Focusing on a community of small family farmers in the Languedoc region of Mediterranean France, Cultivating Dissent shows how rural people struggle against disintegration brought on by the development of capitalism and state modernization imperatives. Lem challenges the image that small farmers tend to be either uninterested in politics or rather conservative in their views.

She also argues against another prevailing image of agrarian people which suggests that the distinctiveness of their regional and local cultures disappears when they become embedded in the commercial world of the market and in modern national culture.

Of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, Cultivating Dissent presents a case in which rural people conform neither to the image of the quiescent and conservative farmer nor to that of the culturally assimilated national subject.