Rural Life-Styles: Material Opportunity, Cultural Experience, and How Theory Can Undermine Policy

Rural geographies are often discounted as marginal to mainstream interests. In part this is because the rural is conflated with agricultural, and thereby is of significant but only minority interest; in part it is because rural geographers tend to be theory importers rather than theory exporters. This marginality is now changing, as rural life becomes variously the object of desire for increasing numbers of people in the Western world, and as critical rural geographies make use of political-economic and sociocultural theories to address issues of nature-society relations and discursive transformations of central concern to human geography as a whole. This paper uses the experience of undertaking a major research project on rural life-styles in England to address a number of such issues. I discuss how the notion of “problems” in rural life have been theorized and researched to date, focusing on the metaphor of “deprivation” as a key but unchallenging bridge between academic and policy discourses about the rural. Using research findings from a major survey of rural life-styles, I argue that both normative accounts of how opportunities are structured in rural areas and qualitative accounts of how rural life is experienced are crucial in a critical interpretation of changing rural life-styles. I suggest important methodological and interpretative implications of using this twin approach. Finally, I record the relations between researchers and the policymaking agencies that sponsored the research, noting how sociocultural emphases on difference are discordant with the simpler unitary narratives of problems preferred by such agencies, and how findings of different rural experiences are vulnerable to a response based on the politics of individual responsibility.