The villagers

the long version

In The Villagers, Critchfield returns to his beloved villages to witness the closing of the urban-rural population gap and to assess the changed values and altered lives global villagers now inherit. Critchfield takes us from a Holocaust memorial ceremony in the woods outside Popowlany village in Poland to a sacred Javanese puppet shadow-play in a Pilangsari village in Indonesia; from planting a rice field in Nae-Chon village in South Korea to harvesting wheat in a Ghungrali village on the Punjab Plain in India. In his travels, Critchfield observes a universal village culture revolving around agriculture, religion, and family that has provided cultural stability for centuries. He finds, however, that this ability to endure has been seriously compromised by recent technological advances and the population drain to the cities, where villagers, over time, lose their common culture. In a bold conclusion, Critchfield warns that this loss of cultural reproduction threatens our own urban culture with disintegration, as shown by ever-increasing levels of crime, hunger, illiteracy, violence, and poverty. To prevent further cultural breakdown, Critchfield argues persuasively, we must re-create the village life among urban dwellers as well as foster policies that sustain our rural communities worldwide.