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Debt and Dispossession

Farm Loss in America’s Heartland

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 county in western Minnesota, Dudley provides an incisive account of the moral dynamics of loss, dislocation, capitalism, and solidarity in farming communities.

211 pages | 4 halftones, 5 line drawings | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 2000

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Culture Studies

Sociology: General Sociology

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Fragile Community
2. Farm Crisis
3. Moral Economy
4. Primal Scenes
5. White Crosses
6. Open Secrets
7. Social Trauma
8. The Last Farmer
Appendix: County Profile
Notes
Index

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