Community Worldview and Rural Systems: A Study of Five Communities in Iowa

Rural geography has gone through profound changes over the decades. Dissatisfaction with traditional emphases on population distribution, landscape features, labor markets, and economic restructuring has led to a recent focus on the construction of meanings associated with rural landscapes and social constructions of rurality. Included in this new turn is a willingness to consider the concept of worldview, or metaphysical frameworks, in geographic study. These new studies, however, often address culture and religious constructs apart from more traditional topics of rural geography. This study of five Iowa farm communities attempts to put such metaphysical frameworks in the context of their everyday settings and connect them to rural agricultural systems. Each of the five communities had a particular vision of society, challenging the monolithic assumptions about rural places. Fundamental to these communities’ worldviews was their range from communitarian to individualistic. Communitarian groups tended toward more diversity in their agricultural systems, articulated alternative agricultural values and perspectives, and had smaller farms. The metaphysical community-level understandings expressed by the five groups in this study shaped spatial patterns, creating places that express the fullness of the intertwined nature of worldviews, legal constructs, relationships with nature, and ethical systems. While each community or place may have a unique configuration of these elements, the processes and forces are similar.