How Much for a Dozen Eggs: Indebtedness and Rural Resilience

Rural community resilience is, in part, impacted by social bonds and networks that exist within the community. It is the existence of these bonds that provides the community with the ability, or resilience, to persevere through periods of struggle. The social bonds are upheld by different forms of social contracts; some are transactional, some are relational, and some are different altogether. These forms of indebtedness create a social structure that impacts the resiliency of the rural communities, which we examine through conceptual and philosophical analysis. As rural communities face shifting demographic and economic systems, understanding how their ability to adapt and remain resilient is increasingly important. There are factors acting on these communities that have implications for the social bonds and resilience of the communities. For example, recreational tourists that engage with rural communities operate on a different social contract than the ones existing within the communities themselves. This research takes a philosophical approach to conceptualize the influence of transitory actors (e.g., recreational tourists) and the structured disincentives to form the same indebted relations that exist in the communities. The aim is to better understand the true effect that indebtedness, both transactional and relational, has on rural community resilience.