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When we act and talk, we produce and
reproduce a certain way of understanding the world.
Groups of people share and further develop an idea about
the world and what it is all about. People who take
the same facts and values for granted, and who participate
in reproducing these ideas, are all part of a discourse.
The discourse, in other words, produces ‘truths’
about the world. Sometimes a discourse gains so much
ground that the truths within the discourse also become
truths underlying government policy: The discourse gains
dominance over competing discourses.
Such is the case for discourse on rurality.
The term stands for a range of ideas about how the rural
(countryside) environment within most of the study areas,
as contrasted with more urban (town or city) surroundings
elsewhere, creates a distinctive parcel of ‘natural’and
human-made elements that influences countless aspects
of local demography, economy, politics, society and
culture. Living there, or contemplating the area
from within an everyday urban perspective, raises different
thoughts about forms of economic and cultural life that
have grown up here and which cannot but shape everyday
practices. For local residents, notions of remotness
about the distance from centres of population, provisions
and services, maybe exacerbated by poor transport links,
coupled to the sense of ‘not being part’ of the
normal round of wider society’s interactions, activities
and achievements. For the urban dweller, the countryside
has a veneer of cultural heritage embedded in green
heritage assets remaining from earlier forms of extensive
agriculture. They view the environment as a potential
holiday venue to which they would like to tag a Wish
You Were Here message.
Many visitors are so enchanted by the
beauty, variety and rural nature that they wish they
could settle here. Increasing numbers of people actually
do make the move, especially after retirement.
In the modern western world the creation
of lifestyle and identity is, more than earlier, a product
of individual choice, and the place we choose to live
is often part of the process of creating identity. Based
on this understanding, we believe that knowledge on
ideas about ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ play
a principal role in understanding rural-urban migration
and the choices people make about where to live. Knowledge
on the social construction of ideas about places, and
the social consequences of these ideas, will provide
valuable inputs to future regional and rural policy.
The meaning in our surroundings is strongly
influenced by what we bring to those surroundings, particularly
our questions and our expectations. While the intellectual
and emotional potential of our surroundings is growing,
and may develop rapidly, its physical reality is being
ever faster eroded. In
this context, ‘Hundred Lines’ is a testbed for research
into how cultural roots are formed or tapped by a process
of understanding the social messages in boundaries and
buildings. |
