Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America's Heartland - Paperback

by Kathryn Marie Dudley (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

By the winner of the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology

The farm crisis of the 1980s was the worst economic disaster to strike rural Americans 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.

Author Biography

Kathryn Marie Dudley is assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at Yale University.