It is my pleasure to offer you the first issue of the Newsletter under the new editorship. The team, which includes Brooke Harrington as book review editor, Sebastian Kohl as editorial assistant and Christina Glasmacher who puts it all together, will publish this and the next two issues. We will keep the spirit of the Newsletter, and have a thematic structure of each issue. In the three issues,...

since land reform in iran, rural studies and rural sociology have been concentrated on rural society as economical and political phenomena; therefore mostly traditional systems of production and power were noted in researches. one issue that was not addressed in this academic discourse was rural religion. religion as a core of culture and the main context to reproduce social integration has a k...