Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America's Heartland

by Kathryn Marie Dudley

Book Overview

Winner of the Margaret Mead Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology

The farm crisis of the 1980s was the worst economic disaster to strike rural America since the Depression--thousands of farmers lost their land and homes, irrevocably altering their communities and, as Kathryn Marie Dudley shows, giving rise to devastating social trauma that continues to affect farmers today. Through interviews with residents of an agricultural...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226169138
• ISBN13: 9780226169132
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

painful descriptions of loss in the heartland

If you've ever gone through hard times and felt like the world was standing in judgement, you have a sense of what the people in this book went through losing their farms. I grew up in farmland and have some sense of how fully peoples lives were tied up in their farms. For all those who see the modern economy as cool darwinian survival of the fittest, Dudley offers up a more plausible alternative: failure is often arbitrary or--worse--prompted by poorly thought out policies. The resulting pain of failure for those who experience the judgement is profound because so many see failure and success in moral terms. I'm still mulling the final message--that the unsympathetic judgement of those who get the short end of the economic stick *is* the American way. I can think of some counter-examples, but for the most part it rings true. Curious what others think.