Rural Identities

Ethnicity and Community in the Contemporary English Countryside

Sarah Neal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367603090
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317060819
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Rural Identities investigates and engages with the ways in which ideas of the English countryside and rural nature, are enrolled into and fashion the narratives of Englishness. At the heart of the book is an examination of the formations of rural social relations, where the processes and practices through which rural attachments and senses of rural belonging, are established and maintained. Drawing on a substantial research project Rural Identities presents important new empirical material in its analysis of why the concepts of community and ethnicity are relevant to understanding the contested status of the English countryside. In doing so, it outlines the exclusionary limitations and inclusionary possibilities of the relational discourses of rurality and nation. The rich empirical material and the conceptual apparatus employed in this volume render it appealing to policy makers as well as to scholars of sociology, geography, qualitative research methods and race and ethnicity studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I want to begin with two narrations.

The first comes from a colleague of mine, Esra, at the Open University. I was talking to her about writing this book and explaining how I had been thinking a lot about the natural and the social and the ways in which these connected to my research and the project. As we were talking Esra, who had migrated from Turkey to Germany with her family when she was a little girl, told me how at her first school in Germany the class had been set a nature quiz – naming native trees and flowers. It is the sort of quiz many of us may recall doing at school. I have clear memories of trying to carefully trace around leaves and writing the names of trees next to these efforts. Esra told me about how difficult she found the naming of German plants and how she only got very low marks and how this experience emphasised her ‘newness’ to the nation. And while she is sure now that there were other children in the class who also did badly in the quiz, for Esra her struggle to successfully identify German trees and plants – German nature – was felt as a ‘jolt’ moment, a moment in which she experienced her migrant status and her non-belonging to the nation.

The second comes from the murder of the South London teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the witness statements of Conor and Louise Taaffe who were leaving their church near the bus stop immediately after the attack on Stephen. Although initially frightened they went to Stephen’s aid and realising how badly he was injured held him and tried to comfort him telling him how much he was loved by his family and that help was on its way. When they returned to their home afterwards they had Stephen’s blood on their hands. They washed their hands into a container and went into their garden and carefully poured the water mixed with blood onto a rose bush they had. Reading or hearing this witness account is poignant. The description of this instinctive and ceremonial ‘small act’ of going to the rose bush is deeply moving and it seems to capture the proximity of nature to social behaviours and the ways in which nature and non-human things are deeply entangled within human emotions – not least those emotions that anyone hearing of this witness account feel themselves.

These very different narrations both open up some of the questions and the puzzles with which this book engages:

• What happens to the concepts with which this book is concerned – the countryside, ethnicity, community (and their relationality) – if they are viewed through a notion of the convergence between the categories ‘the natural’ and ‘the social’?

• To what extent does rural nature exclude or become mobilised in order to deny social inclusion?

• Conversely to what extent can nature transcend social divisions and open up routes of belonging and attachment?

• How do people use and interact with the non-human in intimate and emotional discourses and practices?

Why Countryside, Community and Ethnicity?

In many ways I began worrying at these questions and puzzles in earlier work (see for example Neal, 2002; Neal and Walters, 2005, 2006, 2007; Neal and Agyeman, 2006) in which I examined and challenged the ways in which rural landscapes become sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly whitened geographical territories sustaining particular fantasies of nation. Julian Agyeman and I concluded our edited collection by arguing for what we called more ‘broken narratives of the rural’. By this we meant that the turbulence of the countryside needed to be accounted for – that the countryside needed to be more widely acknowledged as an uncertain landscape, as a site of social struggle and cultural and economic heterogeneity and, directly related to this heterogeneity, as an unsettled and in flux space which has very different meanings attached to it beyond those of ‘rural idyll’ and a ‘rural crisis’; as a space in which the idea of a black and minority ethnic presence and engagement is unremarkable and normative and a black and minority ethnic rural absence remarkable and strange. In short Julian and I concurred with a number of rural scholars (Cloke and Little, 1997, Sibley, 1995; Halfacree, 1997; 2007) when we argued for richer, multiple narratives of rurality in contemporary Britain (2006: 242).

Since this advocation for broken narratives of rurality there has been a little flurry of books (for example, Benson, 2005; Askwith, 2007; Kingsnorth, 2007) and media debate (for example The Independent, 9 September 2005; 31 March 2008) about the meaning of Englishness and the state of the English rural in particular. At the heart of these books and media deliberations are expressions of anxiety as to a vanishing countryside and with it a vanishing Englishness. While this anxiety is by no means a new one – as Raymond Williams (1979) observed three decades ago the worry of a golden rurality that has, or is about to irrevocably disappear is a constant presence (see also Neal and Agyeman, 2006) – the timing and the cluster of voices raised around this is noteworthy for a number of reasons. These debates come at a time when, intensified by the continual background and not so background white noise of a ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ (Lewis and Neal, 2005; McLaughlin and Neal, 2007) and by the partial and (potentially full) devolution of Wales and Scotland, Britishness and Englishness and their dominant political position and meanings are increasingly uncertain and fragile. That the worries about the countryside should be written into these anxieties about nation reinforce the long relation between countryside and country. In other words the countryside is a mirror. That the countryside should itself be viewed as being in crisis is a reflection of the (seeming) crisis of English identity.

This co-joined relationship captured in Roger Askwith’s (2007) book revealingly titled The Lost Village: In Search of a Forgotten Rural England. Askwith begins by returning home to the Northamptonshire village where he lives after a year being abroad. Sitting at an Remembrance Day service in the village church he recalls lines from Philip Larkin ‘I thought it would last my time/The sense that, beyond town,/There would always be fields and farms,/Where the village louts could climb/Such trees as were not cut down.’ Askwith then remembers the further lines from the same poem ‘For the first time I feel somehow/That it isn’t going to last…’ and he goes on to explain how,

the truth of Larkin’s words had suddenly struck me. It – this village – wasn’t going to last […] the actual village – that miniature, self-contained eco system in which past and present were all tangled up, and people, buildings and vegetation shared on reasonably coherent collective story – that village had passed away long ago […] Perhaps I had assumed that, somewhere in the background of my life there would always be, not just one village, but a whole network of many thousand villages, each with its own story and its own local families and its own unique landscape and memories and its own peculiar way of saying and doing things. In short I had imagined a rural England and had blithely gone through life (eagerly embracing the modern wherever I found it) under the impression that it would always be there, like a great rock, with the past clinging to it like lichen. Now when I turned to look at it, it was gone. (2007: 6–7. Emphasis added)

Real England (2007) is Paul Kingsnorth’s indictment of contemporary England and what he sees as the erosion of English culture and identity by bland corporatism and the endless advance of global market forces. While explaining that he comes ‘from a family with an urban history’ and has ‘never been part of the land’ (2007: 161) Kingsnorth, like Roger Asquith and Roger Scruton (2000) a little earlier, argues that there is a loss of rural culture in England and that he ‘can feel its heartbreaking power’. For example, in one of the chapters in his book Kingsnorth describes spending time with various local people in three villages in England. Walking with his guide in Barton, Cambridgeshire through fields and along streams looking for butterflies and bee orchids and seeing poppies, yellow rattles, hares and fox cubs Kingsnorth comments,

it is genuinely hard for someone of my generation to imagine that much of the English countryside was like this just fifty years ago. I almost wish I hadn’t seen it. If you don’t know what you’ve lost, it doesn’t hurt. But I’m glad I wasn’t around to se the loss of places like this on a national scale. It would have been hard to take. As a nation our mental image of rural England is still composed of places like this. Hay meadows, gambolling lambs, poppy fields, spinneys. A curious, almost childlike country landscape: part Beatrix Potter, part Rupert Bear. We don’t know or don’t want to know how broken it is. (Ibid.: 157. Emphasis added)

I have quoted at some length from The Lost Village and Real England because they both capture an anxious melancholy about social change. They speak of things vanishing or broken and in doing so both Askwith and Kingsnorth invoke the constant proximity of rural-nation relation. Within this argument the changing, endangered countryside is always, and at the same time, the changing, endangered nation. In this way I would suggest that debates and deliberations about the countryside are inevitably debates and deliberations about ethnicity and identity. This is a theme that runs through this book.

This is not to deny that the social changes in rural areas that Askwith, Kingsnorth, Scruton and others are commenting on are not and have not taken place. The fundamental shifts in agricultural production that have taken place and impacted on the countryside in England and the wider UK are starkly apparent in even the briefest glances at the statistics. For example Benson (2005: 228–9) notes that ‘in 1939 there were 500,000 farms in Britain…the majority of these were small mixed units of less than 50 acres…There are now 191,000 farms left and of those 19,000 account for more than 50 per cent of national output. It is estimated that three out of four jobs in British agriculture have been lost since 1945.’ The extent to which the countryside has undergone systematic processes of economic restructuring is reflected in the shift from the 1950s when ‘over a third (34.6 per cent) of the “rural population” of Britain was estimated to be dependent in agriculture for its income. By 1970 the proportion had fallen to 24.3 per cent, by 1990 to 19.6 per cent and by 2000 to 16.8 per cent’ (Woods, 2005: 15). The most recent figures show a continued and rapid decline in the agricultural base of rural economies – according to the Commission for Rural Communities (2008: 2) ‘agriculture accounts for no more than 2.8% of employment in rural areas’.

There is of course a recursiveness to these changes of which these economic shifts are an interactive part. Counter urbanisation and the flow of urban to rural migrants reflects, in part, imagined rural idylls and to be in those and imagined intact communities and the security of those. Of course counter urbanisation impacts on and contributes to changing those very rural spaces and communities that it simultaneously seeks out. So this book does not deny that the countryside is undergoing processes of change and restructuring. Rather it argues that the focus on the countryside and the shifts within it have fed into the establishment of two increasingly hegemonic but seemingly completely contradictory rural imaginings – one of idyll and one of crisis. What setting out the key features of each version of the countryside does is emphasise their connectedness rather than their separateness. While the idyll and crisis positions would appear to work in parallel to the other they of continually bump into, collide with and co-constitute each other. It is notions of community and ethnic identity that in particular work as the socially based drivers in these co-joined discourses but these are also bound by and interact with notions of nature. At one level this is a very obvious point to make. After all the spatial context and scrutinised subject is ‘the social relations of the countryside’ and the countryside is all about real and imagined forms of ‘rural nature’. But surprisingly, in many of the debates about rural spaces, their contestations and the processes and practices of social inclusion and exclusion, rural nature itself is often uncommented on, taken as a given or seems like the hovering, slightly awkward, forgotten guest at the party (see Bell and Newby, 1979; Cohen, 1982; Milbourne, 1994; Chakraborti and Garland, 2004 for example). This splitting between the social and non-human worlds produces a the focus on the former with the latter providing the mere context in which the dramas of the social are carried out and can be read as reflective of modernist tendencies to discount, diminish, manage and control nature. In his examination of the relationship between emotions, geography and nature Mark Smith quotes Luc Ferry’s (1995: xvi) assertion that ‘nature is a dead letter for us. Literally it no longer speaks to us for we have long ceased – at least since Descartes – to attribute a soul to it or believe it inhabited by occult forces’. Smith counters ‘contra Ferry, I will argue, nature is a dead-letter only to those “moderns” who have lost the ability to listen to and interpret the non-human world’ (2005: 222).

Table 1.1 Two versions of the contemporary English countryside

What the Askwith and Kingsnorth texts do is engage with rural nature. It may be a rather instrumental engagement when they incorporate the non-human and rural nature directly into their worries about all that is being lost and damaged within their rural/national crisis discourse but nevertheless nature has a clear presence. Using the narratives I began with in this chapter is also an attempt to emphasise how the non-human and rural nature both write and get written into experiences of exclusion; of empathy and of care for others. What seems important to me is to ask so what happens when nature very directly writes and gets written into examinations of the countryside, of community, of ethnicity and of identity? Of concern is how and at what moments rural nature is enrolled, drawn on and invested in social meaning making and everyday social practices.

In many ways I follow here in the steps of Michael Bell (1993) and his ethnographic study of the Hampshire village of Childerley in the late 1980s. What is of concern to Bell is the what he calls the ‘social experience of nature’ (ibid.: 4) and the ways in which the inhabitants of Childerley constructed their social identities as ‘country people’through nature (ibid.: 6). In the time he spent living in the village and talking to residents it was rural nature that was the theme and topic that was continually returned to and discussed and the filter through which social relations were analysed and the agonistic dimensions of these reconciled (see Chapters 3 and 6). In the study that I undertook with Sue Walters – the study with which this book engages – we found very similar entanglements of the social and the natural at work in terms of allowing the people we spoke to, to make sense of the local, national and global worlds in which they lived their lives. This brought to mind the way in which Richard Mabey argues in Nature Cure that ‘we constantly refer back to the natural world to try and discover who we are. Nature is the most potent source of metaphors to describe and explain our behaviour and feelings’ (2006: 19). Mabey also cites Ted Hughes’ poem The Swifts and its lines ‘The swifts are back – they’ve made it again’ as symbols that humans use for reassurance – not only of the return of summer but more profoundly, that ‘the globe’s still working’ (ibid.: Hughes, 1982: 146–7). The social use and interaction with rural nature in relation to the countryside, to identity formations around both ethnicity and community began to be of increasing intrigue to me during the ‘doing of’ the research project on which much of this book is based. Letting rural nature in – into my attempts to think about the findings from the project and to working out what those findings offered in relation to understanding the social, community, the countryside and to questions of belonging and inclusion in rural spaces is a connective thread that runs through this book. Another connective thread is the use of evidence drawn from the research project. It is this project that I now explain.

The Project

In 1992 Chris Philo urged rural geographers to rethink the relationship between the rural and its marginalised, subordinated and invisibilised others. The debate that followed has been a key shaper in the theoretical and empirical directions of rural studies over the 1990s and 2000s (Cloke and Little, 1997). In their response to Philo Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratt (1994: 85) warned against any simplistic re focusing of the analytical gaze on ‘hidden others’ in rural spaces and posed the question ‘should we not attempt to reveal the ways of the powerful, exploring the means by which they make and sustain their domination?’ With this debate in mind I have been concerned with examining the nature of the relationship between the contemporary English countryside and what I have described as the ‘rurally included’. I use this term to describe those rural populations who can appear to make a confident, dominant and a seemingly uncontested claim to rural belonging. My interest was in the qualitative excavation of the co-ordinates that make up this relationship: what were these co-ordinates and in what ways are these narrated? What are the tensions and nuances that mark, bind and fracture the category of the ‘included’? How, in what ways and in what spaces do senses of ethnicity, Englishness and nation enter and shape these processes?

At the heart of the project were three concerns. First, the ways in which the English countryside can be assembled as a cultural and social space in which particular versions of majority–ethnicised belonging are reproduced and reinforced. Second, the ways in which recent high levels of urban to rural migration and socioeconomic changes in the countryside have (re)shaped contemporary rural social relations. The third concern was to access everyday articulations and practices of belonging, commonality, difference and place by members of local rural communities in the English countryside. The connection between these concerns and the category of the ‘rurally included’ has occurred through a focus on two rural social organisations that are very much associated with the countryside – the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) and the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs (NFYFC). These two organisations have significant differences in their membership particularly in relation to generation and gender. Older women tend to constitute the commonest profile of Women’s Institute (WI) membership. Members of Young Farmers’ Clubs (YFC) are aged between 10–24. The Clubs attract a gender mix and include young people who may have only indirect agricultural connections. However, both Women’s Institutes and Young Farmers’ Clubs contain a number of similarities: they are the social organisations most heavily associated with mainstream English rural culture; they are both intensely local but also have national profiles and while they are both leisure organisations, they both carry a sense of community responsibility, of being at the heart of rural well-being and of rural policy development.

In gaining access to the people who participated in the project through their involvement in these organisations the project did not make any claims to be researching a representative sample of rural populations. My intention was clearly not to access such a sample but rather to reach a very particular rural constituency that was neither representative nor was it one that sought to access marginalised or other rural populations. What the project sought to reach and try to capture were normative and ‘mainstreamed’ rural voices. What the project has addressed is the relationality between rurality, Englishness and identity but without making any direct reference to otherness and difference and yet in doing so it sought to shed light on how processes of social inclusion and being ‘accounted for’ may still work through anxieties about and perceptions and senses of others and external threats.

The focus on the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the National Federation o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Debating Rurality: Englishness and Otherness
• 3 Mapping Rurality: Community and Countrysides
• 4 Rethinking Rurality: Ethnicity and Englishness
• 5 Making Rurality: Practices of Community, Conviviality and Social Care
• 6 Competing Ruralities: Convergent and Divergent Discourses of English Countrysides
• 7 Connecting Ruralities: Alchemies of Ethnicity and Belonging
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index