Rural geography has gone through profound changes over the decades. Dissatisfaction with traditional emphases on population distribution, landscape features, labor markets, and economic restructuring has led to a recent focus on the construction of meanings associated with rural landscapes and social constructions of rurality. Included in this new turn is a willingness to consider the concept of worldview, or metaphysical frameworks, in geographic study. These new studies, however, often address culture and religious constructs apart from more traditional topics of rural geography. This study of five Iowa farm communities attempts to put such metaphysical frameworks in the context of their everyday settings and connect them to rural agricultural systems. Each of the five communities had a particular vision of society, challenging the monolithic assumptions about rural places. Fundamental to these communities' worldviews was their range from communitarian to individualistic. Communitarian groups tended toward more diversity in their agricultural systems, articulated alternative agricultural values and perspectives, and had smaller farms. The metaphysical community-level understandings expressed by the five groups in this study shaped spatial patterns, creating places that express the fullness of the intertwined nature of worldviews, legal constructs, relationships with nature, and ethical systems. While each community or place may have a unique configuration of these elements, the processes and forces are similar.
The debate about the effectiveness of the liberal arts curriculum is centuries old, but recent financial and social pressures have placed the survival of the liberal arts in the United States at even greater risk. Using Kimball's (1995) notion of the oratorical and philosophical traditions of liberal education, this article first identifies the critical importance of balancing breadth and depth in the curriculum before honing in on breadth as being in particular danger in the current climate. After analyzing the major threats to breadth in American higher education, the article looks overseas to find a new case for the value of breadth in the curriculum. It focuses on Hong Kong's university system, where a large-scale, multiyear project is underway to graft a fourth year of general education onto a threeyear model of discipline-or profession-specific training. The resulting contrast between American institutions discarding curricular breadth while foreign universities rediscover it is telling. This topic has particular relevance for Christian colleges and universities as they seek the holistic development of their students.
ABSTRACT. This article analyzes New Zealand's rights‐based system of fisheries management from the perspective of local stakeholders on northern Great Barrier Island. The research identified differing perspectives through use of the concept of “boundary construction,” not only in terms of society and nature but also among societal institutions. Great Barrier Island participants exhibited significant differences, especially between staff of the local Department of Conservation and local Maori, both of whom were engaged in negotiating policy implementation at the local level. These differences expressed themselves in conceptions of both societal boundaries—the scale at which community was envisioned—and conceptions of the boundary between nature and culture. The findings confirm the need for the continued development of models of community‐based resource management as well as for the conceptual integration of society and nature in the realm of policy construction.
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