Short Abstract

Our panel attends to changing realities, meanings and relations of rural life and land under the impact of agricultural intensification or resource extraction; demographic, economic and environmental change in cities and countryside; and new aspirations and imaginaries related to land and landscape.

Long Abstract

Interest in rural lives and livelihoods is growing again, accounting for novel demographic, residential, social and economic formations in zones of farming or extraction in the countryside or in emergent peri-urban areas. Such scholarship challenges neat urban-rural contrasts while revitalising established social anthropological interest in household and livelihood, ownership and other land-relations, class and socioeconomic differentiation, kinship and social reproduction, morality and faith. Anthropology’s ‘return to the land’ reflects recent rapid, radical changes to life in the African countryside, including agricultural intensification to produce food for urban and international markets, artisanal mining, land-alienation and degradation, altered property-relations and class differentiation, and new forms of investment and leasehold. It explores responses to the growing inhabitability of cities, as well as to the viability of agricultural livelihoods, linked not least to the environmental and medical repercussions of agrochemical use and eroding modes of regulation, protection and stewardship, which are exacerbated by increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns and rising temperatures. At the same time as rural lives change, people’s ideas about the value and meaning of city and countryside, and their relationships, have transformed, and innovative ways of connecting and moving between the two – migrating, investing, or commuting – evolve. We will discuss research on the changing (and persisting) rural in Africa, with particular attention to transformations in land ownership and use, agricultural production and intensification, social relations and class formation, ecologies and landscapes, as well as in the meanings and affective values attributed to land, rural livelihoods and forms of life.

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