Susan Lees - Böcker

Scholars bring their field experience and their expertise in sociology, social anthropology, economics, political science, and other areas to bear on an understanding of what happened to a model socialist construction: the rural village cooperative of Israel, the Moshav. A number of the chapters describe re-studies of communities their authors had examined a generation ago. The overall result is a diversity of views from the perspectives of individual community members, community organizations themselves, and expert interpreters, about the causes and consequences of a decline in economic cooperation concomitant with a decline in government support and a decline in the role of agriculture in most communities and in the national economy. The processes examined here have considerable importance for the understanding of transformations taking place in vast regions of the world.

To rise to the increasingly urgent challenge of understanding the relationship between human beings and the environment, scholars need to step back and re-evaluate their basic premises about how current explanations should shape the form and content of their research. Against the Grain addresses a variety of topics in the field of human ecology, including ecological anthropology, evolutionary psychology, environmental history, and geography, and challenges scholars to re-think the adequacy of their methods and assumptions. Andrew P. Vayda concludes the volume with a critical commentary on these issues and, more widely, on the subject of explanation. The result is an extremely useful and provocative précis for thinking about, re-evaluating, and rectifying scholarly research.