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Rural sociology is a field of sociology traditionally associated with the study of social structure and conflict in rural areas. It is an active academic field in much of the world, originating in the United States in the 1910s with close ties to the national Department of Agriculture and land-grant university colleges of agriculture.
Rural American history is the history from colonial times to the present of rural American society, economy, and politics. [1]According to Robert P. Swierenga, "Rural history centers on the lifestyle and activities of farmers and their family patterns, farming practices, social structures, political ties, and community institutions."
The ability of farmers to feed large numbers of people whose activities have nothing to do with material production was the crucial factor in the rise of surplus, specialization, advanced technology, hierarchical social structures, inequality, and standing armies. Agrarian societies thus support the emergence of a more complex social structure.
Institutional structure: "social structure is seen as comprising those cultural or normative patterns that define the expectations of [sic] agents hold about each other's behaviour and that organize their enduring relations with each other."
The sociology of culture is an older concept, and considers some topics and objects as more or less "cultural" than others. By way of contrast, Jeffrey C. Alexander introduced the term cultural sociology, an approach that sees all, or most, social phenomena as inherently cultural at some level. [3]
Basic groups: The smallest possible social group with a defined number of people (i.e. greater than 1)—often associated with family building: Dyad : Will be a group of two people. Social interaction in a dyad is typically more intense than in larger groups as neither member shares the other's attention with anyone else.
In this context, 'structure' does not refer to 'social structure', but to the semiotic understanding of human culture as a system of signs. One may delineate four central tenets of structuralism: [100] Structure is what determines the structure of a whole. Structuralists believe that every system has a structure.
And, social or community factors in socialization may be studied in the context of the transmission of cultural factors by studying the social uniformity (or lack thereof) in the transmitted culture. Cultural systems are used (and inform society) both through idea systems and the structuring of social systems. To quote Archer in this regard: