Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Melnikova and Mikhail Lazarevich Lurie have co-edited the volume "The Village as a Value: Ideologies and Practices of the New Rurality" (compiled and edited by E. Melnikova, P. Kupriyanov, M. Lurie). The book has been published by Common Place with support from the Khamovniki Foundation. The collection is dedicated to exploring the concept of the "new rurality."
The book examines the village as a value—both symbolic and entirely material. The book investigates how and why this concept inevitably finds itself at the center of contradictory processes and constructs, where models of conservatism and modernization, utopian salvation and technological advancement, intersect.
The articles gathered in this anthology are written by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, each examining the perception of the rural from different perspectives. These various facets of the new rural reality reflect the mosaic nature of that very perception. By attempting to move the discussion of the village beyond the simple rural-urban dichotomy, the authors pose fundamental questions about the place it occupies in the life of modern people—perhaps even for those who have never lived in a village themselves.