ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses post-traditional rurality with reference to the colonisation of rural areas in Western and Eastern Europe by leisure and producing classes. The notion of 'post-traditional rurality' is at present a vague idea based on the observation that agriculture is no longer the core activity of the rural economy and its institutions no longer guide the use of natural resources in the countryside. A post-traditional rural society emerges in a process of 'detraditionalisation' that refers in unclear ways to modernisation in the dominant urban-industrial society and to the deficient sociological reflection of perceiving traditions as what is to be overcome through modernisation. East Germany may be counted among Eastern European agricultural systems even before the East/West schism of the cold war period. Politically, the modernisation of Russian agriculture began with the abolition of feudal serfdom in 1861 which brought into existence a peasant class of agricultural producers, but not however the Western type of family farming.
