Article
Talking about rurality: Social representations of the rural as expressed by residents of six English parishes

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Abstract

This paper presents a summary account of the associations made, in a variety of questionnaire responses and interview questions, by residents of six English parishes with the term ‘rural’. The case is made for defining ‘the rural’ as an abstract ‘social representation’, a set of rules and resources existing out of space and time which are drawn upon in both discursive and non-discursive actions. The precise form that this representation takes in these actions is highly contextualised and depends upon its precise usage. The content of respondents' representations of the rural contained many aspects of the ‘rural idyll’ familiar to academic researchers, especially in the interviews where the social aspect of rurality was more strongly expressed. However, this resemblance was not a naive acceptance of the idyll but involved a more engaged and often critical reflection on rural living. Hence, the respondents should not be dismissed as the ‘cultural dupes’ of a Pastoral ideology. Nonetheless, in general, they still set themselves up in representational opposition to what have been labelled ‘neglected rural geographies’.

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      While the preceding section showed that many village residents were born and spent much of their lives in areas classified as urban, and also often had strong links to such places even after having moved to the village, many of their accounts placed considerable emphasis on the rurality of their current place of residence. For example, research by Halfacree (1994, 1995), Murdoch (2003), Phillips (2002, 2008, 2014) and Smith (2002b) have variously emphasised the significance of open space, small-scale settlement, agriculture, nature, landscape character, historicity and senses of community in people's accounts of why they moved to a rural location, and these elements were present in numerous accounts given by residents we interviewed: “Very pleasant to live in ….

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