Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

THE RURAL IDYLL

Whether in search of employment, recreation, retirement, or a place from which to continue commuting to an urban job, the ‘counterurbanite’, in increasing numbers, can be found to have quite a disruptive effect upon local social relations (cf. Forsythe 1980; Rapport 1993a). Often reversing more than a century of out-migration from the rural area, the urban returners also change the proportion of young to old in the community. However, the sense of vibrancy which the influx of energetic younger (often wealthier) people can bring to a place is sometimes offset by the local sense that the community—its people, its local organizations, traditions, stated values, behavioural styles and habits of interaction—is no longer quite the same.There is a felt ambivalence, born of a nostalgia for the past, a recognition, nevertheless, that past ways of life were no longer viable, and a sense of vindication that now they are being joined by ex-urbanites who seem to value what was locally possessed all along (however oddly they might seem to express it). In search of an ‘authentically natural’ rural community (cf. Cohen 1988), the in-comers can compete for jobs, benefits and houses, and bring with them social practices—whether of inquisitiveness, assertive leadership or conspicuous consumption— which can make the locals feel like a dispossessed minority in their own home.

It is not that ‘urban refugees’ resident in the country for longer or shorter periods are anything new. Country diaries over the centuries reveal a constant flow of people in both directions (e.g. Macfarlane 1970). But the quest for a rural idyll has changed in nature and number. What was once a practice of aristocratic and noble ladies and gentlemen (viewing, by appointment, artistic and horticultural displays in country ‘seats’, or removing to rural retreats for summer seasons), and then a perk of the burgeoning bourgeoisie, has become a populist pursuit. As Pahl describes (1968), those ‘living the rural life’ will now include: the traditional large property owners; the ‘salariat’ (middle-class professionals); ex-urban workers (retired with some capital); urban workers who continue to commute to work; local workers who also commute to jobs beyond the locale; and locals who work in situ.

The attempt to specify and classify in this way those who now live in the British countryside makes for a confused list, and one always open to reclassification and addition (Gypsies, hippies and new-age travellers, for instance, ‘cognitive deviants’ who drop-out of mainstream, urban life for the inhabiting of their own ‘intentional communities’ (Rigby 1974)). What is perhaps best to keep in mind is the confused sense of rural diversity: ‘ruralism’ and ‘urbanism’ no longer refer to distinct ways of life (if, in Britain, they ever did (cf. Macfarlane 1978)).

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To elaborate upon Pahl’s argument (1968:269), Britain is so small geographically, so densely populated, and so socially confused, that it is as if all live in ‘metropolitan villages’: in cities dispersed around the country. Certainly, the urban/rural distinction, as signifying different lifestyles, different kinds of people, and different types of social relationships in different geo-physical environs, no longer makes analytic sense. What we have instead are inner cities, suburbs, garden cities, new towns, old towns, villages, hamlets, and so on, all related together in one complex process of movement and activity; here is a British population with a dispersed activity pattern, which undertakes complex movements around a ‘rurban’ British setting. Rather than rural/urban, and other geo-physically based representation and determination, Grillo therefore concludes (1980:15) that we should talk instead in terms of ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’: relative and shifting terms which can capture the ways in which local social milieux are acted upon by the supra-local and vice versa, and the way that distinct features and resources of particular habitations are matters of symbolic and attitudinal assignation.

If the urban/rural distinction makes little sense as a designation of socio-cultural difference, however, this does not necessarily lessen its sentimental or imaginative efficacy as an idiom in common usage. The ‘rural’ versus the ‘urban’ remains a highly significant polarity in terms of which people in Britain make sense of their lives, as we have seen. In Robert Park’s words (1968), we are dealing with rurality and urbanity as ‘states of mind’: criteria by which to measure a sense of Britishness, and to chart an orderly passage of life within a British ‘landscape’ or milieu.

Marilyn Strathern’s argument is that in the rhetoric of rurality and urbanity, and issues surrounding who ‘really belongs’ to rural communities (or urban ones), we are seeing ways in which people in Britain deal with ‘classes in the mind’ (1982:268); what appears as a discourse concerning ‘natural, ‘bounded’ villages is better understood as an idiom of socio-economic differentiation, and of movements of status via birth, marriage and migration. More broadly put, what appears to be a spatial division can rather be seen to signify temporal and evaluative considerations, both individual and communal. In the movement from the rural to the urban is told not only a nostalgic national story of a better and glorious past but also an individual story of a possibly better future: from urban achievement to rural retirement; from urban work to enjoying its rural fruits; from urban contest, criminality and immorality to rural peace, order and pristine nobility.

That there are different ways in which the discourse concerning the rural and the urban is phrased—rural simple-mindedness versus urban

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THE RURAL IDYLL

sophistication, for example—does not weaken the argument being put. So long as there is a distinction between the two modalities of existence in Britain, it is possible to garner a clear-cut view of one’s life and identity, and to envisage one’s progress through that life: a movement to a future, better (or worse) time and place. Moreover, one knows precisely what to expect there, because, although it will be the culmination of the passage and effort of a life-time, it will likely represent (however paradoxically) the reaching of a ‘home’: a certain harmony and closeness, something left behind at the beginning. In short, what we are dealing with in the British discourse on the rural idyll, and the rural/urban divide, are notions of progress and futurity, and a certain ambivalence concerning whether the movement these entail should be imagined as linear, or as a finally circular retrieval of an original home.

The anthropological rural idyll

While the argument above has concerned the rural idyll as a British discourse, the phenomenon is by no means restricted in its application. In a quest for the rural idyll there are clear overlaps with those pilgrimages made by tourists and the religious (to name but two), in search of particular ‘authentic’ values. Certain localities are set aside and seen as privileged sites for the attaining of experiences which are not only clearly distinct from current, everyday life but also of superior worth. These might include both the non-modern—rural, historical, natural, ethnic, exotic—and the non-human (cf. MacCannell 1989).

Also included within the ‘non-modern’, of course is the ‘primitive’, the ‘exotic’ and the ‘ethnic’, as anthropologically quested for. Perhaps the most familiar ‘rural idyll’ known to anthropology pertains to the bounded and homogeneous communities which anthropologists have posited, sought and found as the empirical bases of their studies. As has come to be increasingly recognized (cf.Wagner 1975; Kuper 1988), these too are idiomatic constructs which might bear little relation to the actual complexities of socio-cultural milieux in which people live.

More precisely, in the image of the ‘rural community’ is contained an ‘idyllic notion’ of a traditional, communal village life of mechanical solidarity or Gemeinschaft and its evolutionary supersession by atomistic urbanism and ‘artificial’ bases of association. Following any number of developmental dichotomies (Spencer’s, or Durkheim’s, or Maine’s, or Weber’s, or Toennies’s, or Redfield’s or Becker’s), anthropologists have seen in the countryside a way of life and a type of social organization diametrically opposed to that of city: a traditional order and localness threatened (if not already overcome) by the massificating forces of urban

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SCIENCE

change, by the universalistic structures of the modern nation-state. Hence, the rural village is depicted as close-knit and isolated, egalitarian, shunning ostentatious differentiation and esteeming conventional competencies. It is seen as embodying a culture which is consensually shared, homogeneous and uniform, and as engendering a social system which amounts to an encompassing whole and is based on status relations, multiplex roles, dense interactional networks, equilibrial social structures, and ascription (cf. Frankenberg 1966:286–92; Harris 1974:38–9).

In other words, the ‘idyllic’, rural village community has served as a dominant symbol, a verbal idiom, and a micro-institution which has played its part in the institutionalization of anthropology as a discipline of study and a tradition of writing. In the rural village community, anthropology secured for itself the possible progress towards and from a discrete, encapsulable field of study, distant and distinct both in place and in time (cf. Fabian 1983).

In contemporary anthropology (study ‘in’ villages, perhaps, but no longer ‘of’ them (Geertz 1973:22)), idioms of idyllic otherness have become increasingly diverse. We emphasize the otherness of gender, of the body, of globality, of subalternality; we idealize (‘idyll-ize’) otherness per se (as difference, as hybridity, as Orientalism). What should be borne in mind still, however, is the gap between idyllic idioms and the empirical realities they purport to describe.

See also: Community, Home and Homelessness, Tourism,

Urbanism

SCIENCE

Anthropological work on the concept of science has usually concerned itself with issues of the status of scientific knowledge as understood in the West, and with a comparison of forms of knowledge similarly validated elsewhere. Put succinctly: Is Western science to be treated in anthropology as a specially privileged way of knowing the world? Or is Western science equivalent (not only in its social uses but also its ontology) to religion, magic, common sense, law, aesthetics, or any other systematic fund of symbols, values and knowledge-practices shared by a community of people? A range of issues are involved here, and a range of deliberations and opinions have been aired, a sample of which includes the following.

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Does science grow out of religion?

Considering the ways in which modes of thought might evolve into one another was a major preoccupation of nineteenth-century social science. Inspired by Darwin, the writings of Weber, Marx and Durkheim, Spencer, Tylor and Frazer were imbued by evolutionary schemata concerning how one kind of society with its characteristic patterns of thought and behaviour might become something other. In the early twentieth century, Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski were still famously to disagree concerning the nature of the distinction between primordial and evolved engagements with the universe. Was ‘primitive man’ a mystic, inhabiting a pre-logical, sentimental and personalized universe, the objective reasoning of ‘modern man’ only coming later (Levy-Bruhl 1985 [1910]), or did primitive spiritualism exist alongside a pragmatic and commonsensical treatment of problems (Malinowski 1926)?

By the 1930s, however, such deliberation was out of vogue. An evolutionist—temporal perspective had been substituted by a more spatial—diffusionist one, where difference (between cultures as between nation-states) was a matter of geography. To pose evolutionist questions was seen as ethnocentric and ultimately elitist, while no satisfactory criteria were likely to be agreed upon to obtain definitive answers.

And yet, differently phrased, comparable questions have again begun to be asked (cf. Macfarlane 1978; Goody 1983). Can one, for instance, chart a development in conceptions of the sacred? Without making valuejudgements, or assuming necessary, singular, irreversible pathways, can one mark out an evolution in the ‘set[s] of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ (Bellah 1964:37)?

Bellah, for one, suggests an affirmative answer (also cf. Gellner 1988). He sets out (despite some unfortunate terminology) five ideal-typical stages in whose terms ‘the ultimate conditions’ of human existence can be seen to compass both the religious and the scientific: ‘primitive’, ‘archaic’, ‘historic’, ‘early modern’, ‘modern’. An elaboration of these need not detain us here, but the crucial transition for an understanding of the evolution of science concerns ‘historic’ to ‘early modern’. This is characterized by the shift in Europe from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.The Protestant Reformation, Bellah argues, amounted to an overcoming of a number of hierarchies or gradations and their replacement by more discrete distinctions; cosmology was much simplified. The legitimacy of church hierarchy, both in an institutional sense and in the sense of the church’s role in structuring relations between this world and the realms of the sacred, was called into question; likewise the hierarchy of supernatural intermediary figures between the worlds:

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