Publications

My scholarly work has dealt almost entirely with rural America, particularly the Upland South and Mississippi. Published articles are posted here.

Photo © Jane Adams
Cache Watershed Planning Project

1999-2003

In 1999, an interdisciplinary team composed of two agricultural economists, four geographers, an environmental lawyer, and myself, and anthropologist and historian, were awarded an NSF/EPA/USDA Water and Watersheds Program, CSREES project number ILLZ-99E-0151 grant, "Understanding the Social Context for Ecological Restoration in multiple-owned Watersheds: The Case of the Cache River, Illinois. I was lead author on two of the several papers resulting from this project.

2005 Watershed planning: Pseudo-democracy and its alternatives -- the Case of the Cache River Watershed, Illinois. Jane Adams, Steven Kraft, J.B. Ruhl, Christopher Lant, Tim Loftus, and Leslie Duram. Agriculture and Human Values, 22:327-338

2005 Class: An Essential Aspect of Watershed Planning. Jane Adams. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. 18:533-556

2003 Proposal for a Model State Watershed Management Act. J.B.Ruhl, Christopher Lant, Tim Loftus, Steven Kraft, Jane Adams, Leslie Duram. Environmental Law. Lewis & Clark Law School. 33(4):929-947.

2004 Ecological Restoration in Multiple-Ownership Watersheds: The Case of the Cache River in Illinois - Social and Economic Issues. Jane Adams, Jeffrey Beaulieu, David Bennett, Leslie Duram, Steven Kraft, Christopher Land, Tim Loftus, John Nicklow, and J.B. Ruhl. Illinois Water Resources Center Special Report No. 27. Pp. 161-75.

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Photo © D. Gorton

The Transformation of Rural Life

In 1983 I began dissertation research in Union County, Illinois. For the next many years I mined the archives, interviewed dozens of people, photographed the area, and collected old photos. I sought to understand the transformation of a hill region in deep Southern Illinois whose economic base had been agriculture, primarily fruit and vegetable production, and timbering. Articles from that research are posted here. In addition, I published three books deriving from this research:

The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

"All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work:" The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman. Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed. editor. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003

Peer-reviewed articles

1986 Farmer Organization and Class Formation. Canadian Journal of Anthropology/RCA 5(1):35-42.

1987 Business Farming and Farm Policy in the 1980s: Further Reflections on the Farm Crisis. Culture and Agriculture 32:1-6.

1988 The Decoupling of Farm and Household: Differential Consequences of Capitalist Development on Southern Illinois and Third World Family Farms. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30(3):453-482.

1990 Creating Community in a Midwestern Village: Fifty Years of the Cobden Peach Festival. Illinois Historical Journal 83:97-108

1991-2 "A Woman's Place Is In the Home": The Ideological Devaluation of Farm Women's Work. Anthropology of Work Review xii(4) and xii(1):2-11.

1992 "How Can a Poor Man Live?" Resistance to Capitalist Development in Southern Illinois, 1870-1890. Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture. 3(1):87-110.

1992 1870s Agrarian Activism in Southern Illinois: Mediator Between Two Eras. Social Science History 16(3):365-400.

1993 Resistance to "Modernity": Southern Illinois Farm Women and the Cult of Domesticity. American Ethnologist 20(1):89-113.

1994 Government Policies and the Changing Structure of Farm Women's Livelihood: A Case from Southern Illinois. in The Economic Anthropology of the State, edited by Elizabeth M. Brumfiel. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

1995 Individualism, Efficiency, and Domesticity: Ideological Aspects of the Exploitation of Farm Families and Farm Women. Agriculture and Human Values 12(4):2-17.

1997 Quiesence Despite Privation: Explaining the Absence of a Farm Laborers' Movement in Southern Illinois. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 39(3):550-571.

1999-2000 Farm Women, Class, and the Limits of Nostalgia. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 92(4):315-338.

2000. Farm Women, Class, and the Limits of Nostalgia. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

2004 The Farm Journal’s Discourse of Farm Women’s Femininity in the Post WWII Decade. Anthropology and Humanism June 2004

2007 Ethnography of Rural North America. Society for the Anthropology of North America. 10(2):1-4.

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Photo © D. Gorton
Miscellaneous Publications & Papers

2002 "Modernity" and U.S. farm women's poultry operations: farm women nourish the industrializing cities 1880-1940. Paper presented at the international conference, The Chicken: Its Biological, Social, Cultural, and Industrial History: From Neolithic Middens to McNuggets. May 17-19, 2002, Yale University, Program in Agrarian Studies. © Jane Adams 2002

1999 "Changing Farm Women's Roles" Feature article for Illinois History Teacher 7(1):2-6.

1999 "Many Sides to Relevance," Anthropology Newsletter 40(4):14.

1996 (with Margarita Bolanos) Aproximacion historico al desarrollo de la antropologia norteamericana en Centroamerica: 1930-1990. In: Carmen Murillo (Editor). Antropología e identidades en Centroamérica. Colección de Libros del Laboratorio de Etnología. Departamento de Antropología. Universidad de Costa Rica.

The Cobden Peach Festival 1938-1987. Booklet prepared for the 50th anniversary of the Cobden Peach Festival. Union County Historical Society.

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