Question

Illustrate a traditional rural community by explaining its basic features.

Answer 1

Answer:

Rural Communities

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Rural Community: Traditional Features of Rural Communities!

A rural community is marked primarily by a small, sparsely settled, relatively homogeneous population that engages primarily in agriculture (although there are exceptions to this rule, especially in industrial societies). The traditional rural community tended to be a folk society.

Robert Redfield (1941) describes the folk society as “a society, which is small, isolated, non-literate and homogenous with a strong sense of group solidarity……….. Behaviour is traditional, sponta­neous, uncritical and personal; there is no legislation or habit of experiment and reflection for intellectual ends.

Explanation:

Traditional features of rural communities:

It would be a mistake to fit all rural communities into one set of image because all rural communities are not alike. Yet certain features have been found common to nearly all kinds of rural communities.

These are:

1. Rural society was based predominantly on agriculture. Land was the basic means of subsistence. Nearly all rural population was involved in agricultural way of life directly or indirectly. A substantial part of their income was drawn from agriculture. All faced common problems, performed common tasks and shared common helplessness before the awesome natural calamities (floods, droughts etc.), which man cannot control.

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2. The rural way of life used to be quite different from urban life. Thrift was an honoured value and conspicuous consumption was seen as an urban vice. A farmer’s status was measured by his lands, his herds, his crops and the inheritance he could pass on to his children.

Distrust of city people and disapproval of urban life was a predictable rural attitude. Rural people used to be suspicious of intelligentality and book learning. Their life used to be simple without any fun and fair in the modem sense of the term. They used to have deep faith in religion and duties.

3. The rural social system was marked with minimum of social differentiation and social stratification. It was mostly based on land and property relations. These relations determined the share of various socio-economic groups and the distribution of agricultural wealth among the various sections of the rural population.

4. There was predominance of primary groups. On one hand, these groups were important in the development of the personality (socialisation) and ort the other hand they used to exercise primary control over the lives of the rural people.

Related Articles:

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