New rurality and the experience of place: the small rural locality of La Niña, Buenos Aires, Argentina

This paper presents a cultural geographic approach for understanding local social processes of territorial re-appropriation taking place in response to non-local forces and interests. This approach is applied to the small rural locality of La Niña, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. The small vill...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:GeoJournal 2018-12, Vol.83 (6), p.1301-1315
Main Authors: Urquijo, Pedro S., Bocco, Gerardo, Boni-Noguez, Andrew F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agribusiness
Agriculture
Appraisals
Archival research
Cultural factors
Economic conditions
Economic opportunities
Economics
El Nino phenomena
Environmental Management
Forces (mechanics)
Geography
Globalization
Human Geography
Inhabitants
La Nina
Locality
Population decline
Rural areas
Rurality
Settlers
Social conditions
Social life & customs
Social processes
Social Sciences
Social structure
Surveys
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper presents a cultural geographic approach for understanding local social processes of territorial re-appropriation taking place in response to non-local forces and interests. This approach is applied to the small rural locality of La Niña, in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. The small village of La Niña is currently in a locally-led process of recovering from a recent depopulation trend caused mainly by the irruption of transnational agribusiness. As economic opportunities have dwindled in the last decades, more recently local inhabitants and new settlers have set forth diverse strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of depopulation on the social structure. We focus our attention on the way the living experience of place is involved in all these strategies. We contend that despite economic and cultural homogenization caused by globalization, the experience of place is a permanent though ever-changing aspect of social life. Our research was based on archival and hemerographic surveys and ethnographic field techniques, encompassing participatory observation, semistructured and in-depth interviews with social and government leaders and local producers as well as field landscape appraisals.
ISSN:0343-2521
1572-9893
DOI:10.1007/s10708-017-9834-3