Rural property: Contemporary processes of rural transformation and differentiation

Projektleitung: Dr. Lutz Laschewski

Förderung: DFG - Programm Wissenschaftliche Netzwerke

Kooperation: Humboldt Universität Berlin, MPI für Sozialanthropologie Halle, LMU München BOKU Wien und Universität Wageningen

Zeitraum: 01/2005 bis 02/2009

Einordung:
Institut: Professur Agrarökonomie

Projektbeschreibung:
The proposed network will examine contemporary processes of rural transformation and differentiation. It will do so by bringing together twelve 'junior' scholars who have conducted empirical research on these processes in postcolonial, postsocialist and western European settings. The 'juniors' will be joined by three senior scholars with theoretical expertise on property. 'Junior' and senior scholars will jointly examine contemporary rural transformations by looking at the changing definitions of social actors, objects, and relationships constituting property relationships (see Figure 1).

The analysis of contemporary rural transformations and differentiation will proceed by way of three leading questions.
• How do contemporary processes of rural change redefine the social actors recognized and legitimized in property relationships?
• How does contemporary rural change modify the goods of material and symbolic value important to social actors?
• How have the types of relationships, including rights and obligations, asserted by social actors changed in the process of rural transformations?

The network will seek explicit comparisons of empirical cases and theoretical work from postcolonial, postsocialist and western European settings. As highlighted in the previous section, property research has been characterized by a separation into different research traditions (for an exception, see F. Benda-Beckmann et al. 2004). This network, therefore, proposes a rather unique attempt to bridge the divide and to take advantage of the different research traditions for an innovative comparative assessment. The underlying assumption is that property offers a potent analytical framework to examine and compare contemporary rural change in the three settings.
Scholars from several scientific disciplines will participate in the network. The scholars include social anthropologists with experience in postcolonial settings, social anthropologists and rural sociologists working on postsocialist transformations, and legal sociologists, rural sociologists, social anthropologists and an institutional agricultural economist conducting research on rural change in western Europe. This mix reflects the transdisciplinary nature of property research involving social anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, economists, and philosophers. Representatives of the latter two are not included in the network, with one exception (Marianne Penker), because their research approaches and modes of reasoning starkly differ from the disciplines participating in the network.

Bearbeiter:

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