The Restructuring of Social Imaginations in Rural Geography

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Pergamon

PII: S0743-0167(97)00056-9

.hmmal tit' Rural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 121-153, 1998

The Restructuring of Social Imaginations in Rural Geography

Martin Phillips

Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester LEI 7RH, UK

Abstract - - This paper reviews the development of rural social geography. It argues that there has been a restructuring in the dominant social imagination expressed within rural social geography away from a 'restricted social imagination' which shied away from considering phenomena which were immaterial and clearly politicized. The prevalence of this social imagination within geographical studies of rural settlement, population change, access to resources and services and rural communal life is highlighted. It is argued that there have been two important directions of critique of this social geography. First, the politicization of rural social geography through Marxism is discussed with particular reference being paid to the analysis of class relations in the countryside. Second, the rise of postmodernism and the cultural turn of rural geography is discussed. Attention is drawn to the explicit politicization of this social geography and the emphasis placed within it on the immaterial. The paper outlines some of the key arguments and texts of these two lines of restructuring, and also how some earlier work trespassed beyond the dominant restrictions placed on social imaginations of the rural. The paper ends by raising the issue of whether the immaterial and the politicized have been recon- ciled together within the current work of rural social geographers. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a rising concern with outlining and promoting the notion of a

"geographical imagination" [see notably Gregory (1994)]. The notion of a geographical imagination is often traced back to David Harvey's (1973) Social Justice and the City in which it was raised as a coun- terpoint to the idea of a sociological imagination as outlined by Mills (1959). In slight contrast to the current emphasis on the geographical imagination, Harvey's original argument was for the introduction of a greater sociological imagination in geographical studies, a point which was later drawn upon by Lewis (1979) (p. 28) who suggested that there might be a case for the introduction of greater sociological imagination into the geographical analysis of rural communities. This paper seeks to explore this notion of a sociological imagination within rural geographical studies, and in particular to investigate a suggestion made by Philo (1991) (p. 3) that the history of social geography might be written usefully as the installation, and then challenge and

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dismantling of a "restrictive vision" of social geography. Philo suggests that this vision stems from

a discourse of exclusion frightened about permitting geography to consider phenomena which are immaterial (which are not tangible, not easily countable and mappable) and which may have worrying 'political over- tones' to them (as occurs once geographers start to study social groups, their often unequal inter-relations and their often highly unfamiliar life experiences).

(Philo, 1991, p. 4)

A key component of this installation, challenge and dismantling was changes in ideas about what constitutes "the social". Rather than see a sociological imagination suddenly becoming integrated into geography as the comments of Harvey and Lewis might be seen to suggest, the arguments of Philo point to changes in the way geographers have conceived of, or imagined, the social. This paper will suggest that it is possible to apply such a reading to rural social geography and that there have been shifts in the prevailing social imaginations within rural geography which have meant that many rural geographers have begun to think what may have

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been seen previously as unthinkable and in particular to recognize both the centrality of many immaterialities and the unavoidability of being political. More particularly, the paper will suggest that recent years have witnessed a re-examination of earlier foci of attention--such as demographic change and urban to rural migration, service provision in the countryside, rural housing and the social relations of family, kinship and localism - - in connection with theoretical concerns circulating within a broader social geography and indeed within social and cultural studies more generally. It will also be argued that a number of new themes are emerging in the social geography of the countryside relating to issues of social identity, social difference and the construction and reception of cultural images of the countryside. These issues have brought the theories of social and cultural studies to the fore in the study of the social geography of the countryside, and indeed to some limited degree may have positioned rural geography more centrally within social and cultural studies. This is not to say that all is unproblematic in rural social geography, and the paper will conclude by noting the continuing debate over how the political, the material and immaterial may be related.

Reflections on exclusions and inclusions in writing academic histories

Before embarking on this reading of the development of rural social geography it is important to reflect on the ways in which past geographies can be interpreted, not least because, as recent debates in this journal (e.g Murdoch and Pratt, 1993, 1994;

Philo, 1992, 1993) and in Sociologica ruralis (e.g.

Cloke, 1996; Crow, 1996; Miller, 1996a,b) have amply demonstrated, recounting the past development of subjects is a very complex, and often highly contested, enterprise. As Rose (1995) (p. 414) has commented in the context of accounts of the history geography, writing histories is a process of representation which is "always a practice of inclusion and exclusion". Exclusion can operate in a number of distinct ways. First, there are always limits to the knowledge that any person, or indeed, group of people, have: there is always some piece of work which we have not read or have not understood fully. All histories of knowledge will therefore be partial histories. In the context of this present paper, there will be a very clear Anglocentric focus which stems largely from the author's own socialization into rural geography. Furthermore there will be a temporal focus on changes occurring since the 1960s, a feature which again reflects the author's own trajectory into the academic study of rural geography. In both cases it has been endeavoured

through reading to extend thc horizons of the author's awareness, but the limitations will no doubt be clearly apparent and many of the arguments presented would no doubt be in need of reworking if applied to different contexts.

As well as exclusion due to the situatedness of the author, there is also exclusion by intent, in that within historiographic accounts some knowledge is deemed as being unimportant or of lesser significance than other, included, knowledge. All histories are therefore constructions which carry with them forms of evaluation and judgement.

Within recent debates over the writing of the history of geography at least four distinct forms of evaluation and judgement have been advanced [see particularly Livingstone (1995, 1992)]. First, there have been what have been termed "Whiggish" or

"presentist" histories which, as Livingstone (1992) (p. 4) puts it, write history backwards "from the present to the past" and thereby effectively seek to marshal past events, texts and people into an "historical spectacle" by which people can "better see geographies present state of affairs". Classically in whiggish histories the spectacle provided is one of progress: from error and constraint to enlighten- ment and power [see, for example, Chorley and Haggett (1967) on the emergence of a model building geography]. Presentist histories can, however, also be less modernist in character, in which case they tend to chart wrong turns and missed opportunities [see, for example, Ley and Samuels (1978) on the history of humanistic geography]. These forms of historiography have come under severe criticism in recent years with Living- stone, for example, arguing that, at best, they lead to a reduced understanding of past geographies in that there is a filtering out of detail, contradiction, dispute, inconsistency, hesitancy, nastiness and

"sheer messiness" (Livingstone, 1992, p. 8). At worst, for Livingstone, they lead to instrumentalist readings of the past in which there is an attempt to fix "one's own prejudices on to the most charismatic names, under the guise of innocuous historical explanation" [Skinner (1969) quoted in Livingstone (1992)], or else there is an attempt despoil the repu- tation of earlier writers by chastising their failure to adopt present day arguments [see Rose (1995) for some comments of the psychology of these twin desires].

Such criticisms can lead to the adoption of a second style of historiographic writing, namely what Living- stone (1995) calls "encyclopedism". Under this style of writing, theoretical judgements are seen to be irrelevant and the task of the historiographer consists of merely collecting and cataloguing people

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Restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography 123 and publications. As is the case for all forms of

empiricism, the approach fails to recognize the extent to which observation is theory laden, and hence ignores a series of theoretical presuppositions its practice entails. So, for instance, the approach neglects the extent to which doing geography involves much more than simply the writing of texts and the actions of a few, 'key', individuals. As Matless (1995a) (p. 405) has remarked, histories of geography may be less about the creation, flow and contest of ideas, and rather more about "an indissol- uble mingling of intellectual debate, political power, bodies.., dreams and desires".

In recent years a third form of historiography has risen to prominence, namely 'contextual history', which Livingstone (1992) (p. 224) suggests seeks to

"understand past geographies in their own context without subjecting them to twentieth century judgements". Contextual approaches seek, as Livingstone (1994) (p. 368) puts it, to "earth" ideas in "the all-too mundane world of social and economic interests, bodily needs and psychological yearnings", and also in their intellectual contexts; that is in relation to other ideas, both academic and non-academic, circulating around the author and from which the author was drawing or resisting. In the context of the historiography of rural geography, Philo (1992) (p. 199) has suggested that there is "a minor historiographic task to be done tracing the moments of contact between early works of what might be termed 'rural geography' and the socio-cultural ideas of other geographers and other academics". A particular focus in this historiography might be the way "works of rural geography have claimed an association with ideas of other geographers" (Philo, 1992, p. 204) and also with notions of other forms of geography. Philo cites, for example, a series of writings that have connected rural geography to some notion or other of social geography.

The present paper very much seeks to follow this lead and to, thereby, explore:

(1) the constitution of what has on repeated occa- sions (e.g. Gilbert and Steel, 1945; Houston, 1953; Phillips and Williams, 1984) been described as the 'sub-discipline' of rural social geography; and

(2) the extent to which rural social geographers have drawn upon, or distanced themselves from, ideas of the social circulating within geography more widely conceived and within other disciplines.

The first focus will involve the delimitation of some boundaries over what is taken to constitute social geography. In the present context this will be done

by using texts which identify themselves as, to some degree or other, about 'social geography'. The sense of the social within these texts will then be compared to other texts which focus on rural areas and which are geographical in one or more of the following senses:

(1) they are self-identified as such;

(2) they are written by people working, or having worked, in geography departments; or

(3) they appear in books or journals with a geographical designation.

Having established some sense of the social within these rural geography texts, the paper will go onto pursue its second task which is to compare this 'social imagination' with that circulating within other areas of human geography and within other social and cultural studies disciplines.

The account presented here will not, however, be a contextual one in the sense of refraining from subjecting past writings to judgements stemming from the present. In part this reflects a rejection of the notion that it is ever possible to completely suspend the exercise of judgement [see Phillips (1994)], and it stems partly from a concern to write an historical interpretation which is orientated to the present in that it seeks to understand "how we have gotten to where we are" (Livingstone, 1995, p.

422). This form of historical interpretation in a sense involves constructing a dialogue with the past into order to inform and improve the present. As such it should aim to be written so as

to take seriously the historically contingent circumstances within which certain practices and principles were developed while, at the same time, holding out the possibility of critique that is more than merely a further and veiled and cunning form of enslavement. (Living- stone, 1~95, p. 422)

Having outlined some of the exclusions present in this interpretation of the historiography of rural geography as related to the limitations of the author's position and intentions in writing, the point is now reached when it is felt to be reasonable to start the account.

Restricted social geographies of the rural Social geography as the study of material products Philo (1991) suggests that one of the earliest explicit statements about the constitution of social geography is The Study of Social Geography by Hoke (1907). Philo goes onto to suggest that Hoke's vision of social geography was one which was very tangible, very materialistic:

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the focus...is very much on the obvious, countable, material things that human beings create in and out of the landscape- buildings, settlements, roads and other 'marks' on the landscape. (Philo, 1991, p. 5)

Philo adds that this material focus typified much

"early geographical inquiry", by which he appears to mean the geography of the mid-Twentieth Century [see also Philo (1994), p. 255]. It is certainly evident that much of rural geography, including that which identified itself as being in one sense or another a form of social geography, adopted this focus. For example, as Philo himself notes, A Social Geography of Europe by Houston (1953) which contains a lengthy section on "rural geography", focused primarily on "morphological accounts of landscape, settlement and house types" (Philo, 1992, p. 204).

Some 8years earlier,, Gilbert and Steel (1945) (p.

118) had declared that one of four main branches of social geography was "the distribution and form of rural settlements, that is of villages, hamlets, farms and scattered dwellings" and, as Pacione (1984) was to document some 40 years later, a whole series of rural geographers have focused on the form and distribution of settlements and dwellings. Particu- larly renowned studies included those of Deman- geon (1928, 1939), Thorpe (1964) and Roberts (1979).

In part this focus on rural settlements and material landscape elements such as field systems reflected the continuing influence of environmental determinism. This is well demonstrated by Fawcett's early statement as to the rationale for studying rural settlement distributions:

the basic contributions are those which seek to describe and map the actual distribution of the rural habitat in specific areas, and show that the distribution both as a fact in itself and in its areal relations to other geographical facts, such as relief and altitude, water supply and drainage, soils and underlying rocks, dominant crops and types of cultivation, roads and other means of communication, density and distribution of population in the area, and sometimes, political boundaries. (Fawcett, 1939, p. 152)

The prevalence of the physical environment in Fawcett's list of geographical influences was repro- duced, in a series of other studies, including many which purported to reject a strict environmental determinism.

Fawcett's comments also highlight two other features of rural settlement studies, namely the primacy often given to description and mapping, and the emphasis given to material subjects: to water, soils, rocks, crops, roads, and human bodies. Many of the studies of rural settlements were historical in focus and; as Philo (1994) has observed, much historical geographical work in mid-century was pre-

occupied with identifying the material elements of past landscapes. Great stress was placed on field observation and with settlements and dwellings being amongst the most visually discernible landscape elements, it is unsurprising that many of the most renowned studies were based on extensive observation, either directly or through the medium of aerial photography (e.g Roberts, 1979; Thorpe, 1964). The materiality of dwellings and settlements also had conceptual and presentational implications.

Lewis (1979) (p. 95), for example, has suggested that

"[t]he early interest in the distribution of rural settlements was facilitated by the ease with which they could be conceptualized as a pattern of points on a map". In practice, however, many rural geographers came to recognize major problems in such conceptualization and representation. Emrys Jones, for example, commented that while the study of settlements in rural Britain was often described as focusing on the "simple" issue of distribution

this is not the case; it is a complex problem with several aspects. Does "distribution" mean the number of dwellings in certain units of land? Does it mean the extent of settlement within certain limits, or does it mean degrees of dispersion and agglomeration? (Jones, 1951, p. 60) A large number of rural studies became focused on issues surrounding spatial classification and measurement, seemingly often to the exclusion of discussing virtually anything else. This trend was reinforced with the increasing quantification and scientization of geography through the 1950s and 1960s when highly complex measures of rural settlement size, form and distribution were developed (e.g. Haining, 1982; Hudson, 1969; Pacione, 1982;

Rowley, 1971; Stone, 1968). One consequence, as Philo (1992) (p. 200) has commented, was that rural geography texts became "deserted of people.., eerily still, silent and devoid of people". Furthermore, with the adoption of a broadly logical positivist conception of science, the endeavour to both make the description of the geographies of rural settlements more geometrically precise was linked to the claim that these geographies could be explained as being the outcome of more or less universal social laws.

One of the clearest illustrations of this development was Rural Settlement and Land-use by Chisholm (1962) which sought to utilize the ideas of Weber and particularly von Thiinen to understand the processes helping to mould the location of rural settlements and patterns of land-use. Other studies of this ilk drew on the central place models of Christaller and Losch (e.g. Bracey, 1953; O'Farrell, 1969; Rowley, 1971).

Logical positivist studies very much continued with a materialist focus in terms of their object of study, but their approach of study was in many respects

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Restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography 125 highly non-materialist in that it frequently involved

utilizing a social imagination which, at least in theory, was seen to be distanced from social experiences and interests. Von Th~inen's major work on agricultural ianduse The Isolated State, for example, began by asking the reader to, "Imagine a very large towns at the centre of a fertile plain which is crossed by no navigable river. Throughout the plain the soil is capable of cultivation and of the same fertility"

[Hall (1966), p. 9; emphasis added]. As a series of geographers were to later to remark, this imagining was one which was quite removed from any experiences anyone was likely to have, bar arguably those that lived in the north German plains. On the other hand, as Barnbrock (1976) has outlined, it was a very highly and specifically socialized one. Barn- brock argues, for instance, that von Thiinen's model of agricultural land-use was based on a "idealization of human interaction" embedded in the notion of

"harmonic social structures" (Barnbrock, 1976, p.

60). Von Thfinen's "isolated state" was also his

"ideal state":

for Von Thianen...[i]ndividuals are caught in innumer- able interdependencies that put constraints on the thinking subjects. This veiled reality cannot be properly analysed. The task is first to abstract principles and then to "transfer these to the Isolated State instead of trans- ferring actual conditions". Therefore the Isolated State is the 'true' representation of the final end mankind should strive for. [Barnbrock (1976), p. 61; quotes from von ThiJnen's Isolated State]

Von Thiinen's work, for Barnbrock, involved the imagining of a society whereby social conflicts were ended because people received a 'natural wage'; that is, they received an income which accorded to rational differences in the resources they owned.

This social image was one of rational inequality and hence harmony. It was thereby an image which legitimated clear levels of social inequality. However, while an isolated uniform plain may be distant from reality, social orders with high levels of inequality are not. Indeed for Barnbrock Von Thfinen's Isolated State was the product of thoroughly bourgeois social imagination:

Bourgeois society is viewed by Von ThiJnen as the ulti- mate stage in the development of man. He envisages a society ruled by the harmonic subsumption of man under capital. (Barnbrock, 1976, p. 61)

More recently, and rather more generally, Philo has argued that rural geographers have often constructed texts which portray the countryside as being occupied by

by little armies of faceless, classless, sexless beings.., du- tifully laying out Christaller's central place networks, doing exactly the right number of hours farmwork in each of Von ThiJnen's concentric rings, and basically

obeying the great economic laws of minimizing effort and cost in negotiating physical space. (Philo, 1992, p. 201 )

Overall one can suggest that the geometrical geographical imagination manifest in many rural texts in the 1960s and 1970s was connected, generally implicitly, into a sociological imagination which saw people as being either actually or ideally subject to some supra-individual ordering logic, a logic which was generally capitalistic in form. The sociological imagination underlying many spatial science texts was hence tied closely, in rationale if not through practices, into dominant economic interests in contemporary society. It was an imagination which also tended to depoliticize the study of rural settlement in that the explanatory social logic was variously 'legitimated' by being presented as equili- brating, 'naturalized' by being presented frequently without comment, and 'universalized' by being presented as if it was the only logic by which socie- ties had ever been structured. Rather than seeing social structures as constructed and contestable, they were presented as harmonious, natural and universal.

Whilst such a social imagination can be seen as a significant element within many studies of rural settlement, it is important to consider whether there were any notable exceptions. One obvious candidate are those studies which explicitly rejected an economic focus. Many studies of rural settlement distribution and morphology, for example, sought their explanations in social and particularly cultural differences. This was particularly evident in the studies of people like E. G. Bowen and Emrys Jones on rural settlement in Wales (e.g. Bowen, 1940, 1926; Jones, 1945, 1951) where reference was made frequently to the both the influence of Celtic cultures, and also to "localized alien features"

(Jones, 1945, p. 110) related to English (or Anglo- Saxon), Scandinavian and Norman influences.

However, as the discussion by Duncan (1980) of Carl Sauer's cultural geography has outlined, the explanation of material features by culture is not necessarily that far removed from logical positivistic neo-classical economic explanation in that people can still seen as being subject to a supra-individual logic. In the case of these cultural explanations the logic is that of conformity to cultural norms with people being seen to be adopters of some externally produced 'super-organic culture'.

A more agency focus line of criticism was outlined by Williams (1963b) who complained that although studies of British country life had produced "a reasonable amount of information about farming and the rural landscape", he felt that very little was known about the people who worked the farms,

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namely the farmers. He argued that the lack of research on farmers was "deplorable" because "it is the farmer, in the course of generations of occupying and cultivating the land, who created both the present pattern of English agriculture and much of the rural landscape" (Williams, 1963b, p. 63).

Williams called for the adoption of a more "sociological perspective" to rural settlement and landscape, although he ended up reproducing a very similar material focus to many contemporaneous studies when he argued for the study of "the rela- tionship between society and land" because "this was the particular field of the social geographer"

(Williams, 1963b, p. 63).

Social geography as the study of population

While the distribution of settlements and the geometrics of material landscape elements formed a major constituent of British rural social geography from middle of the century through into the 1970s and beyond, and hence it may reasonably be described as a 'peopleless' geography, it is important to note that there was a series of rural geographies which did very much focus on people and might be seen to constitute another form of social geography.

Returning to the early delimitation of social geography of Gilbert and Steel, they suggest that:

In the first place it is concerned with distribution of population over the earth's surface, and maps of density and distribution of population are the principal tools of the social geographer. (Gilbert and Steel, 1945, p. 118).

A concern with the enumeration of population numbers, distributions and densities can be seen to animate a whole series of rural studies, with two particular foci of attention emerging: namely, rural 'depopulation' and 'counter-urbanization'. A series of geographers have sought to document the extent of these two trends (e.g. Berry, 1976; Bolton and Chalkley, 1990; Champion, 1989; Fielding, 1982;

Lawton, 1968; Woodruffe, 1976).

As in the study of rural settlements, it is possible to discern important differences between empiricist and logical positivist studies. In the former attention was either concentrating solely on enumerating the extent of population change rather than attempting to explain it or else explanation was conducted solely in terms of contiguous observable events and processes. Rural repopulation, for example, was seen to be the result of either the presence of people with the resources and desire to live in the countryside (Bolton and Chalkley, 1990; Joseph et al., 1988, 1989) or local successes in implementing a 'development' policy (e.g. Horner, 1986; McCleary,

1988; Hill and Young, 1991), or local success in market competition (e.g. Drudy and Drudy, 1979;

McCleary, 1991; Strachan, 1988). Those adopting a more logical positivist perspective, on the other hand, saw rural depopulation and counterurbanization as being the result of some more or less universal law. Hence depopulation was seen to be the result of economies of scale and cumulative advantage of the process of centralization, while counterurbanization was explained as the outcome of such laws as the maximization of individual preferences, economic cost minimization and the balancing of demand and supply (see Fielding, 1982). In such accounts the change from depopulation to counterurbanization was rather problematic in that it might seen to imply a break-down of one universal law and its replacement by another. There were, however, some attempt to suggest that they were distinct outcomes of a common process, such as 'urbanization' (e.g. Lewis and Maund, 1976) or 'agricultural restructuring' (e.g. Drudy and Drudy,

1979).

Whilst there are important differences between these studies, they did share some features. In particular the majority of these studies conform to the restricted vision of social geography identified by Philo in that people appear in them as tangible, easily countable, and, indeed, easily mappable, phenomena. The study of population hence appears to have a similar visible materiality as did the study of settlement. In addition, it also appears as a rela- tively apolitical activity in that there seems to be little contestation about the object of study, although there certainly was disagreement about their explanation. The issue of what constitutes a 'person', for example, remains in these studies unproblematic and thereby unexamined (cf Pile and Thrift, 1995; Thrift, 1994). Demographic statistics are, however, a social product and thereby are inter- connected with relations of power, and, indeed, the politics of demographic statistics have arguably become rather more evident in recent years with debates over the inclusion of questions on race and ethnicity, the impacts of changing household structures and the best definition of social class.

Social geography as the study of access to resources and services

Social geography has been not only defined as the study of human settlements or population distributions. Another frequently voiced notion of 'social' within human geography has been as a state of fairness and equality, witnessed, for example, by the call by Harvey (1973) for geography to be concerned

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Restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography 127 with social justice and David Smith's slightly later

call for a geography concerned with "who gets what where" (Smith, 1979, p. 15). This sense of a social geography concerned with fairness and equality was particularly important in the 1970s but there were earlier precedents. Gilbert and Steel, for example, in their early discussion of social geography recognized a concern with "the distribution of social groups and their 'way of life'" and promoted the "geographical analysis of the housing health and conditions of labour of different communities" (Gilbert and Steel, 1945, p. 118). This notion of a socially concerned geography was also a vision which held appeal for some rural geographers with, for example, Clout (1972) and Gilg (1985) expressing concern about the social relevance of rural studies and arguing for the creation of knowledge that could be "applied" to resolve social problems. Gilg, for example, concluded his book Introduction to Rural Geography with the statement:

the future for rural geography should be an applied one, where it integrates its own research, relates this to the real behavioural world and to policy formation, and thus attempts to produce a rural environment that is not only physically attractive but also a lively and prosperous place to live. (Gilg, 1985, p. 266)

Notions of a socially relevant and applied geography raise the possibility of a greater politicizing of geography and may indeed, as Philo (1991) (p. 12) has remarked with reference to Gilbert and Steel's writing, signal a vision of geography which is rather different from the dominant "obsession with material things". However, as developed within rural geography in the 1970s, and indeed within much of human geography at this time, there was both a desire to have a clearly visible material focus of study and to have a depoliticized arena of academic study. The material focus was provided through a continued focus on rural settlements and population size, albeit conjoined with an emphasis on the distribution of resources. From the 1970s onwards rural geographers and others produced a large number of studies on access to employment (e.g. Hodge and Whitby, 1981; Little et al., 1991), housing (e.g. Clark, 1982; Phillips and Williams, 1982; Shucksmith, 1981), transport (e.g. Moseley, 1979), retail outlets (e.g. Clark and Woollett, 1990; Moscley and Spencer, 1978); and legal (Blacksell et al., 1991), welfare (e.g. Clark and Woollett, 1990; Joseph and Phillips, 1984) and leisure (e.g. Fitton, 1979;

Harrison, 1981; Patmore, 1983) facilities. This was a rural geography which was seen to be 'social' in the sense that it was concerned whether people were getting adequate or equal access to services or resources. It was also a clearly material geography in that it tended to focus primarily on the enumeration of the most observable features of service provision,

such as houses, buses, shops and legal and welfare institutions. In this it stood in some contrast to other forms of social geography and other social science disciplines where through the 1980s and the 1990s there was a rising recognition of the value of studying the meanings attached to houses (Duncan, 1981), shopping (Shields, 1992), law and disorder (Blomley, 1987, 1989) and mobility (Clarke and Doel, 1994; Harvey, 1985; Matless, 1992; Thrift,

1994).

The significance of the studies of access to resources and services to rural geography in the 1970s and 1980s is clearly demonstrated by the contents lists of a number of popular undergraduate texts published in the early 1980s (e.g. Gilg, 1985; Pacione, 1984;

Phillips and Williams, 1984). Several of these books were also keen to 'depoliticize' the study of resources and services, a concern which was often expressed in terms of a rejection of theory. Pacione (1984), for example, argued that rural geography should resist the application of ideas derived from wider, more regional perspectives, while Gilg argued that rural geography was, and by implication should remain, "broadly theory free" [Gilg (1985), p. 172, original emphasis]. As Robinson (1990) (p. 18) notes, both these authors "tended to eschew theory and closer links with developments in other social science disciplines". Theory was portrayed as unnecessary in that it diverted attention from recog- nizing the specificities of rural objects, in large part because theory was seen as an alien import from non-rural disciplines. Worse still, much of the theory circulating elsewhere in human geography in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to be trying to do away with the notion of rural as a meaningful object of study anyway. The term 'critical theory' took on a very particular inflexion within rural geography being used to signal conceptual arguments which rejected notions of distinctively rural spaces, rather than as a form of social critique [see Phillips (1994), p. 90].

Amongst the consequences of this rejection of theory was a continued neglect of the social imagination underpinning the rural social geography of 'applied rural geography' and its political connota- tions and consequences. This point which was highlighted by Hoggart and Buller who suggested that applied rural geography relied on very particular, although unacknowledged, value dispositions:

Essentially...it rests on the idea that agreement can be reached over what constitutes a 'physically', 'lively' and 'prosperous' environment. It also carries with it heavy tones of liberalism. There is a heavy acceptance of the view that governments principally are there to serve the people; that they listen to suggestions and, in doing so, are neither self-interested nor promote biases in the

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distribution of socio-economic benefits. (Hoggart and Buller, 1987, p. 266)

In other words, Gilg's conception on an "applied rural geography" relied on a very specific social imagination concerning the constitution of rural environments and how they are, or should be, constructed. Furthermore, as Hoggart and Buller suggest and the studies of people such as Harrison (1991) have demonstrated, it was a social imagination which was not necessarily shared by everybody.

Harrison argues, for instance, that many people do not go into the countryside to merely enjoy an attractive physical landscape, as the arguments of Gilg implies, but rather go to experience "a range of active and sensual pleasures". She also suggests that these views of and attachments to the countryside tend to be ignored because they do not fit in with the perceptions of planners and land-owners who structure the provision of countryside recreation and who adopt views about the countryside which are quite similar to those espoused by Gilg. In other words, the views of applied rural geographers tend to mirror the views of those who have the most power to construct the countryside. Recognition of other views and the extent of their marginalization effectively politicizes the study of rural recreation:

actions to make the landscape more physically appealing may be in the interest of one group and not another, and further more they may actually favour those who are already are getting more of their interests served anyway.

The rural social geography of rural resources and service provision of the 1970s and 1980s conformed to the contours of the restricted vision of social geography which has been identified with respect to the study of rural settlements and populations. It focused on the most easily observable, countable and mappable elements of service provision. It also largely ignored, and often refused to give any credence to thinking about, the social imaginary involved in studying rural society, and yet at the same time it was employing very distinct and power laden conceptions of social use of the countryside.

Social geography as the study of family and community

Another and long established loci of rural social analysis has been on 'kinship' and 'community' relations. Classic studies on these issues include those of Arensberg and Kimball (1940), Rees (1950), Williams (1956, 1963a), Frankenberg (1957), Little- john (1963) and Emmett (1964). In many respects these research foci have been more significant in disciplines like anthropology and sociology than they

have been in geography, although a number of geographers have sought to draw connections into their discipline (e.g. Cater and Jones, 1989; Harper, 1989) and at least one of these classic studies was described by its author as, in part, "an essay in social geography" (Williams, 1963a, p. 163).

The emphasis on kinship and customs in these rural social studies was frequently presented without comment and thereby naturalized as an object of study. Sometimes, as in the above study in social geography, reference was, however, made to explicitly theoretical arguments such as those made by the German sociologist T6nnies (1957) who suggested that their were two types of human relations: 'gemeinschaft' or 'community' and 'gesellschaft' or 'society'. Gemeinschaft was seen to be related to

"close human relationships developed through kinship...common habitat and...co-operation and co-ordinated action for social good" while society was seen to be created through "impersonal ties and relationships based on formal exchange and contract" in which, "no actions...manifest the will or spirit of... unity" (Harper, 1989, pp. 162-163).

The study of communities though notions such as gemeinschaft and gesellschaft would seem to represent a radically different emphasis from the previously discussed social geographies with their emphasis on such highly visible material entities such as the settlements and human bodies.

However, it will be argued that it is possible to discern a repeated concern amongst rural geographers to restrict their study of communities to issues which were in line with the dominant material emphasis. This restriction was played out in two main ways: first, by connecting the study of rural communities to demographic changes; and second, by insisting on the application of research method- ologies which centred on the observable and measurable. In addition it will be suggested there was a important but generally unexamined politics to the study of rural communities.

As Harper (1989) (p. 163) has remarked, T6nnies presented the concepts of gemeinschaft and gesell- schaft "as themes for analysis" rather than as social forms linked to particular settlement types or even particular historical periods. However, T0nnies, and more especially later writers who have drawn upon his ideas, frequently linked the gemeinschaft and gesellschaft division into both spatial and temporal divisions. Notable writers such as Wirth (1938) implied that places were either rural or urban, and that all urban and rural places were essentially alike.

Other writers (Redfield, 1 9 4 7 ; Sorokin and Zimmerman, 1929; Queen and Carpenter, 1953), however, argued that there was not a simple rural/

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Restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography 129 urban divide but rather a series of subtle changes

from a rural like place to an urban like place. In other words, there was a continuum stretching from c o m p l e t e l y - - o r as it was fequently described ' t r u l y ' - - r u r a l place to a completely or 'truly' urban place.

The precise basis for the continuum was a matter of some considerable debate (Burie, 1967; Duncan, 1967; Frankenberg, 1966; Martin, 1976). One frequently adopted approach was to see the rural/

urban continuum as being a continuum of settlement size, a focus which was very much in accord with settlement and demographically centred socio- geographic imaginations already outlined. At least three lines of argument were presented to link forms of community with population and settlement size.

First, if rural areas were almost by definition areas of gemeinschaft then changes in the size of a rural population would lead to a shift in the overall balance of gemeinschaft and an increase in gesell- schaft. One illustration of such a line of argument is Rees who worked for a period as a geographer at Aberystwyth and who saw a clear link between depopulation and the survival of gemeinschaft:

every person counts as part of the social organism and when one dies or leaves the hamlet he [sic] is missed by the whole community, a sense of incompleteness lingers on as though the whole organism had lost a limb. (Rees,

1950, p. 99)

The notion of a transition from gemeinschaft to

gesellschafi continued even when concern over rural depopulation faded into the background to became replaced by concern over counter-urbanization.

Although counterurbanization was seen to spell the end of rural depopulation, it was not seen to spell the end of the rise of gesellschaft over gemeinschaft.

One interpretation of this drew on 'sociological theories' such as those of Wirth which suggested that with population growth people resorted to an increasing use of formalized and instrumental orientated interaction. This idea was picked up in geography by advocates of an urban ecology but, as Lewis (1979) has observed, it remained rather un- explored within rural geography, a feature which he suggest reflected the view that continuing influence of the rural-urban dichotomy which presented all rural areas as homogeneous. However, a large number of studies did emerge in the United States by sociologists on how social behaviour might change in settlements experiencing rapid population increase (e.g. Freudenburg et al., 1982; Krannich, 1985; Krannich and Greide, 1984; Wilkinson, 1982, 1984).

A rather different link between population increase and changes in the character of communities was

proposed by another group of studies. Rather than seeing population size as a key factor, a number of studies drew attention to apparent the role of rural in-migration in this process and argued that this was leading to community values and practices being over-ridden by the values and practices of the city through urban to rural migration (e.g. Lewis, 1979;

Pacione, 1980; Pahl, 1965a,b). The rural 'new- comers', while physically leaving the city in their migration move were seen to retain their urban life- style, and hence were seen to be bringing 'gesell- schaft' with them. Williams again can be used to

illustrates this viewpoint:

Every development that has taken place in parish affairs has emphasized and reflected an urban way of life in various ways. Against this the traditional way of life is static and can offer nothing to replace the loss of community feeling which is a result of these developments. (Williams, 1956, p. 203)

The issue of population change and its various impact on gemeinschaft characteristics of rural communities dominated much of rural social geography from the 1960s. However, a series of criticisms began to circulate with the most renowned arguably being that of Pahl (1966). Criticisms were conducted at both empirical and theoretical levels. Pahl, for instance, highlighted studies which suggested that relations of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft could often be seen in the same place, while Brody (1973) ques- tioned the historical perspective advanced by many community studies by arguing that many of the customs and traditions cited as evidence of a long standing and at risk gemeinschaft were in practice often scarcely a hundred years old. Wright (1992) (p. 202) has similarly argued that there was a clear tendency for community studies to be "not historically rooted" and to "lose sight of detailed historical processes of historical change".

More theoretical claims included Pahl's suggestion that relations of gemeinschaft and gesellschafi have social origins which were independent of the spatial characters of places. This was summed up in his remark that, "any attempt to tie particular patterns of social relationships to specific geographical milieux is a singularly fruitless exercise" (Pahl, 1966, p. 293). Pahl also argued that if the notion of a rural-urban continuum was to be used at all it should not be as a device for classifying settlements and their associated communities but rather should instead be interpreted in a more dynamic way as referring to processes of change. This argument was summarized nicely by Lewis and Maund:

social change should not be viewed as 'place-deter- mined' explanation but rather as a process which involves the whole of society whether located in the city, the fringe or remote countryside...If such a stance is

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adopted then urbanization is a process which involves the diffusion of new ideas and attitudes throughout society. The diffusion path is socially selective and consequently...the communities which are affected experience considerable change. (Lewis and Maund, 1976, p. 19)

They go on to suggest that urbanization has three c o m p o n e n t s - - d e p o p u l a t i o n , population and repo- p u l a t i o n - whose differential diffusion, both socially and for Lewis and Maund particularly across space, account for social differences in communities.

The notion of rural social change as being the manifestation of a more societal wide change has a longer pedigree than just back to Pahl (cf Miller, 1996a). It can be seen to reflect a persistent sociological imagination which Williams (1985) (p. 96) has described as a "retrospect to an 'organic' or 'natural society'". In this view modern social changes such as commercialization, industrialization and urbanization are seen to have brought about 'a fall' in the nature of society from which all present social suffering and disorder originates. Williams suggests that this view is one of the most powerful myths of modern times and the writing T6nnies clearly resonate with the language of William's retrospect:

The theory of Gesellschafl deals with the artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the Gemeinschaft in so far as the individuals live and dwell together peacefully. However, in the Gemeinschaft they remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors, whereas in the Gesell- schaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors. In the Gesellschaft...we find no actions that can be derived from an a priori and necessary unity; no actions, therefore, which manifest the will and the spirit of unity even if performed by the individual- ... here everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of sharp tension against all others.

(T6nnies, 1957, p. 65)

belonging. Indeed Lewis' Rural Communities: A Social Geography may indeed represent something of a "signpost" to "a rural geography with an enlarged social imagination" (C. Philo, personal communication). However, it was a signpost which many ignored. In particular there emerged a series of criticisms about the evaluation of gemeinschaft over gesellschaft, and by implication, the rural over the urban. Newby and Buttel (1980) (p. 7), for example, described community studies as being a

"skilful blend of normative prescription and wishful thinking" rather than detailed "empirical description" and analytical "explanation". Even Lewis is highly critical complaining, for instance, that community studies "lack a sound theoretical base", that "the subjective nature of their data precludes true comparison" and that the development of an

"analytical approach" has been "piecemeal".

Overall, Lewis concludes that the future of community studies should be to "develop sounder hypotheses. .. [and] to test them with greater rigor, thereby working towards the development of a general theory of the geography of community life".

Such critiques of community studies highlight how the immateriality of community studies provided a stumbling block to many researchers. Indeed while some reference was often made to conceptual diffi- culties with community studies, in many cases it appears that it was the inability to apply analytical techniques which was most critical and which led many rural geographer, and also many other researchers, to turn their backs on community studies during the 1960s and 1970s [see Newby (1986) and Harper (1989)]. Where research was conducted it very often focused on the problems of delimiting communities and on establishing connections with demographic changes.

Gemeinschaft or community was hence seen as preferable to gesellschafi or society, a perspective which was also adopted by some geographers. Lewis, for example, quotes from Minar and Scott (1969) to suggests that the term community has a "humanistic manifestation" in that

'it expresses our vague yearnings for a community of desire, a communion with those around us, an extension of the bonds of kin and friends to all those who share a common fate with us', and therefore, provides 'the co-operative fullness of action, the sense of belonging, the face-to-face association with people well known'.

(Lewis, 1979, p. 29)

Such claims can be seen to represent a sociological imagination which is quite distinct from one which focuses only on clearly discernible materialities:

instead there is a plea to recognize the significance of vague yearnings, of desires, and of senses of

There were exceptions to these twin emphases particularly beyond geography. In the 1980s, for example, a number of anthropologists such as Cohen (1982, 1986), Strathern (1981) and Rapport (1993) began to conduct a series of rural 'ethnographies'. These studies very much sought to address the unobservable dimensions of community. Cohen (1983) (p. 12), for example, argued that the aim of his ethnography was "to penetrate subterranean levels of meaning". Emphasis was placed on experi- ential forms of research such as participant observation and many of these ethnographies explicitly sought to distance themselves from some of ideas which dominated the work of T6nnies and the community studies of the 1930s and 1950s. Cohen, for example, argued for studies which sought

to explore not generality and the norm, but to seek out diversity, to explore differences within the c u l t u r e - to

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Restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography 131 see, therefore not how culture integrates but how it

aggregates. (Cohen, 1983, p. 12) has very clear geographical and, indeed political geographical, aspects to it:

For Cohen, and also for Rapport (1993), the notion of community employed within the earlier community studies and within T6nnies' gemeinschaJ?/

gesellschaft distinction focused almost exclusively on the way meanings and behaviour in a locality might lead to social integration and coherence. They suggested that this emphasis was mistaken because it failed to examine the way people could differently interpret the same message or symbol or that people could undertake the same actions but for radically different reasons. In such criticisms these ethno- graphers were not alone: indeed Murdoch and Day (1995) (p. 8) suggest that Rapport's arguments echo

"what has become a standard verdict of the 'classic' rural community studies", namely that they

"projected a powerful image of the 'organic', unified social whole, within which all difference tended to be subordinated to an overwhelmingly shared 'way of life'... [in which] there appears no disharmony".

In other words, community studies employed a super-organic view of culture in much the same way as did some settlement studies.

Whilst seemingly distancing themselves from the notion of culture embodied in notion of gemein- schaft, some of these rural ethnographies exhibit a similar anti-modernism to TOnnies and the early community studies. Cohen (1982) (p. 3), for example, notes that while some people see the notion of distinctive cultures in urbanized and industrialized countries like Britain as being funda- mentally mistaken, in his view such arguments misunderstand "both society in Britain, and the very nature of culture". One of the central animating concerns of Cohen was to display, in all "its physio- logical intricacy", how people identified with the place where they lived, how they had a feeling of

"local distinctiveness". In this he argued he was turning away from "grand theoretical analysis and cold-blooded comparative sociology" and, instead, emphasizing "the local" and "the indigenous perceptions of the locality".

One can see here a social imagination which is open to many things beyond the most observable and measurable materialities. It is also a social imagination which still arguably draws on Williams' retrospect in that terms such as 'indigenous' resonate with notions of historicity and authenticity as much as did T6nnies account of gemeinschaft. Cohen's work hence differs from many social geographical studies of the time in that although he uses a similar social imagination he does not employ the same methodological or theoretical restrictions. Signifi- cantly, although not himself a geographer, his work

People...become aware of their culture and experience their distinctiveness not through the performance of elaborate and specialised ceremonial but through the evaluation of everyday practices. These practices become even more value laden in the communities...

located...on the 'fringe' of industrialised political economies and thus continually exposed to metro~

politan cultures which declare them to be parochial and irrelevant to contemporary circumstances. Very often, to remain in these communities is itself an expression of commitment, and commitment is sustained by contin- uous elaboration of the culture...The persistent 'production' of culture and the attribution of value becomes an essential bulwark against the cultural imperialism of the political and economic centres.

(Cohen, 1982, p. 61)

Cohen was hence very much concerned with spatial marginality and centrality. Furthermore in using terms like imperialism and commitment, Cohen's approach can be seen to be politicizing his study.

Indeed, his work can be seen as a clear illustration of the way the study of rural communities can, as Newby (1980) (p. 80) has put, have "a social, as well as a sociological rationale" if the research rationale is to outline "the dynamic of small rural communities in order to uphold their perceived strengths and to defend these qualities against threats to their existence represented by centralizing and bureaucra- tizing trends of modern society". For Newby this rationale underlay, usually rather implicitly, the work of many community studies of the 1960s.

Given that many geographical studies of this period employed similar ideas it may also well have under- pinned them as well, albeit once more implicitly. By contrast Cohen and some of his fellow ethnogra- phers of the rural articulated a political rationale much more explicitly. While Cohen disagreed with several aspects of the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft

approach of T6nnies and the community studies, he actually shared their view that rural communities were coming under threat from modern society.

Where they differed was that Cohen explicitly sought to resist this threat, while T6nnies and the early community studies often failed to articulate any theoretical rationale or seemed to view the modernization of rural communities as an inevitable, albeit arguably undesirable, outcome.

In the work of people like Cohen the study of social geographies of the rural can be seen to have moved significantly beyond the restricted imagination which it has been argued has dominated much of social geography. The need for such a movement can be demonstrated by considering the social geography of the private and public which are employed within T6nnies and the early community studies ]see also Harper (1987); Phillips (1994); Wright (1992)]. With