Rural society, society in which there is a low ratio of inhabitants to open land and in which the most important economic activities are the production of foodstuffs, fibres, and raw materials. Such areas are difficult to define with greater precision, for, although in nonindustrialized nations the transition from city to countryside is usually abrupt, it is gradual in industrialized societies, making it difficult to pinpoint the boundaries of rural places. A second, related problem is that governments do not use the same statistical criteria for rural and urban populations; in Japan, for instance, any cluster of fewer than 30,000 people is considered rural, whereas in Albania a group of more than 400 inhabitants is regarded as an urban population.
In the past, rural societies were typified by their adherence to farming as a way of life. Such cultures were not goal- or achievement-oriented; their members sought subsistence, not surplus. Marked by a high regard for intimacy and traditional values, farming communities were often regulated by kinship customs and ritual, and, in particular, the ownership and care of productive land was strictly guarded by tradition. Collectively, these characteristics are often designated by the term gemeinschaft, an expression introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Tönnies described the contrasting nature of urban life with the term gesellschaft, a state characterized by impersonal bureaucracy, rationalized specialization, and mechanization. Gesellschaft is typically associated with modern industry, where people are employees who perform specific, goal-oriented functions in a rational and efficient, as opposed to a traditional and organic, manner. The two terms are sometimes translated as “community” and “society.” Rural inhabitants work with people they know well and are accustomed to relationships of great intimacy and small scale, whereas urban dwellers know each other in narrow, segmented ways that have little to do with family or friendship. According to Tönnies and subsequent sociologists, all societies are characterized by mixtures of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft; the United States, where even agriculture is almost completely mechanized, is closer to the gesellschaft end of the spectrum, whereas rural India, which is still heavily guided by tradition, is an example of gemeinschaft.
Historically, farming societies have had higher birthrates than urban societies; their populations have also tended to be younger, to live in larger families, and to include slightly greater percentages of males. These phenomena were related: it was to a farmer’s advantage to have many offspring, especially males, who could work in the fields as children and then would support their parents as they grew older. Generally, however, as the children became older, there was not enough productive land for all of them to support their own families, and some would migrate to the cities. In this way, cities have historically absorbed the excess population of the countryside, thus tending to become filled with comparatively older people living in smaller families. With the advent of improved health care in this century, infant mortality rates fell, and the increased number of surviving offspring has swelled the number of migrants to the cities.
In the industrialized nations the countryside has sometimes been virtually depopulated, to the point that, for example, in 1970 only 6.7 percent of the employed persons in the United States were in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. The result has been a global acceleration of the process of urbanization, which has in turn created vast slums in many urban centres. To halt or reverse this process, agricultural-development specialists have suggested methods of increasing productivity without moving large numbers of farmworkers off the land. Among their recommendations are improvements in soil technology and changes in irrigation, seed stocks, and drainage; they counsel against further large-scale mechanization. The habit of the developed nations to apply their own practices of agriculture to situations where they might not be ultimately beneficial has been yielding to the belief that appropriate technologies must be developed for each area.