Extracting the violence from rural extraction economies

One of the most common industries in rural areas nationally as well as globally is the extraction industry. The extraction industry includes any industry involving the removal of raw resources from the land. Farming doesn't traditionally fall into this category however; as small family farming economies transition into large corporate agricultural industries, some kinds of farming now may be considered extraction industries.

Typically, the actions involved in extraction industries can have a violent affect on the land being used. Imagine clear cut forests or open pit strip mines. Both harshly change the habitats and landscapes around them in a jarring and destructive manner. Can such environmental degradation occur without any social internalization of that violence? Ecofeminism as well as trends in rural violence suggest that rural residents do in fact internalize this degradation and suffer more violence right along side their exploited natural resources.

In Challenges for Rural America in the 21st Century, Daniel Brown asserts that a key element of extraction industries is that the communities, regions and peoples living near one are all living with exploitation because of the industry presence. Extraction industries imply exploitation simply by the nature of their existence in a rural area. But does the exploitation of the land correlate with social violence?

Rural social and domestic violence has received little academic attention, especially when considering the relationship between extraction industries and violence. Much of current work focuses on the special needs of rural persons relative to spatiality and seperation from services, not the relationship between local violence and local industry. One recent Austrailian study, "Globalization, Frontier Masculinities and Violence," from the British Journal of Criminology focused on the violence among rural Austrailian extraction industry workers.

This study showed that the more remote or rural an extraction industry man was, the more likely he was to be involved in violence, both self inflicted or against other persons. This study focused on man to man violence in social settings and did not specifically address domestic violence. But if social violence amongst males is increased, it follows that intimate partner violence is likely also heightened because of these circumstances.

Ecofeminism has long related the destruction of the environment to violence against women. In her article "Eco-cide: Thinking Ecologically and Globally about Women and Violence" Robyn Lynn explains this increase in social violence as related to the destruction of the local environment:

Violence also becomes manifest more broadly in...'the violation of the integrity of organic interconnected and interdependent systems, that sets in a motion a process of exploitation, inequality, injustice and violence' (Shiva 1989,5)-the killing of people, their culture and lifestyle by the murder of nature.

When we normalize to exploiting and violating the rural lands around us, it becomes easier to internalize such violence amongst each other socially. Extraction economies are possibly essential to rural livlihoods on a global scale. How can we continue operating such exploitative industries but mitigate how the workers of those industries internalize and take home these ethics of abuse and destruction?

The Hell’s Angels enjoy a lovely weekend at Bass Lake

In the summer of 1965, the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club decided to spend their Fourth of July Weekend at Bass Lake, a small resort area located in the Sierra National Forest approximately 14 mi (23 km) from the south entrance of Yosemite National Park. Coming off one of the most notorious years in their existence (including being charged with gang-raping two young women in Monterey, CA), the Hell’s Angels of California picked Bass Lake as the place they would celebrate Independence Day by spitting beer in the face of all that rural Americans consider decent. Despite their best efforts to keep their holiday destination under wraps, the “word” had gotten out, and the rural residents of Bass Lake were on alert. The “word” was that a large horde of medieval barbarians, riding iron horses were coming to burn their village down in a drug-fueled frenzy. The citizens of Bass Lake were certainly doomed. Certainly, that is unless the police and civilians of Madera County could find a way to simultaneously subdue and appease the roving crew of 100 plus leather-clad chain wielding demons.

For the Angels, runs like the one to Bass Lake are primarily parties, not raids where local women are captured and churches burned to the ground. Once provoked however, the Angels are not the sort who back down from a confrontation. Try to consider however, the viewpoint of the local small town sheriff. Who, with a police force of only twenty-five men, gets word that between 100 and 500 motorcycle outlaws are converging on his town in a matter of hours. The worst things he has had to deal with in his career are highway accidents, and weekend drunkards brawling at the local saloon. What will he do “[W]hen 500 delegates from some apparently subhuman species converge on a peaceful community and begin pissing in the streets, hurling beer cans at each other and racing loud motorcycles in the village square?” In Bass Lake, California in 1965 the local police handled the situation exceptionally well. I will attempt to explain how by interpreting the chapter “The Statutory Rape of Bass Lake” in the book: Hells Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson.

“The trick is to control them without any provocation, but outlaws are easily provoked.” Hunter S. Thompson

The first measure taken by the law enforcement of Madera County was to issue a vague preliminary injunction aimed at the Angles, the thing was titled: ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE WHY PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION SHOULD NOT ISSUE AND TEMPORARY RESTRAING ORDER MADE. It named as defendants “John Does 1 through 500, Jane Does 1 through 500, individually and as associated under the name HELLS ANGELS or ONE PERCENTERS.” The police had established road blocks on all the roads leading to Bass Lake prior to the Angels arrival. When the Angles did arrive, they were photographed and handed a copy of the injunction. The injunction prevented anyone receiving it from “(1) violating any public law, statute or ordinance or committing any public nuisance… (2) any conduct offensive to the senses…(3) carrying or possessing weapons of any kind…” An injunction of this type did two things, it served to confuse the Angles, and to put them on notice that the law was watching. After being handed a copy of the injunction the Angels were all sent to a predetermined location where law enforcement lined the only way in and out of the isolated campsite. The police also imposed a strict curfew at 10PM which in effect kept the brutes caged like trapped lions at the zoo.

The local police brought in reinforcements from surrounding counties, and their numbers totaled around 100. The key to this law enforcement team was a towering Sheriff named “Tiny” Baxter. Thompson described him as 6 foot 6 and built like a NFL defensive end. He was in charge of the entire production, which he viewed as an army against army standoff. He preferred peace, that much was true, but he was prepared for war. His attitude was of emblematic of the classic rural sheriff, the kind who would strike fear in the heart of any petty lawbreaker who came to his town looking for a good time. He was pure redneck, and he was going to be dammed of the Hell’s Angels burned down the town on his watch. Luckily, he had enough brains to back up his brawn. He knew that it was far better to provide the Angels with a space of their own, and give them a fair opportunity to purchase enough beer to get them through the night (an amount totaling some 80 cases). Tiny’s tough nature was emblematic of the locals in the area, for they were “mountain people.” Mountain people, the descendants of miners and lumberjacks are simple people who don’t mess around once their simple existence has been threatened. They can rally as quickly and fiercely as any small town KKK chapter, complete with axe handles, hunting rifles, and a maddening rage.

The Angels quickly noticed it was not just the police they had watch out for, the jacked up holster wearing locals were prepared to fight the Angels to the death. It seemed every able bodied young man had been summoned to the town center, as if Paul Revere himself had rode through only an hour earlier. The locals were at the liquor store waiting to meet the invaders head-on. All they needed was an excuse. Tiny Baxter and six of his deputies escorted the Angels in and out of the camp site in order to maintain the peace. It was apparent that no local man was going to surrender his wife and daughters to the heathens without a good old fashioned bludgeon—fest.

The smartest thing Sheriff Baxter did to keep the peace was to converse with the Angles’ leader, Sonny Barger early and often. And most importantly, he did it with respect. The Sheriff kept a dialogue with Barger, and agreed to any reasonable request the Angels made, but he also laid down the law.

“If you play it straight with us, Sonny, we’ll play it straight with you. We don’t want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we’re gonna come down on you hard, it’s gonna be powder valley for your whole gang…But there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy yourselves here like everybody else. You guys know what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with you. We know that.”

The effect of this treatment put Sonny Barger in an unusual position, instead of leading the riot, he assumed a responsible fatherly role, one that was necessary to maintain order amongst his pack. Barger knew that the Angels might win the initial skirmish with the locals, but it was a long haul back to Oakland and Los Angeles. They would likely be picked off one by one as they tried to escape through the mountain roads, not to mention the California Highway Patrol. So in the end, Hell’s Angels were allowed to have their party. The booze flowed; pills & marijuana were consumed; and those who brought “old ladies and mamas” were able to find 20 minutes of privacy amongst the trees. Miraculously the whole scene was well contained. No one from the town was hurt, and only one or two Angels were arrested.

“In retrospect, there was unanimous agreement that both the press and the police had done a spectacular job. There was massive publicity, a massive police presence and massive beer drinking to justify all their concern. In a galaxy of nationwide riots and civic upheaval, Bass Lake was a star of peace.”

The OxyContin problem for rural pharmacies

The New York Times reports today in a front page story that many pharmacies--especially in rural areas, it seems--have stopped selling OxyContin, Vicodin, and other drugs that have increasingly made pharmacists of robberies by addicts. The dateline is Bingham, Maine, population 930, in nonmetropolitan Somerset County, population 50,947, in the north central part of the state. The story reports on a "rash of armed robberies at Maine drugstores last year, a sharp increase that has rattled pharmacists and put the police on high alert." The thieves, it seems, are looking for oxycodone (the main ingredient in OxyContin), hydrocodone (the main ingredient in Vicodin) and Xanax. Some 1800 such robberies have occurred nationwide over the past three years. As a result, some pharmacists, such as Chet Hibbard in Bingham, have stopped carrying OxyContin--and posted signs to that effect. Hibbard ceased to "dispens[e] the highly addictive painkiller last July, after two robbers in ski goggles demanded it at knifepoint one afternoon as shocked customers looked on." Hibbard is quoted: “Outside hiring an armed guard to be in here 24/7, I don’t know what else to do.”

The story recounts some other brazen robberies, some in metropolitan areas:

In Rockland, Me., one wielded a machete as he leapt over a pharmacy counter to snatch the painkiller oxycodone, gulping some before he fled. In Satellite Beach, Fla., a robber threatened a pharmacist with a cordless drill last week, and in North Highlands, Calif., a holdup last summer led to a shootout that left a pharmacy worker dead.

Here's a link to a story about a pharmacy burglary in my home county. Here is a 2001 story about Oxycontin addiction, also linking it to rural areas.

Here's another recent story about a "bath-salts" type substance sold in convenience stores and gas stations, which has apparently caused very erratic behavior in those using the cocaine-like substance. Florida and Louisiana have recently banned the sales of these products.

Just a click away

Photographs are literally a click away. Pressing one’s fingers down on a camera preserves an image, a memory, and potentially history. Photographs of rural life capture nostalgia, sentiment, and sometimes a real human life. Rurality, as we know, diverges greatly not only within America, but also between countries where rurality may be a way of life. In this blog post, I would like you to consider the contrasting photographs of rural America and rural South Africa, and my humble attempt to discern what can be learned from these photographers’ eyes.

South African photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa’s camera documents the rural-industrial peripheries, where many South African migrants live. His philosophy is one of exchange and collaboration - and in an interview he states, “It was important that I offered them the chance to decide how they wanted to be photographed, and in this way it became, in a sense, about giving them back their dignity and authorship.” Looking at his photographs, it is evident that he gives each individual an assertive voice. The men, women, and children are positioned in the center staring directly at the camera, while surrounded with their possessions. The undeniable conclusion is that the camera gives these individuals in a world that is undergoing industrial changes. In fact, Mthethwa says in his interview that for many of these people, the photos became a living document.

It is important to note, however, that Mthethwa’s photographs separate the place from the individual. In fact, most of his photographs are just about the individuals, rather than the land. Perhaps this is because Africa is quickly industrializing, and land is less nostalgic than maintaining the individual identity of one’s culture and family.

In contrast to Mthethwa’s photographs are photographs taken by various individuals documented in SlowExposures. SlowExposures is a festival created by Chris Curry and Nancy McCrary as a way to capture the rural South through photography. Specifically, the goal of the program is “to remind visitors and residents to ‘slow down’ and allow the images to surprise, educate, reacquaint, and challenge their perception of the rural South.” Similarly, the photographs taken of the rural South portray individuals in the center frame, staring squarely at the camera – almost directly challenging our assumptions of them.

One difference, however, between the photographs of Mthethwa’s and those of these photographers is that SlowExposures seems to enhance the beauty of the surrounding areas of the rural South. Many of the photographs play upon the beauty of the area and the objects that are part of the region – such as doors, homes, animals, and even junk. Perhaps, as we have discussed in class, this is based on preserving our nations nostalgia or preserving our environment. Regardless, it is hard to deny that these photographs evoke a feeling of a long lost era that wants to be recaptured.

Mthethwa and SlowExposures seek to do the same thing – capture places, regions, and a people that tend to be forgotten in our world today. In fact, I would go so far as to say that their photographs are important because they do capture a memory of a time and place that still exists, and this allows us – the people who have steamrolled ahead – to be aware that the rural still is evolving and still maintains a place in this world.

Movin' on up?

Although the traditional breakdown of social classes into upper, middle, and lower may not be nuanced enough to capture all the subtle differences between groups of people today, it is at least clear that given the enormity of income and wealth inequality in the United States, where the bottom 40% essentially have no wealth at all, there is definitely some form of class hierarchy.

A few years ago Janny Scott and David Leonhard of the New York Times did a series of articles on social class in America, and although they noted that the term means different things to different people, class is generally comprised of four factors: occupation, education, income, and wealth. Income and wealth are not the only markers of class, but it is not difficult to intuit that a person's education and occupation are highly interrelated with their wealth and income. Scott and Leonhard argue that even though merit is playing a greater role in determining who can climb to the heights of society today, "parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits that meritocracy rewards. When their children succeed, their success is seen as earned." Thus, the class we are born into has a significant impact on our social mobility.

None of this is incredibly surprising, but I believe the subtlety of how the class we are born into affects our social mobility poses a special problem for rural people in this new meritocracy. Given that rural citizens are generally poorer than urbanites, rural children also tend to have fewer educational opportunities due to lack of funding and parents who are less able to invest directly in their kids' education.

But, I think there may be a more deep-seated obstacle facing rural education reformers: rural culture. It would certainly be very unfair to assume that all rural areas and their inhabitants share the same cultural values. No rural place is exactly the same as any other. But the "traditional values" (article download) that are so often popularly associated with rural places include self-reliance, hard-work, and personal accountability, among others. Under this value set, the harder you work and the more focused you are, the more successful you will be- mirroring the meritocratic philosophy that predominates in America today. The question is, do these values also have embedded in them the idea that it is fundamentally unfair to take the hard-earned fruits of one's labor through taxes and give them to someone who has not been able to succeed on their own?

Maybe this line of reasoning is a stretch- a strong sense of community is also seen as a traditional rural value, which would entail that rural people are more likely to help neighbors in need. But in both the media and my personal experience, I have found that many conservatives fundamentally bristle at the notion of someone getting something for nothing. We all have to earn our own way.

Rural people tend to lead to the right, and although there are certainly myriad reasons why, cultural values must have played a part in forging their conservative disposition. Is it possible that the very values politicians so often laud when discussing rural America, actually prevent rural voters from supporting policies that would give them a fairer shake in the meritocracy? Maybe this question assumes too much, but until more people realize that hard work often just isn't enough to move up the ladder, traditional assumptions about fairness and self-determination might hold us back, especially those with little to start with.

Japanese Internment and the rural

This week marked California's first Annual Fred Korematsu Day, honoring a Japanese American who, with the help of civil rights attorneys, contested the United States Government's incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II in the famous case Korematsu v. United States. Much of my mother's family was imprisoned during WWII in these segregation camps, mostly in Topaz, Tule Lake and Kooskia (a remote Department of Justice camp in Idaho, reserved for a small number of "enemy aliens"). A recent conversation with my grandmother and the increase in attention being paid to this period of time due to the new holiday, has had me thinking about the location of the camps, the impact on the existing communities as well as on the Japanese incarcerates, and the state of these former camps and communities now.

There were ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps scattered along the western half of the country, and a number of smaller DOJ camps. They were built outside of cities -- wooden barracks lined up, guard towers erected and barbed wire strung -- in mostly rural locations. Many were built on or near Indian reservations. Poston camp was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objection of the Tribe. The 2000 census reported a Poston population of 9,201. At the peak of the war, the camp held just over 17,000. Manzanar was placed between the towns of Lone Pine and Independence in California's Owens Valley. The 2000 census reported a population of 1,655 for Lone Pine and 574 for Independence. At the height of the war, Manzanar camp held more than 10,000 internees. I am most familiar with Tule Lake camp, which straddled the town of Tule Lake and the unincorporated town of Newell, in Modoc County, at the California/Oregon border. In 2000, Tule Lake had a population of 2,010 and Modoc County, a population of 9,449. At its peak, Tule Lake had a population of over 18,000. Tule Lake was also built on the home of Native American tribes.

A number of thoughts and questions arise when considering the sudden influx of people into these communities. While I see the practical reasons for the Government placing these camps in rural locations (availability of land), there is also something to be said of the way that these sparsely populated locations served to separate Japanese and Japanese Americans from urban centers, where they would be more visible and could possibly have been given legal assistance and more empowered to contest their detention.

My grandmother recently commented that she was not allowed to access newspapers, or other media from the outside world, which would have alerted her to current events outside of camp. Her statement arose as we watched coverage of the uprising in Egypt, where Internet and telephone access had been shut down in an effort to cut off Egyptians from each other and from the outside world. The impact on, and lack of coverage of, rural communities in Egypt was discussed earlier in this blog. Although many of years and thousands of miles apart, the inability to communicate frustrates organization in both of these situations.

Thought should also be given to how these rural communities felt about their towns being used to imprison so-called enemies. Knowing that many of the camp sites were reservations, or home to native American tribes, its ironic that they were taken over and used to segregate unwanted Americans. But maybe it isn't surprising.

And additionally, how were these rural communities changed by the internment camps? I am most familiar with Tule Lake, due to my involvement in organizing pilgrimages to the site. Today, nearly sixty years after the Japanese Internment, there is very little evidence of what took place there. There are bare remnants of an outhouse and the concrete frame of the camp jail, but all barracks were sold for $1 and dragged away years ago. In 2008 Tule Lake was declared a National Monument and began to receive federal funds for preservation of the site. It will remain empty and preserved, with information plaques and an education center as a reminder of the atrocities that took place there.

What is clear is that the Japanese incarceration impacted Japanese American communities at the time and the effects have reverberated through generations. There is less discussion, however, on the interaction between the segregation camps and the communities in which they were placed and those lasting impacts.

Rural activism: reflections on Egypt and some American anticedents

This weekend, the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution and the anti-government protests in Egypt seemed to hit a fever pitch. What had largely been neglected by American corporate media finally found an international stage. Egyptians in Cairo and Alexandria had bloody clashes with government police, armed with semi-automatic weapons.

This naturally led me to start searching for news articles regarding those Egyptians not located in large metropolitan areas. Unsurprisingly, there does not seem to be a lot of coverage, if any, of the current Egyptian uprising as experienced by rural Egyptians, despite the fact that numerous news reports still assert that over 50% of the Egyptian population remains in rural villages, rather than in the big cities.

Political commentator Adrei Fedyashin wrote an article today comparing the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. He speculated that the difference in the urban-rural population make-up between the two countries was one of the major differences that could explain why Tunisians were more successful in ousting former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali than the Egyptians have in convincing President Mubarak to step aside. "[President Mubarak] is perfectly aware that the anti-government rallies in Cairo and Suez, however massive, are still short of a nation-wide revolt. Indeed, an instant revolution is hard to bring about in a country like Egypt, where rural dwellers form the bulk of the population. Most favor caution and moderation."

Today at 10:30 a.m., Joel Beinin, professor of history and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University, posted his own piece on the likelihood of success for the Egyptian protesters on foreignpolicy.com. In the article, Beinin discusses how youth have largely been a the driving force behind the protests, using social media like facebook to organize themselves on a larger scale. Internet as an organizing tool has its limitations, especially in Egypt, however, Beinin says. "[The movement's] presence on the Internet has been considerably greater than in urban neighborhoods and rural villages where computer access is limited and illiteracy rates are high."

Whatever the likelihood of success of the Egyptian protests, it seems clear that Egypt's rural population has largely been left out of the media spotlight, if it indeed has been participating in the protests.

Usually when I think of protests, what comes to mind are images similar to those I remember seeing during the Prop 8 aftermath in San Francisco. People gathered in a major metropolitan city-center, using large construction tubes with hand-sized holes drilled in them to create a barricade against traffic (the people put their hands inside the tube and then hand-cuffed themselves together), shutting down a center of commerce and drawing attention to one's cause. But what happens when rural people want to do the same? Are the rural people of the United States similar to those described in Egypt, favoring "caution and moderation" over action?

I have a few pieces of knowledge that came to mind upon pondering these questions. What first came to mind were the protests held in Northern California and Southern Oregon, sometimes referred to as the State of Jefferson, in the early 1940s.

Long complaining of a lack of resources provided by each state to the rural counties, the people of Curry, Josephine, Jackson, and Klamath Counties in Oregon, and of Del Norte, Siskiyou, and Modoc Counties in California proposed that they secede from their respective states to form a new, largely rural state, named after the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The people of the states of Oregon and California largely ignored the calls for secession from the rural counties. As relayed in an op-ed piece by Tim Hunt in the San Francisco Chronicle dated August 17, 2003, the secession movement was thought up largely to protest the lack of maintenance being done to the major roads and highways. According to jeffersonstate.com, a website in support of secession, after the people in the states decided to secede, they camped out on Highway 99, barricading traffic and distributing pamphlets to travelers declaring their secession.

News crews were there to document the movement, and jeffersonstate.com boasts that

"Hollywood newsreel companies were present to record the events, including the highway barricades. The State of Jefferson was off to a banner start. The newsreels were to air nationally the week of December 8, but tragically on December 7th Pearl Harbor was bombed and the State of Jefferson rebellion of 1941 came to an end. The people of the region went to work for the war effort and good roads were eventually built into the backcountry[(sic)] to access strategic minerals and timber."

Although the State of Jefferson still claims to have seceded in 1941, maps have not been redrawn and the secession has largely been forgotten by everyone except for those people living in the region.

Another fact largely overlooked by those people studying the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is that much of the organizing that occurred of people of color in the South happened in rural schools founded to serve as inspiration to grassroots organizing for equal rights.

Rosa Parks, the infamous African American woman who refused to move to the back of the bus or give her seat up to a White patron, was one of the most famous students of the Highlander Center, located in New Market, Tennessee. A long time veteran of grassroots organizing, Parks spent years learning how to protest and organize from schools and organization which were largely located in the rural south. According to Paul Roget Loeb, who wrote a piece on "The Real Rosa Parks" on commondreams.org,

"Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had been active for twelve years in the local NAACP chapter, serving as its secretary. The summer before her arrest, she'd had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists, like South Carolina teacher Septima Clark, and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning "separate-but-equal" schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign."

My knowledge of rural activism is largely limited to these two facts, but I am sure that there are many more examples of rural activism which has led to political change.

Malaysian rural rhetoric

After living in a rural village in Malaysia for 7 months, one thing was clear: I knew more about my small, adopted town, Matang, than most Malaysians did. While visiting the country's capital, Kuala Lumpur, a seven-hour bus ride from Matang, I would often see faces of sheer horror when I told the more metropolitan Malaysians where I was living. "How do you handle it?" "They are so uneducated there! So conservative!" "They are so poor, you must be so bored!" And, of course, I was always reminded that Matang was located in Hulu Terengganu, a province whose namesake meant something along the lines of "backwater," for a reason.

As you might expect, I resented this negativity. Yes, Matang was rural and poor, and much more conservative than the rest of the country, but people were educated and just as capable as their fellow Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur. It bothered me that the city-dwellers thought of Matang as "uncivilized," and certainly spoke about their compatriots as "others" they could not understand.

I was reminded of these perceptions recently in an article in The Star, Malaysia's most widely-read English publication. In this story from January 25, 2011, the author begins by describing how a child from a Penan settlement in rural Sarawak accidentally kicked over a kerosene lamp in his sleep, burning down his longhouse and those of 300 other villagers. The author then continues to describe the settlement's health and environmental problems. Yet, the story is not about development or addressing social and economic disparities, but rather it is about relief, and largely focuses on how Mercy Malaysia, a Kuala Lumpur-based humanitarian organization, has come to the settlement's rescue to rebuild and provide volunteer medical care.

While it is extremely admirable that there are aid organizations willing to travel to remote places to help out in what are, to be sure, very dire situations, the rhetoric in the article was reminiscent of my experiences with the Malaysian rural-urban divide. It characterized the rural residents as passive, helpless, "others," describing "their shy demeanors" and "curious stares," and how they anxiously pleaded, "will you come back for us?"

Of course, I have never been to this community, and it does appear to be an entirely different level of rural than where I lived, but I have a hard time imagining that the Penan residents are such passive, starry-eyed fans of their non-rural counterparts. It seems that when characterizing "the rural," the tendency is either to idealize residents as just simple, grateful, happy people, or to discount them as uneducated and unintelligent.

Either way, the effect is the same. Essentializing rural people and places creates a perception of rural areas as lower, less-important communities. For impoverished rural communities, this essentialization leads to the belief that they will, from time-to-time, need rescuing, but nothing more. For impoverished communities in the developing world, this rhetoric will have to change if social and economic inequalities are to be effectively addressed.

Uneven development, neglect of rural populace drove the Tunisian revolution

NPR's Eric Westervelt filed this report about the Tunisian "Jasmine Revolution" yesterday under the headline, "Rural Tunisians Hope Revolt Brings Jobs, Opportunity." The story's lede, which follows, elaborates on the rural angle, noting that the uprising began in rural Tunisia, where it is seen as a "jobs revolution."

Pent-up fury in the country's rural interior over endemic unemployment, and a long-standing sense of regional inequality, fueled the nationwide revolt. Protests in the capital by students and many from the country's middle classes played a key role in toppling the autocrat. But it all began — and casualties were by far the highest — in the rural hinterlands.

The story seems to be one echoed in so many countries in the developing world: uneven development leaves rural residents jobless and, ultimately, hopeless. This was a theme, for example, of the 2010 uprising in Thailand, which was ultimately squelched. (An earlier blog post about the Thai situation is here, and a recent update is here.)

Back to Tunisia, Westervelt quotes Taoufik Hamdouni, 29, who lives in the same village as the man who set himself on fire after he was humiliated by a local official who was harassing him about his vegetable stall in Sidi Bouzid, which according to wikipedia has a population under 4,000. Hamdouni says:

"Ben Ali was stupid because he was not interested in the center or south of the country," Hamdouni says. "We've been marginalized for a long, long time. You see the differences between the regions. Even those of us with degrees have to look for work in the tourist towns as laborers and such, and we get bossed around by people who aren't even educated."

Seething anger at a sense of regional neglect was exacerbated by widespread local corruption, says Hamdouni's friend Marwan Chokri. Local government and party officials would shake you down or ask for a kickback to get an interview, to get to the top of the list, to get a license — you name it, he says.

* * *

Ben Ali came from the Tunisian coast, so there was an added sense in the rural areas that the ousted dictator favored the coastal resort towns while people here got nothing.

The U.N. estimates unemployment among the country's young rural population at greater than 25%, but Tunisians believe it is much higher.

Westervelt concludes, quoting a resident of Sidi Bouzid, that if the revolution does not lead to job creation, it will be seen as a failure.

Bison ranching takes hold in the plains

Read Kirk Johnson's story in the New York Times here, under the headline "Plains Giants Have Foothold on Tables." Johnson's story features a father-and-son team, the Goulds, in western Kansas, who shifted part of their century-old beef ranch to raising bison last year. Here's an excerpt:

The Goulds, with 40 animals as a start, made their first delivery of buffalo meat, also known as bison, to friends here in Denver last week. They are opening a themed restaurant on the Kansas-Colorado border supplied by the ranch, and planning bison hunts for tourist-visitors.

***

With prices and American consumption of buffalo at all-time highs — though still minuscule in volume compared with beef, chicken or pork — a new chapter is clearly beginning for one of the oldest animal-human relationships on the continent, dating back millennia before the first Europeans arrived.

Many of the ranchers raising buffalo are new to ranching--and committed to grass-fed product. Retail vendors, on the other hand, say grain-fed product is the way to go because it delivers greater consistency.

Rural Arkansas town takes swipe at Confederate flag

The city council of tiny Marshall, Arkansas, population 1535, voted this week to impose a fine of $1,000 on anyone flying any flag other than the Arkansas state flag or the flag of the United States of America over city hall. Repeat violations are subject to a fine of $5,000. The city council's decision came after Marshall's mayor, Jim Smithson, flew the Confederate flag over city hall last week, including on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. An earlier news report from the AP (no longer on the web) indicated that Arkansas also commemorates Robert E. Lee's Birthday in mid-January. That fact is not included in this story by a Little Rock television station.

Marshall is the county seat of Searcy County, population 8002. Searcy County is a persistent poverty county in the state's Ozark mountain region. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, no African Americans lived in Searcy County at the time of the 2000 Census.