Contested Countryside Cultures

Rurality and Socio-cultural Marginalisation

Paul Cloke, Jo Little

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134769544
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines the 'other' side of the countryside, a place also inhabited (and visited) by women, children, teenagers, the elderly, gay men and lesbians, black and ethnic minorities, the unemployed and the poor. These groups have remained largely excluded by both rural policies and the representations of rural culture.
The book charts the experiences of these marginalised groups and sets this exploration within the context of postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial and late feminist analysis. This theoretical framework reveals how notions of the rural have been created to reflect and reinforce divisions amongst those living in the countryside.

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INTRODUCTION: OTHER COUNTRYSIDES?

Paul Cloke and Jo Little

OTHER COUNTRYSIDES?

David Sibley in his excellent book Geographies of Exclusion (1995) quotes from a speech by the Conservative MP Sir Cranley Onslow during the second reading of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill (1994):

Part V [the section of the bill dealing with public order differences] and its provisions to strengthen the position of those people who want law and order to prevail in the countryside are an important departure from precedent. The creation of a new offence of aggravated trespass is a significant step forward that will be widely welcomed in all parts of the country where people have become all too used to disorder, intimidation and violence prevailing and interrupting the lawful pursuits of those who live in the country, value it and want to continue with their countryside sports.

(Sibley 1995:107)

Here, Sibley notes, is one blatant vision of rural life which clearly excludes a host of ‘others’ from a supposed countryside hegemony based on idyllic villages, redcoated huntsmen and a certain conservative Englishness. We wanted to call this book ‘Other Countrysides’ because we believe that representations of rurality and rural life are replete with such devices of exclusion and marginalisation by which mainstream ‘self’ serves to ‘other’ the positioning of all kinds of people in the socio-spatial relations of different countrysides. Instead, our title Contested Countryside Cultures must serve this purpose, and our hope is that ‘contesting’ will signify both a wish to contest any generalised rural other, and the inevitability that different representations of culturally constructed countrysides will be mutually contesting in one way or another.

This book reflects something of a resurgence in rural studies over recent years, not only as it embraces the ‘cultural turn’ which is evident in the broader social sciences, but also as it achieves a wider significance, as the cultures of nature and rurality are (re)discovered to be transcending the supposed boundaries of rural geographical space. In particular, three foci have emerged which have bridged the gulf between rural studies and what have previously been supposed to be more mainstream cultural ideas. First, the focus on landscape has involved a recasting of cultural geography’s traditional interest in landscape and environmental relations. The recognition that environmental, territorial and other geographical myths are of continuing significance in constructing alternative nationalist ideologies (see, for example, Daniels 1993) has served to make interesting connections between countrysides and ideological representations. Second, the focus on the spatiality of nature has implicated countryside spaces in increasing measure. Given the rising interest in the relations and agency of nature and environment, countrysides are often represented as appropriate and obvious spatialisations of nature in which to contextualise wider themes. Third, there has been a focus on ‘hidden’ others which is the principal concern of this book. Here, rural areas have proved to be a magnetic attraction for those seeking to practise cultural geography’s theorisations of difference and otherness. Countrysides are rich in myth, and they offer a scale of territory which somehow provides researchers with a heightened prospect of access to hidden others in appropriate numbers. Here too, then, rural studies have bridged over into wider concerns, with considerable intellectual excitement being generated in the process.

Identification of these foci should not be taken to suggest that the only geographies of rural areas are now these cultural ones. Indeed, we would suggest that these more recent cultural geographies are being overlaid, palimpsestually, onto existing accounts of behavioural and political studies of economic change, and constructionist studies of social change. We do suggest, however, that some of the current excitement and ‘fizz’ of rural studies does draw heavily on these cultural themes. There has been a move from old to new centralities, involving a change to the ‘stuff’ of rural studies, both theoretical and methodological (Cloke 1997). We have no wish at this point to reproduce existing accounts of the changing nature of rural studies (see, for example, Cloke and Goodwin 1993; Marsden et al. 1993; Phillips 1997), but we do wish to comment briefly on the broad trajectory of these changes.

In terms of theoretical ‘stuff’, rural studies has travelled a tortuous and nonlinear journey from a fascination with theorising regularity, via a fascination with a critical theorising of the sameness inherent in the structuring of opportunities and the agency of human decision-making, to the more recent emphasis on theorising differences and significations in geographies of otherness, discourse and cultural symbolism. There are currently some very interesting concurrent spirals in this work, with different strands interweaving not only between different people’s work but also within some people’s work. Thus, attempts to explain rural change are spiralled together with a giving voice to other geographies of rural life and change; relativist attitudes to power relations are spiralled with ideological attitudes to power; and geographies of (so-called) ‘real’ life in rural settings are spiralled with imagined geographies of the rural.

The shift from old to new centralities is also manifest in methodological practices, as rural researchers and scholars have moved from a fetishism with numeric data towards the interpretation of a kaleidoscope of different texts. There is now a more marked fascination with the imaginary texts of novels, paintings, photographs, films, television and radio. In many ways, images and stories about countrysides have proved very alluring, with the very idyll-ised myths about nature and rural life (which are often the focus of deconstruction) drawing researchers to themselves in an obvious, yet ironic, process by which research subjects are chosen. The willingness to embrace the stories told in these imaginary texts is inextricably linked with the methodological fascination with ethnographies. Constructing and interpreting qualitative texts has often involved a facilitation of storytelling by research subjects. Increasingly easy transitions can thus be made between the ‘imagined geographies’ of imaginary text, and the ‘imagined geographies’ of rural people. An integral component of these new rural ethnographies has been the desire to give voice to ‘other’ rural geographies, although there has inevitably been a concurrent concern for the intertextualities of the situated author-knowledges of the self.

This book, then, seeks to present some of the fruits of these new fascinations. However, it does not do so uncritically. ‘Others’ as positioned subject groups or individuals and ‘othering’ as processes by which such positioning occurs are certainly not unproblematic ideas. Therefore, before proceeding to some of the stories that have been assembled regarding rural others, we want to look a little further at the concepts which for some are viewed as reinvention of very conventional concerns for inequality, discrimination and social division, but which for others open new windows onto the social and spatial processes of boundary formation in rural areas whereby some groups and individuals are separated out from society as being different, and often deviant.

OTHER CONCERNS?

The focus on ‘otherness’ in rural studies has been signposted by a recent debate in Journal of Rural Studies. Philo’s review of neglected rural geographies emphasised that most accounts of rural life have viewed the mainstream interconnections between culture and rurality through the lens of typically white, male, middle-class narratives:

there remains a danger of portraying British rural people…as all being ‘Mr Averages’, as being men in employment, earning enough to live, white and probably English, straight and somehow without sexuality, able in body and sound in mind, and devoid of any other quirks of (say) religious belief or political affiliation.

(Philo 1992:200)

Here, Philo not only highlights some ‘forgotten’ items for the rural research agenda but also points to the discursive power by which mythological commonalities of rural culture will often represent an exclusionary device, serving to marginalise individuals and groups of people from a sense of belonging to, and in, the rural, on the grounds of their gender, age, class, sexuality, disability and so on. As rurality is increasingly understood as a phenomenon which is socially and culturally constructed, so the exclusionary qualities within these constructions need to be highlighted. To offer an example which is worked through in Chapter 14, if rural myths of problem-free living preclude recognition of poverty (Cloke 1995; Cloke et al. 1995) or homelessness, then we need to know about it. Or, as discussed in Chapter 11, if rurality is bound up by nationalistic ideas of (white) Englishness then resultant cultural attitudes about who does and who does not belong in the countryside serve as discriminating mechanisms of exclusion. Power is thereby bound up discursively in the very sociocultural constructs which have characterised rurality.

Philo’s debate with Murdoch and Pratt hinges on the degree to which understandings, evaluations and uses of understandings about the discursive power within socio-cultural constructions of the rural can be channelled collectively into an agenda for change. He suggests that rural geography should be made more open to the ‘circumstances and to the voices of “other” people in “other” places: a new geography determined to overcome the neglect of “others”, which has characterised much geographical endeavour to date’ (Philo 1992:194). Murdoch and Pratt’s response is that merely giving voice to ‘others’ does not sufficiently address issues of power in the rural arena:

what follows from this concern to ‘give voice’ are a set of issues which Philo does not really consider… Simply ‘giving voice’ to ‘others’ by no means guarantees that we will uncover the relations which lead to marginalisation or neglect.

(Murdoch and Pratt 1993:422)

Philo’s thesis on power and ‘otherness’ is founded upon a postmodern rejection both of transcendental notions of the problematic, and of a priori theorisations of injustice. He admits to being

unhappy about the assertive modernist impulse present in Bauman (and thus in Murdoch and Pratt) which proceeds with such certainty, which still puts faith in the a priori theoretical specification of how the world and its injustices operate, and which heroically assumes the duty of assessing from without the realities of ‘other lives’ against transcendental yardsticks of ‘right’/‘wrong’, and ‘good’/‘bad’ that may have little relevance for the peoples and places concerned.

(Philo 1993:433)

Murdoch and Pratt’s reply underlines important cuts of difference in the motives which inform and spark the imagination of rural research. In particular, there are important differences between those wishing to allow particular people in particular places to speak for themselves about the power relations in which they are located, and those wishing to incorporate a vision for change into the research process:

Should we not attempt to reveal the ways of the ‘powerful’, exploring the means by which they make and sustain their domination (perhaps in the hope that such knowledge could become a reservoir to be drawn upon by oppositional actors)? Do we not also seek to influence the decisions of the ‘powerful’, such as policy-makers, in the hope that they might be persuaded to produce more effective and just interventions in the world?

(Murdoch and Pratt 1994:85)

Far from being a comfortable concept, then, otherness is a focus of enquiry which can be driven from very different philosophical standpoints and which carries with it very different expectations in relation to the politics of ‘giving voice’ to othered individuals and groups.

A sensitive understanding of ‘others’ suggests an acknowledgement of several complex issues. First, to talk of ‘other’ is to gaze into a mirror of the self. As Shurmer-Smith and Hannam explain, not only do we have to escape the tunnelled vision of our own gaze on the world, but we also have to realise that in so doing we risk the homogenisation of the non-self:

all of us are constantly falling into the trap of assuming that our own view is obvious, no matter how hard we try to think beyond our own egocentricity, ethnocentricity or group solidarities. But as soon as we start to think about people who are not ourselves we lapse into the language of ‘Othering’ and, as one urges oneself to consider ‘Others’ or to see the ‘Other’ side of the question, those who are not like ‘me’ can start to slide into homogeneous mass of difference from ‘me’, essentially the same as each other.

(Shurmer-Smith and Hannam 1994:89)

By this token, the self dominates, and the other comes a very poor second, a tolerated periphery marginalised by individualist politics and often painted out in the canvas we use to impose knowledgeable order onto a hugely variegated world. Recognition of the need to give voice to neglected others therefore requires not only a deconstruction of these knowledge-order frameworks, but also a full recognition of the intertextualities of the self. Our natural tendency is to impose familiarity of language, concept and representation onto other subjects and thus to treat them as what Doel (1994) labels as ‘the other of the same’. The alternative (Doel’s ‘other of other’) is an openness to new categories, unfamiliar interconnections and unknown language concept and representation. As Philo suggests in Chapter 2, the terrain of rural studies has thus far been characterised by the other of the same rather than the other of the other.

If other is inextricably linked to the self, then it is also to be understood in terms of an unrecognised positioning of subjects. Lacan’s (1977) conceptualisation of othering in terms of child development traces a psychoanalytical division between those aspects of the self which are central and those which are peripheral. Just as a child looking in a mirror sees the self that is looking and the self that is looked at, so the more general constitution of self and subject involves a phalanx of meanings which reinforce an automatic positioning of subjects as core or peripheral. These constitutive meanings tend to be implicit such that the positioning of the subject tends to be essentialised rather than the reflexive result of assessing the power structures at work.

A third issue in an understanding of others relates to the domain in which ‘othering’ is experienced. Sibley (1995) shows how otherness is sometimes thought to reside in some separate domain of text or psyche. For example, Deleuze (1990) offers a construction of the other in which the self is experienced as an imaginary being, where places, ideas, sensations which are not directly experienced can achieve an imagined existence. Following Mead (1934) however, Sibley prefers an interpretation of the relationship between the self and the other which is fully located in the social and material world. Thus the boundaries between the self and the other may be formed through a series of cultural representations of people, positionings and objects, but are embedded in social and often spatial contexts.

Some of these complexities are evident in the practising of research into ideas of otherness in specific circumstances. Most contemporary studies of otherness draw in some degree on the accounts of Orientalism by Said (1978, 1986, 1993). Here, the relationship between the Orient and the Occident is traced to a created nexus of theory and practice in which the discursive formation of the Orient as ‘other’ rests on a complex hegemony of domination which has been invested in both materially and culturally by the colonial powers of the West. Said’s work has been seminal in its critical focus on the discursive constitution of colonialism which deploys a powerful criticism of the self, and an equally powerful appreciation of other discourses of the Orient. As Bernstein (1992) has stated in relation to Derrida’s practices of deconstruction, the power of this work lies in ‘an uncanny ability to show us that at the heart of what we take to be familiar, native, at home—where we think we can find our center—lurk (is concealed and repressed) what is unfamiliar, strange and uncanny’ (p. 174). There is certainly a sense in which the familiar, natural belonging so often associated with the home and hearth of rurality has lurking within it relations and positionings which are unfamiliar, strange and literally uncanny. It might also be suggested that rurality is subject to forms of internal colonialisation not unlike those described by Said, in that the discursive formation of the rural rests on a complex hegemony of domination which both materially and culturally constitutes an acceptance and belonging for some, and a marginalisation and exclusion for others. What is clear, is that the complexities of rural selves and rural others will continue to be a key arena in the appreciation of the interrelations of socially and culturally constructed ruralities.

As with all such prominent contributions, Said’s studies have themselves attracted considerable criticism from those wishing to practise research into ideas of otherness. For example, Lewis (1993) and Rocher (1993) have suggested that Said’s concept of Orientalism is both too inclusive, and not inclusive enough. As Jewitt (1995) explains, the work is ‘too inclusive’ because it lumps together very different Anglo-French commentaries on the Orient, and thereb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Other Countrysides?
• 2 Of Other Rurals?
• 3 From the Power of Topography to the Topography of Power
• 4 Constrasting Roles for the Post-Productivist Countryside
• 5 Anti-Idyll
• 6 Making Space
• 7 Rurality and ‘Cultures of Womanhood’
• 8 Employment Marginality and Women’s Self-Identity
• 9 Little Figures, Big Shadows
• 10 Contesting Later Life
• 11 Ethnicity and the Rural Environment
• 12 Endangering the Sacred
• 13 ‘I Bought my first Saw with my Maternity Benefit’
• 14 Poor Country
• 15 Conclusion