation, and their devastating effects on the social and ecological environments that house them. The book is compiled of 32 short articles authored by 37 authors, and separate introductions with factual sections making up some of the best material of the book. The authors range from well-known journalists such as Michael Pollan, to famous environmental advocates like Robert Kennedy Jr., and to scholars, including anthropologist Wendell Thu. The book is primarily a battle cry to combat what the editor calls one of the greatest humanitarian crises of modern times. The book aims to help activists ‘‘...become articulate on this issue so they can forge arguments, alliances, and strategies to campaign for a change in social norms that ultimately eliminates these food animal factories’’ (p. xi). The book largely lives up to its goal. It is a pathbreaking compilation of the primary problems with and the resolutions for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These include chronologically: The Pathological Mindset of the CAFO; Myths of the CAFO; Inside the CAFO; The Loss of Diversity; Hidden Costs of CAFOs; The Technological Takeover; and Putting the CAFO out to Pasture. These sections and their chapters smoothly evolve into a clearly organized guide to understanding CAFOs, and provide suggestions for resolving the problems of factory farming. Much of the book is a detailed review of animal factory conditions, often in horrific detail. These scenes serve to shock and jolt the reader into the inhumane world of factory farming, yet are sometimes repetitive, with authors reviewing the same inhumane practice, for example gestation crates for sows. Although many of the chapters refer to credible sources, we rarely directly hear the voices of farmers, consumers, rural community members, factory workers and regulators, or see new analysis of data. The book serves as an accessible, engaging introduction for undergraduates, but would need to be coupled with more detailed, empirical studies in a course. Although the book is a general appeal to activism, it constructs a specific type of activist. Marcus in the final section talks about how there are three main movements against CAFOs—vegetarian, animal rights, and animal welfare. With the addition of environmentalists and health advocates, these groups constitute the primary activists targeted in the book. The book excludes rural dwellers, a central group in the CAFO struggle, that along with some farmers have fought and continue to fight these factories. An exception to this is Thu’s chapter, which hones in on how local communities are politically stripped of their rights to refuse CAFOs. He provocatively suggests that industrial animal factories are a larger assault on democracy. The questions the book asks and the activism strategies that it suggests overall exclude the rural as a site of activism, and rather favor a general call to the public for awareness. This is exemplified by the story-telling tendency of the book. Some authors target corporations at the expense of a detailed documentation of contract factory farms that would be helpful to activists trying to stop the building of CAFOs. The reader learns much about Smithfield Foods, Tyson and IBP, which to the book’s credit leaves the reader L. Ashwood (&) Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: ashwood@wisc.edu

Daniel Imhoff (Ed): The CAFO reader: the tragedy of industrial animal factories: University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 2010, 462 pp, IBSN 0970950055

Scholars largely assume that hog production is following the same industrialization process as the integrated poultry industry. Since the collapse of hog farming in the 1990s, academics have anticipated that pro- ducers will eventually become trapped in contracts that leave the integrator with full control over the production process. Embedded in this prediction is an assumption that hog farmers respond to these productive pressures indi- vidually. Our analysis of the Carthage Management System suggests a differ- ent path for the hog commodity chain. The Carthage Management System is a conglomeration of business management firms that bring finishing hog farmers together to form limited liability corporations (LLCs) in the breed- to-wean stage of hog production. We use a sociology of agrifood framework to suggest that the nuances of hog production encourage the use of what we call folding corporations to limit liability in ways that profoundly transform the family farm. Corporations and individual hog farmers alike employ this cre- ative LLC structure to deflect responsibility for the risks of hog production. We identify how folding corporations externalize the costs of production onto rural communities. Additional research is needed to better understand unfolding farmer identities, legal protections for farmers, how widespread organizational structures like Carthage Management System are, and their consequences for rural communities and the industrialization process.

Where's the Farmer? Limiting Liability in Midwestern Industrial Hog Production

Local knowledge registers prominently in scholarly efforts to resolve environmental problems, ushering in widespread use of participatory practices of deliberation. Without the incorporation of local knowledge, many scholars contend that environmental science and planning remain beholden to the unbridled reign of the expert, and the daunting complexity of environmental problems remains seemingly impossible to penetrate. Following in this vein of work, we formed our participatory research project on nonpoint water pollution in two watersheds around four action clusters. On the local side, we included a cluster of farmers and farmland owners and a cluster of general community members. On the expert side, we included a cluster of researchers and another of government officials. However, we found in our research that the development of democratic deliberation depended more on whether participants situated and linked their knowledge than whether it was local or expert in origin. We suggest grounded knowledge, situating one's experiences in a way that enables participants to actively link with other knowledge, as a concept useful for scholars to better understand which ways of knowing enable deliberation in the participatory processes.

Loka Ashwood

Papers

Rural Conservatism or Anarchism? The Pro‐state, Stateless, and Anti‐state Positions

Tyranny of the majority and rural environmental injustice

Daniel Imhoff (Ed): The CAFO reader: the tragedy of industrial animal factories: University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 2010, 462 pp, IBSN 0970950055

Where's the Farmer? Limiting Liability in Midwestern Industrial Hog Production

Linked and Situated: Grounded Knowledge