#RuralCulture

[socialistarchitecture]

: moldovan cosmism versus moldovan modernism . #mosaicwalls #spaceprogram #busstopschain #ruralmodernism #ruralculture #mosaicwalls #monumentalart_moldova #statecommissionedart_moldova #monumentalpropaganda #monumentalart #busstopsnetwork #socialistarchitecture_moldova #urbanexplorer #modernismtour_moldova #socialistarchitecture #sovmod #sovietmodernism #sovarch #sovietarchitecture #modernismtour #modernism #publicspaces_moldova #transformationofpublicspace #publicspace #urbanism_moldova #urbantransformations #culturalinfrastructure #ruralmodernism . ©stefanrusu . https://www.instagram.com/p/BLCLH7uhU1p/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=budt6fsbvdyo

[cfor36garh]

People of Bastar celebrating some local festivals. . . Exploring with: @street.villa #cfor36garh #musician #drum #percussion #drums #musicians #musicalinstrument #musicianslife #instrumentomusical #music #classicalmusician #acousticmusic #muscian #musicstudent #chhattisgarh #traditionofindia #folkdance #culturalheritage #ruralindia #ruralculture #cultureandart #dancesofindia #2021 (at Chhattisgarh) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJfmF2Zrawm/?igshid=1q8k3igu3oy7k

[villotale-blog]

Chalo Let’s Go....yuhi chala chal rahi #ruraltourism #rurallifestyle #culturetrip #ruralculture #travel #village #biker #wanderlust #uttarakhand #uttarakhand_travel_diaries #uttarakhandtraveller #uttarakhandtourism https://www.instagram.com/p/B4u2s_Tn5u2/?igshid=1lsqvcpkt4e6u

[mathom-crafts]

Una paese senza pastori é un paese morto. Un paese che abbandona i suoi pastori é un paese senza speranza. In Sardegna e non solo i pastori stanno protestando, fiumi di latte scorrono nelle strade. Si prospetta un futuro in cui il latte verrà pagato meno del suo costo di produzione. Viviamo in un mondo con sempre più centri commerciali e sempre meno pascoli. Le macchine possono circolare liberamente mentre i pastori no. Abbiamo un mare di plastica ma le pecore inquinano i fiumi. Il pastore, una volta figura comune sta diventando un eccezione, sempre più simile all'homo selvaticus, già mito, da relegare nelle foreste e nei pascoli sempre più ridotti. Uomini e donne che parlano con i cani, che intagliano i rami e che ascoltano le pietre. Cani che lavorano, utilizzando tutte le virtù di cui son possessori. Bestie libere, in alto tra i monti. Cani, bestie, uomini,donne e bambini, questo é quello che stiamo perdendo. Conoscenze, memorie e arti che non ci verranno ridate indietro. Stiamo soffocando le nostre radici. Foto sconosciuta. A country without shepherds is a dead country. A country that abandons its shepherds is a country without hope. In Sardinia and not only there, shepherds are protesting, rivers of milk flow in the streets. There is a future in which the milk will be paid less than its cost of production. We live in a world with more and more shopping centers and less and less pastures. The cars can move freely while the shepherds do not. We have a plastic sea but sheep pollute rivers. The shepherd, once a common figure, is becoming an exception, more and more like homo sylvaticus, already myth, to be relegated to the increasingly reduced pastures and forests. Men and women talking with dogs, carving branches and listening to the stones. Dogs that work, using all the virtues of which they are possessors. Free beasts, high up in the mountains. Dogs, beasts, women, men and children, this is what we are losing. Knowledge, memories and arts that will not be given back to us. We are suffocating our roots. Unknown photography. #pastorisardi #pastorizia #sardegna #sardinia #pastorizianeverdies #sheperds #tradition #roots #ruralculture #sheep #herd https://www.instagram.com/_mathom_/p/BtywH4rnBz5/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1h6yzcymbf3a2

[tourdefarm]

7-day long #LadakhFestival begins! 7 amazing things you must know about the festival

[donateyoursweat]

Ladakh Festival! A great way of cultural & heritage conservation. 

http://bit.ly/2wr5oAy 

[lebzamj-blog]

My home town. #nature #limpopo #lebzamj #photography #portraitphotography #mirror #mirrorselfie #canon #canonphotography #naturephotography #trees #ruralculture #blackandwhite

[driftlessworld]

Along the tracks #Boscobel #railroads #theamericancollective #winteriscoming #railroads #landscape #infinity #topograph #ruralculture

[greatermnart]

Art, Social Capital, and Navigating the Stormy Present

                                                                       Minnesota is often cited as one of the most liveable states in the nation. There are a variety of factors that contribute to the Northstar State’s high quality of life--a relatively strong economy, a well-regarded public education system (both K-12 and higher ed), the highest rate of voter turnout in the country (which in turn creates a high level of accountability for our politicians), and a variety of governmental programs that form a basic safety net for citizens. What many of these factors have in common in that they are to at least some extent underwritten by social capital.

Social capital can be defined in a number of ways, but what it boils down to is that people’s social cohesion and personal investment in their communities help create a better quality of life for everyone. Probably one of the best-known works on social capital in America is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. First published in 2000, the book is an extensive survey of the civic climate of the country and an overview of the basic principles of social capital.

In his book, Putnam identifies two distinct kinds of social capital--bonding social capital and bridging social capital. Both of them have beneficial effects, but one is more of a public good to the community than the other. Bonding social capital emphasizes in-group identification--for example, members of the same church or political party feel solidarity with one another due to shared religious or political beliefs. The problem with bonding social capital is that when taken to an extreme, it can create an us-versus-them mentality that can be detrimental to the community as a whole (the Ku Klux Klan would be an example of this). Bridging capital, on the other hand, creates ties across heterogenous groups of people. Take, for instance, the diversity of people who are Vikings fans or who donate to support their local high school’s marching band.

Putnam describes social capital as both a ‘private good’ and a ‘public good,’ writing that

“Some of the benefit from an investment in social capital goes to bystanders, while some of the benefit redounds to the immediate interest of the person making the investment. For example, service clubs, like Rotary or Lions, mobilize local energies to raise scholarships or fight disease at the same time that they provide members with friendships and business connections that pay off personally.” (p. 20)

Minnesota as a state has some of the highest levels of overall civic engagement in the country (Putnam, 292). This is a key factor to understanding why our state overall works well--the networks of mutual trust and reciprocity Minnesotans have built within their communities and the state support our civic infrastructure and create a climate where people assume that their neighbors are acting in good faith and are willing to help one another out.

What does this have to do with rural arts and sustainable outstate communities? A lot, actually. Social capital and the interpersonal ties it creates serves as a kind of glue that holds the community together and creates a collective resilience and ability to deal with shared problems. Social capital ties in directly to the concepts of community capacity and civic capacity. In their evaluation study of the Knight Creative Community Initiative, authors Mark Stern and Susan Seifert outline the following definitions for these concepts:

Community capacity: Community capacity is the interactions of human capital, organizational resources, and social capital existing within a given community that can be leveraged to solve collective problems and improve or maintain the well-being of the community. It may operate through informal social processes and/or organized efforts by individuals, organizations, and social networks that exist among them and between them and the larger systems of which the community is a part.

Basically, does a community have the right people and resources to be able to solve its problems.

Civic capacity: Civic capacity [...][is] a concerted effort to address a major community problem. By “concerted” I mean special efforts to involve multiple sectors of a locality, including both governmental and nongovernmental. The label “civic” refers to actions built around the idea that furthering the well-being of the whole community, not just a particular segment or group. Civic capacity concerns the extent to which different sectors of the community--business, parents, educators, state and local officeholders, nonprofits and others--act in concert around a matter of community-wide import. It involves mobilization--that is, bringing different sectors together but also developing a shared plan of action.

In other words, civic capacity focuses on accomplishments whereas community capacity is more concerned with the potential to solve problems.

The next fifty years are going to prove to be hugely challenging for humanity as we figure out how to transition from the industrial model of a fossil-fuels supported economy and society to one that is sustainable in the long term. It will not be easy, and we will need to be able to work together to weather the storms that are to come. Social capital is a key part of this--in fact, communities with high social capital are demonstrably more able to cope with disaster planning and response than communities with low social capital. Putnam touches on this when he writes that “Mounting evidence suggests that people whose lives are rich in social capital cope better with traumas and fight illness more effectively” (p. 228). Communities with high civic capacity are overall better equipped to deal with responding to problems and even disasters.

A recent article in the New Yorker was focused on the ways that the federal government is attempting to draft plans for how communities can be most prepared to face the existing and future challenges of global climate change. Social capital is explicitly mentioned as a factor that helps community weather the storms of a rapidly-heating climate. In the article, Nicole Lurie, the Obama administration’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response, is quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of social research showing how much better people do in disasters, how much longer they live, when they have good social networks and connections. And we’ve had a pretty big evolution in our thinking, so promoting community resilience is now front and center in our approach.”

Here’s where things get a little more interesting--in Bowling Alone, Putnam specifically names the arts as a way of building social capital that is currently underutilized for this purpose. In the last chapter of the book, he makes the case for the arts being an integral part of building social capital:

Singing together (like bowling together) does not require shared ideology or shared social or ethnic provenance. For this reason, among others, I challenge America’s artists, the leaders and funders of our cultural institutions, as well as ordinary Americans: Let us find ways to ensure that [...] significantly more Americans will participate in (not merely consume or “appreciate”) cultural activities from group dancing to songfests to community theater to rap festivals. Let us discover new ways to use the arts as a vehicle for convening diverse groups of fellow citizens.

Art manifestly matters for its own sake, far beyond the favorable effect it can have on rebuilding American communities. Aesthetic objectives, not merely social ones, are obviously important. That said, art is especially useful in transcending conventional social barriers. Moreover, social capital is often a valuable by-product of cultural activities whose main purpose is purely artistic” (411).

Because participating in and producing arts and culture allows people from a diverse set of backgrounds to connect, it is a particularly useful way of building bridging social capital. And guess what? Bridging social capital is currently the least plentiful kind of social capital in rural Minnesotan communities.

The University of Minnesota Extension service has undertaken a multi-year project to examine various rural communities in the state and their levels of social capital. In each of four case studies conducted (Granite Falls, Waseca, New Prague, and Cook County), the bridging social capital of the community is lower than the bonding social capital. When answering the question “do residents of different social backgrounds trust each other?” none of the communities surveyed had an affirmative response of greater than 50% and bridging trust had the lowest score of the six kinds of social capital measured in every community.

I don’t mean to suggest that that arts have some mystical power to protect our society from the nastier effects of climate change or from the potential difficulties of transitioning to more sustainable economic and cultural models. I do, however, believe that the arts can be used to help build strong and resilient communities that can work together to solve common problems. The task of ensuring that our rural communities are socially and civically equipped to meet the challenges of the future is something that everyone will need to help solve, and artists are particularly well suited to being of use in this area.

Image credit: "The Great Wave off Kanagawa." Katsushika Hokusai, 1826. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

[sputn-iik-blog]

Dork and I #ruralculture 💩😁

[villotale-blog]

Chalo Let’s Go....yuhi chala chal rahi #ruraltourism #rurallifestyle #culturetrip #ruralculture #travel #village #biker #wanderlust #uttarakhand #uttarakhand_travel_diaries #uttarakhandtraveller #uttarakhandtourism https://www.instagram.com/p/B4u2s_Tn5u2/?igshid=1lsqvcpkt4e6u

[tourdefarm]

Enthral in a delightful spice plantation tour and get a chance to explore the various spices with a delicious Goa lunch.

[tourdefarm]

Have you ever tried Kulhad? The Kulhad is not just a symbol of ancient tradition.

[tourdefarm]

Marwar Festival!

Get ready to revel in the glory of the Rajasthani culture….

[tourdefarm]

Are we moving away from our culture? Why agriculture is the best way to conserve it? Find out here...

[tourdefarm]

Monsoon Festivals of Maharashtra!

It’s time to immerse in the local culture. Experience the traditional values of the cultural heritage of rural Maharashtra this monsoon!