A play for rurality – Modernization versus local autonomy

Sociologia Ruralis, 1999

Sociological theorizing about 'late' (or 'reflexive') modernity contains many implications for contemporary rurality, but these are largely implicit and unexplored. We are told, for example, that late modern societies are structured around consumption rather than production interests; that their economies are 'service' or 'post-industrial' or 'knowledge based' in form; that relations to knowledge, rather than to material resources, are the key to social organization and conflict; that typical late modern individuals are urban 'flaneurs' who appropriate and construct their world via a 'tourist gaze'; that collective action is focussed on the search for new identities and discourses which far transcend the old divisions of 'class' and 'rural-urban.' The XVIIIth Congress of the ESRS will take up such characterizations and explore them explicitly: what do they suggest about the possibility of being rural and the role of rurality in late modernity? Can a focus on rural processes challenge or enrich such societal models? How is rurality (or, how are ruralities) structured and reconstructed in the social movements and institutions of late modern civil society? Is there a single European state project for the rural, which tries to incorporate East and West, North and South, core and periphery, and what are its impacts on different gender, generational, occupational, regional etc. rural groups? What form can a late modern food production system take, and what interests and concerns are involved in its shaping? Is human society increasingly independent of nature, or is a growing consciousness of environmental risk forcing a new realization of the importance of natural resources and how their use is organized? Thus we hope not only to encourage the continuing 'mainstreaming' of rural sociology, but also the 'ruralization' of mainstream sociological theorizing.

Sociologia Ruralis, 2010

Against the current moment of rural doubt, we argue that the material, symbolic and relational practices of the rural continue to be articulate aspects of our politics. We term the material practices 'rural power' and the symbolic practices 'the power of the rural'. The relational practices we term 'rural constituencies' when relations are bounded materially and 'constituencies of the rural' when they are bounded symbolically. We apply this framework to a critique of contemporary theory, especially mobilities research, which, we argue, typically speaks with a passive rural voice. We argue for recognising the active rural voice in the mobilisation and stabilisation of the rural.s oru_512 205..224 T he rural still causes trouble. In our supposedly modern and urban age, when we have grown accustomed to thinking of the rural as something old and tired, too exhausted and passive to resist and get out of the way of cities and city people, we still find repeated reminders of the alertness and vigour of rural places, ideas and lives. These reminders are not necessarily cause for romantic celebration. Afghanistan, Waziristan and Sudan nettle the world, showing us the continued stark military challenge of the rural. Everyone is talking about food again, worried about its dearth, its excess and its quality and lack thereof. Diseases from swine flu to avian flu to West Nile virus bring the rural into the streets of everyone's concerns. People move from countryside to city, from city to countryside, and from countryside to countryside and the results are not always conflict free. The rural also pleases us, soothing our worries through book and film and song, and rewarding our ambitions through walks and weeding and woodcutting. In all these ways and more, the rural remains an active feature of our lives, continually confronting us and our politics materially, symbolically and relationally. And yet many writers from many quarters have argued that the rural is declining in consequence. Others have objected to or qualified such a take on the rural. This is an old and seemingly endless debate, one that more than a few scholars are weary of,

Geoforum, 2009

There is a widespread assumption that associates the rural with the unchanged and unchangeable. However, what constitutes 'the rural' is under constant transformation. In rural Europe a rapid process of social recomposition and economic restructuring is taking place causing increasing social complexity and new disputes about what is and should become the rural. This is more apparent in mountain areas, being locations that are particularly vulnerable to change. This situation is reflected in the growing diversity of discourses of rurality, which struggle to impose their particular views and interests on others. Nevertheless, little attention is paid in understanding the multiplicity of representations and interests held by rural dwellers about their own world. This paper aims to explore the diversity of perceptions and perspectives held by the inhabitants of the county of El Pallars Sobirà, in the Catalan Pyrenees. The material provided by semi-structured interviews given to local residents has been analysed through the Q methodology. As a result, four discourses of rurality have been identified, namely: the agriculturalist, entrepreneurial, conservationist and endogenous development. Finally, we argue that an underlying social structure, derived from the experiences of local dwellers of the rural population movements and the tertiarisation of local economies, exists behind the organisation of the debate on the rural. This leads us to assume that not only perceptions, but also socioeconomic reorganisations are in dispute.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Rurality is that which makes somewhere, someone, or something rural. With this statement, consensus largely ends. Consequently, this article introduces the status of rurality to the reader from four different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary, perspectives. First, it indicates why many authors have suggested that rurality no longer remains a useful or significant category within social science, notwithstanding its widespread popular resilience. Second, it returns to the challenge posed by the latter resilience to argue that this cannot be dismissed so easily. Indeed, it is through popular representations that rurality retains much ontological distinctiveness. Moreover, the suggestion, from Baudrillard, of ‘map preceding territory’ (rather than vice versa) suggests, third, a rurality much less spatially confined than immediately expected, a state some researchers have called post-rurality. Complicating things still further, adding a nonrepresentational affective aspect leads, fourth, to the proposal that there may still be something in human existential experiences of and engagements with rurality that also support retaining the term as a valid social scientific concept. The article concludes with a model of the rural than going some way to reconciling these perspectives, while accepting that rurality today remains inherently plural, hybrid, and still partly ‘undiscovered’.

Landscape Research, 2019

2000

Journal of Rural Studies, 1998

This paper reviews the development of rural social geography. It argues that there has been a restructuring in the dominant social imagination expressed within rural social geography away from a 'restricted social imagination' which shied away from considering phenomena which were immaterial and clearly politicized. The prevalence of this social imagination within geographical studies of rural settlement, population change, access to resources and services and rural communal life is highlighted. It is argued that there have been two important directions of critique of this social geography. First, the politicization of rural social geography through Marxism is discussed with particular reference being paid to the analysis of class relations in the countryside. Second, the rise of postmodernism and the cultural turn of rural geography is discussed. Attention is drawn to the explicit politicization of this social geography and the emphasis placed within it on the immaterial. The paper outlines some of the key arguments and texts of these two lines of restructuring, and also how some earlier work trespassed beyond the dominant restrictions placed on social imaginations of the rural. The paper ends by raising the issue of whether the immaterial and the politicized have been reconciled together within the current work of rural social geographers.

Rural Restructuring. Global processes and their …, 1990

When analysing social change, it is always important to distinguish between terrain, map and compass -that is, between object studied, models constructed, and analytical tools employed. The distinction is particularly crucial in the case of rural change, where tools and model are themselves the products of their own history. Rural sociology, as a discipline, developed on the (more or less explicit) postulate that in modern (industrial) societies there was a significant division of the social domain into two relatively independent worlds, rural and urban. The approach could be supported by pointing to the obvious fact that the two worlds did indeed function differently, which could be ascribed, for instance, to the relative economic autarky of rural societies ; to specific mechanisms in the political field ; or to cultural differences. These factors were reflected in the very different reproduction mechanisms for city and country, with family, village and land looming very large in the latter.not that rural societies had ever been independent or urban societies -The raison d'_tre of rural sociology was not that rural societies were independent of urban societies, but that they displayed a relative autonomy, albeit subject to external pressure.

2022

Abstract -- Considerations of lay discourses of the rural -- people's everyday interpretations of rural places and ideas of the rural -- have become increasingly evident in some key articles addressing the theory and practice of academic rural studies. A major element of the retheorization of rural studies, which itself is set within the broader contexts of recent developments in social theory, considerations of lay discourses have concerned themselves with the nature and implications of everyday interpretations and constructions of the rural, and, in some cases, how academic discourses are complexly bound up with such processes. This paper sets out to review some of the key examples of how and why lay discourses are being used in academic approaches to the rural, and how some of these are also addressing the key question of the problematic relationship between lay and academic discourses. It then aims to develop these initiatives, firstly, by suggesting some clarification of what lay discourse is; how other discourses, particularly popular and professional, should be identified; and why close attention should be paid to how they link up. Secondly, drawing on qualitative case study material gathered from an academic incursion into lay discourses of a small village in south west England, it is suggested that the very different nature of lay discourses has not been fully appreciated, and this has led to only partial success in some academic attempts to assimilate them into new approaches to rural studies, particularly in the ongoing debate about definitions of the rural. It is shown that lay discourses of the rural, such as they are, can be expected to be both spatially and conceptually complex and incoherent to an extent that will make it difficult for them to be incorporated into established (modern) academic rural approaches and thus leads to conclusions that in part support Murdoch and Pratt's (1993) concept of the 'postrural'.