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Challenging the notion that modernization is a homogenizing process, Susan Rogers contends that in the course of large-scale transformations communities often reproduce and strengthen distinctive cultural and social features. To make this argument, she focuses on the French farming community of "Ste Foy" during a period of rapid change (1945-75). Using ethnographic field data and archival material that she collected as a "participant-observer," she finds an intriguing puzzle: an allegedly archaic social form, the ostal, has become increasingly common in the community. The ostal, a type of family farm organized around an extended "stem family" household, is a variant of the stem family systems associated with preindustrial southern Europe. How have Ste Foyans continued to remake this "archaic" mode as their community grew more prosperous and more involved in national and international markets? In showing how the specific identity of a community is reproduced rather than obliterated by modernization, the author reveals dialectical relationships between structure and change, history and culture, and the centralized nation-state and regional diversity. This analysis addresses anthropologists, historians, and scholars interested in local politics and economic development

Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth‐Century Florence. Carole M. Counihan. New York: Routledge, 2004. 248 pp.

▪ Abstract  In France as elsewhere, anthropology developed as an autonomous discipline concerned with the study of faraway primitive or "exotic" societies, but it has shifted its purview, especially over the past several decades, to also include societies closer to home in both time and space. Consideration of the substantial literature produced over the past 30 years by French anthropologists conducting research in France illustrates the specificities of national disciplinary traditions in perceiving and meeting this challenge. Anthropology's position within the institutional framework of contemporary French academic and scholarly life, as well as the intellectual traditions that have been brought to bear on the ethnological study of France (especially the legacies of Durkheimian social thought and folklore studies) are shown to have helped shape both the production of anthropological knowledge of and in France and debates about its pertinence to the discipline's future.

Cet article étudie analytiquement l'historiographie de la constitution du système Land-grant américain. Il s'agit d'un réseau national d'institutions financées sur fonds publics, et se consacrant à la recherche et à la formation agricoles. Ce réseau fut établi par une série de lois fédérales votées par le Congrès américain entre 1862 et 1914. Le système Land-grant , encore très solide de nos jours, combine étroitement la vulgarisation, la recherche et l'enseignement universitaire. On lui attribue en général un rôle majeur dans l'édification du secteur agricole, aussi productif que rationalisé, caractéristique des États-Unis aujourd'hui. Un tel système institutionnel, centralisé et imposé par l'État fédéral, est tout à fait exceptionnel dans le cadre américain, et l'auteur suggère que ce caractère exceptionnel a amené les historiens du système à se concentrer en priorité sur son degré de réussite dans l'atteinte des objectifs de démocratisation proclamés à l'origine. Replacer le système Land-grant dans une perspective comparatiste internationale permettrait de soulever une gamme plus large de questions, y compris celle du degré réel d'influence d'institutions de ce type sur le développement agricole.

AbstractHow does the presence of a mediator change the dynamics of a dispute and help move disputants toward agreement?