Rationality, Habitus, and Agricultural Landscapes: Ethnographic Case Studies in Landscape Sociology Leland L. Glenna Leland L. Gienna is a graduate student in the department of rural sociology at the University of Missouri- Columbia. His research interests include ethics, the sociology of agriculture, and environmental sociology. He is currently working on his dissertation in which he is using discourse ethics to critique the environmental and social consequences of the way standards for small grain commodity production are introduced to farmers. ABSTRACT To explain how agricultural landscapes become social constructions of the natural environment, this essay utilizes Jurgen Habermas' s concept of rationality and Pierre Bourdieu 's constructs o file ld and habitus to examine how social relationships shape the way three farmers perceive, alter, and evaluate their land. Intensive interviewing and aerial photographs are used to document the processes through which farmers internalize the primary rationalities of social relationships as a foundation of decision-making regarding water impoundments on their land. One farmer internalizes an instrumental rationality while interacting within relationships with the economic and political system; his landscape changes are meant to improve his ability to extract profit from the land. A second case focuses on afarmer who draws upon familial relationships to provide a substantive counter to the instrumental rationalities of economic relationships; he built a pond to conserve soil. The final case is of a farmer who resists social relationships governed by an instrumental rationality; he built a pond to improve and preserve the beauty of his farm. Introduction Greider and Garkovich (1994) and others (S chnaiberg, 1980; Cosgrove, 1984; Penning-Rowsell and Lowenthal, 1986; Urry, 1990; Giddens, 1994) argue that the environment is a social construction, t As a society, we collectively assign symbols to the objects, creatures, and circumstances that surround us, and we alter it or leave it alone according to the symbols we have assigned to it. A landscape, then, is a reflection of the relationship of a group's beliefs, values, and sym- bols to their environment. However, these scholars do not explain how systems of symbols are spread through- out a society. And they do not explore the way people accept some symbols and reject others. The goal in this article is to develop a theoretical perspective that describes the process by which nature becomes a social construction by explaining how individuals are influ- enced by particular societal relationships as they as- sign meanings to, alter, and evaluate a landscape. As people raise questions about the environmental consequences of conventional agricultural practices, there is a growing need to understand the agricultural landscape and how the society influences the farmers who interact with the landscape (Ward and Munton, 1992). A popular conception, shared by many farmers, the general public, and some scholars, is that each farmer is his other"own boss" (Mooney, 1988; Krebs, 1992), implying that farmers assign meanings and alter their land according to their individual interests, inde- pendent of the social structures and forces to which other workers are subject. Other scholars portray farm- ers' actions as the end result of greater societal trends When they create linear models to show that demo- graphic, social, or economic forces lead to landscape changes but do not explain the active role that farmers play in interpreting these forces, or how these farmers may have the capacity to reflect upon and resist social forces (Ward and Munton, 1992; Rikoon, 1995). What is needed is a perspective that explains how farmers interact within social relationships that may offer dif- ferent, even competing, ways of assigning meaning to and changing a landscape (Rikoon, 1995). This article combines the study of aerial photo- graphs and intensive interviews in three case studies to 21