The Villagers : Changed Values, Altered Lives: The Closing of the Urban Rural Gap

Critchfield, Richard

ISBN 10: 0385420498 / ISBN 13: 9780385420495

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Villagers : Changed Values, Altered Lives: The Closing of the Urban Rural Gap
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385420498
• ISBN 13: 9780385420495
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Fine
• Weight: 1.609 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Warning that the loss of cultural continuity by villagers will ultimately destroy cities, a journalist documents the closing urban-rural population gap and loss of cultural stability because of technological advances and population drain to urban centers.

From the Publisher

Since 1959, award-winning journalist Richard Critchfield has been reporting on villages and the lives of villagers around the world. His 1980 book, Villages,was considered "ground-breaking" (Wall Street Journal ) and "a landmark study [to] be referred to for years to come" (Foreign Affairs ).In The Villagers, Critchfield returns to his beloved villages to witness the closing of the urban-rural population gap and to assess the threshold of radical change global villagers now face. Critchfield takes us from a Holocaust memorial ceremony in the woods outside a Popowlany village in Poland to a sacred Japanese puppet shadow play in a Pitangsari village in Indonesia; from planting a rice field in Nae-Chonvillage in South Korea to harvesting wheat in a Ghungraii village on the Punjab plain in India. Over 35 years and several continents, Critchfield has observed a universal village culture revolving around agriculture, religion, and family which has provided villagers with cultural stability for centuries. He finds, however, that this ability to endure has been seriously compromised by recent technological advances and the population drain to the cities, where villagers by and large lose their common culture. In a bold conclusion, Critchfield warns that it is this loss of cultural reproduction by villagers which threatens our urban culture with ultimate disintegration, as shown by ever increasing amounts of crime, hunger, illiteracy, violence, and poverty. To prevent further cultural breakdown in our cities, Critchfield argues that we must recreate the village life among urban dwellers as well as foster policies which sustain our rural communities worldwide. A devastating indictment of the reckless sacrifice of culture at the hands of technology, Villagers puts the dilemma in very real human terms with revealing and moving portraits of those on the frontier of cultural evolution: the villagers of the world.