Farmers’ resistance in urbanised and remote rural places: a geographical perspective

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concept of resistance in rural studies. Resistance has usually been associated with community responses to global processes that alter rural space and daily life. Ethnographic interviews with 19 farmers in Spain found different individual resistance strategies within each geographic area, evidencing a plurality of responses, or strategies, regarding specific problems. Each person within a community was able to develop a strategy according to their own interests and each community did not constitute a homogeneous confluence of interests. Few studies on processes have linked the plurality of place and rural communities. This article contributes a comparison of the resistance strategies of farmers in rural areas with socio-geographic characteristics to analyse the value of geographic “place” and the plurality of resistance strategies for permanence. Main characteristics of place reveal general strategies of farmers which contrast with the individual, everyday tactics each farmer has for survival within their place.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• farmer
• livestock farming
• politics
• geography