ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the rural transformations, particularly with respect to the changing topics of rural-based research conducted by social scientists. Into the mid-twentieth century, analysis of rural economics tended to focus on village-level subsistence agriculture and smallholder cash-cropping. Anthropologists and sociologists produced numerous monographs on kinship-oriented agrarian production, small-scale rural industries, rural development and agrarian transitions to capitalism. Insofar as political analysis has had much to say about rural politics, it has been with respect to the role of rural voters and constituencies in terms of national, electoral politics. While the rural-biased gerrymandering of parliamentary constituencies has long been pointed out, the issue has become more prominent in the wake of the hotly contested twelfth and thirteenth general elections. Problematically, however, in the absence of sophisticated or in-depth on-the-ground research into the motivations or dynamics of rural voting patterns, such analysis remains largely speculative and laced with no small amount of urbanite contempt for rural citizens.
