The Village and Its Discontents: Meaning and Criticism in Late Modernity is a hopeful collection of essays about villages in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and across the world. The "village" is an idea, a construct, and a way of organising society. Villages constitute the basic unit of analyses in the arts, humanities and the social sciences. For decades, village level studies have been conducted across a wide range of academic disciplines such as archaeology, real-estate management, architecture, computer science, medicine, pharmacy and pharmacology. Through the collection of essays presented, the contributors hope to generate interest in studying villages, to understand the meanings that attach themselves to the concept of the village, and to gain greater theoretical insights into multidisciplinary knowledge and analyses in today's highly developed global societ