strangers asking strange questions? a methodological narrative of researching belonging and identity...

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doi:10.1016/j.jru

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Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 177–189

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Strangers asking strange questions? A methodological narrative ofresearching belonging and identity in English rural communities

Sarah Neala,�, Sue Waltersb

aFaculty of Social Sciences, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UKbLiteracy Research Centre, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, UK

Abstract

This paper emerges from a current research project that examines the relationship between contemporary English rurality and notions

of identity and belonging. While this is primarily a methodological narrative we argue that this narrative speaks to an analysis of current

rural relations. The paper concerns itself with two key methodological issues that have arisen during the ‘doing’ of the research. First, it

examines our own relationship, as ‘outsider’, urban-based researchers, to the rural and the use and/or relevance of our biographies as

resources for making ourselves seem less ‘strange’ and for accessing, and being in, rural environments. At the same time as providing us

with a map into our micro rural worlds the paper draws on this biographic-research relation in order to problematize notions of

homogenous rural identities and polarized rural/urban identities. The second part of the paper argues that who we were/how we were

perceived had a relation to what ‘truths’ and accounts we were told by our respondents. More particularly, we show how our use of focus

group interviews had a direct role in the rehearsal and presentation of these ‘truths’. Given the current contestations and tensions over

what and who ‘the rural’ is, it was clear that those involved in the focus group discussions wanted to give us particular stories that often

fell into a consensus pattern of either ‘rural idyll’ or ‘rural crisis’ narratives. Drawing on Simmel’s notion of the stranger and focus group

data we argue that for these narratives to be told we, as researchers, were ascribed by the group members to shifting positions of intimacy

and remoteness.

r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In 1992 Chris Philo urged rural geographers to rethinkthe relationship between the rural and its marginalized,subordinated and invisibilized others. The debate thatfollowed has been a key shaper in the theoretical andempirical directions of rural studies over the 1990s and2000s (Cloke and Little, 1997). In their response to PhiloMurdoch and Pratt (1994, p. 85) warned against anysimplistic re-focusing of the analytical gaze on ‘hiddenothers’ in rural spaces and posed the question ‘should wenot attempt to reveal the ways of the powerful, exploringthe means by which they make and sustain their domina-tion?’ With this debate in mind we have been con-cerned with examining the nature of the relationshipbetween the contemporary English countryside and the

e front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

rstud.2005.08.009

ing author.

esses: [email protected] (S. Neal), s.walters@lancaster.

rs).

‘rurally included’. By this we mean those rural populationswho can appear to make a confident, dominant and aseemingly uncontested claim to rural belonging. Ourinterest is in the qualitative excavation of the co-ordinatesthat make up this relationship: what are these co-ordinatesand in what ways are these narrativised? What are thetensions and nuances that mark, bind and fracture thecategory of the ‘included’? How and in what places dosenses of ethnicity, Englishness and nation enter and shapethese processes of narrativization?From its inception what was apparent to us as

researchers1 was the importance of a reflexive account of‘doing’ this research. Who we were and what our relation-ship was to the project mattered. Of course we are notmaking any claims here to originality in our recognition ofpositionality. Our account follows what Cloke and Thrift(1994, p. 4) have described as the ‘self-reflective turn in

1The project had Leverhulme Trust funding for one full-time research

fellow.

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ARTICLE IN PRESSS. Neal, S. Walters / Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 177–189178

cultural studies’. In the placing of our selves in themethodological narrative our intention is to demonstratethe ways in which our speaking positions shed analyticallight on the micro social worlds in which we have engagedourselves in two distinct but closely connected ways. First,our research stories reveal empirical data about rural,social and place relations. Second these stories raisereflexive questions as to the research process itself. Theproject predominantly used focus groups for data collec-tion and the paper considers the place of our selves in thisparticular interview setting. Our concern here is not todiscuss ‘what we have found’ but to discuss the process andexperience of the ‘finding’. While we detail the project, itsintentions and its design, it is the ways in which experiencesand constructions of rurality and rural belonging—oursand our co-conversationalists—constantly inserted them-selves or ‘leaked’ into the project’s fieldwork that isexamined here. This methodological examination occursthrough the consideration of the intersection of three keyfields—the notion of the researcher as a stranger; the‘bleed’ of our autobiographies into the data collectionprocess and our dialogical encounters in the focus groupinterviews. While cultural geographers such as Cresswell(1996), Hetherington (2000) and Askins (2006) have drawnon the concept of the stranger to analyse rural socialrelations we use it as the ‘hinge’ between the epistemolo-gical and the methodological. It is through the presentationof a stranger-self intersection that we simultaneously offer aspecific, reflexive scrutiny of ‘ways of seeing’ in qualitativedata collection and evidence some of the contemporarycontestations, desires and tensions which characterizeclaims to rural belonging.

2. Setting the scene: project research themes and design

frames

At the heart of the project are three concerns. First, theways in which the English countryside can be assembled asa cultural and social space in which particular versions ofmajority-ethnicised belonging are reproduced and rein-forced. Second, the ways in which recent high levels ofurban to rural migration and socio-economic changes inthe countryside have (re)shaped contemporary ruralcultures and populations. The third concern has been toaccess everyday articulations of belonging, commonality,difference and place by members of local rural commu-nities in the English countryside. The connection betweenthese concerns and the category of the ‘rurally included’has occurred through a focus on two civilian rural socialorganizations that are very much associated with thecountryside—the National Federation of Women’s Insti-tutes (NFWI) and the National Federation of YoungFarmers Clubs (NFYFC). In our accessing of these rurallyassociated voices the project is not making any claims toresearching a representative sample of rural populations.Our intention was clearly not to access such a sample butrather to reach a particular rural constituency.

At the time at which we write there is an unprecedentedpublic interest in the English countryside and who residesin and belongs to it. This engagement with the rural isevidenced by such factors as the gentrified repopulation ofthe countryside and the middle class (counter) urban desireto ‘live in it’, the formation of the Countryside Alliance andthe high profile controversies over hunting. Tensions overwho does and doesn’t reside in and visit the countrysidehave been especially apparent in relation to ethnicity andracism as the widely publicized comments of the Chair ofthe Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillipsdescribing the relationship between the English countrysideand minority ethnic groups as one of ‘passive apartheid’demonstrate. There is an element of ‘delay’ to the positionthat Phillips has chosen to take up as it neglectsthe longevity of concerns about issues of ruralracism, exclusion and formations of mono-ethnic identityin rural areas. These concerns have been the focusof political activity (e.g. the Black EnvironmentalNetwork); policy research (Jay, 1992; Derbyshire, 1994;de Lima, 2001; Askins, 2004); policy initiatives (Dhalech,1999) and academic scrutiny (Agyeman and Spooner, 1997;Neal, 2002; Charaborti and Garland, 2004; Neal andAgyeman, 2006). This academic work has occurred withina broader theoretical context in which rural studies andcultural geography have addressed the ways in whichidentities are spatially constituted and the contested natureof spaces and who is seen—and not seen—as legitimatelybeing in/of them (Cresswell, 1996; Cloke and Little, 1997;Philo, 1992; Sibley, 1997; Hetherington, 2000; Matless,1998). What this diverse body of work has done isdemonstrate the importance of the scrutiny of rural spacesand places in the understanding of identity formationand particularly their intersection with ideas of nationand ethnicity.What the project has addressed is the processes by which

rurality and Englishness mutually constitute each other butwithout making any direct reference to otherness. In thisway we have sought to disturb and disconnect theethnicity-race couplet urged by Hall (2000). At the sametime we have been cognizant of the constant slippagebetween ethnicity and race categories and the processes bywhich ethnicity is racialized and race ethnicized (Hall,2000; Brah, 1996). The work of Barth (1969) and Wallman(1986) is particularly useful as it has drawn attention to theconstructed nature of ethnicity and the centrality of thesocial boundaries of ethnic identity formation. As Hutch-inson and Smith (1996, p. 9) note what is important forBarth is ‘the boundary itself and the symbolic borderguards (language, dress, food etc.) that perpetuate thecommunity’. The project has concerned itself with the‘core’—what this is—that the boundary surrounds andasks what are the discursive practices that structure thesenses of belonging that are contained, apparently wellwithin, the boundaries. We follow Probyn (1996, p. 19)here in privileging belonging over identity ‘because thelatter term captures more accurately the desire for some

ARTICLE IN PRESSS. Neal, S. Walters / Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 177–189 179

sort of attachment, be it to other people, places or modes ofbeing’.

2.1. Rural social organizations and rural communities

The focus on the NFWI2 and the NFYFC3 allowed anexamination of two organizations that have a high profileassociation with the rural and, particularly with the NFWI,an association with Englishness (see Andrews, 1997 forexample). Internally, the NFWI and the NFYFC seethemselves as playing a central community role that is re-emphasized in the face of rural change as this statementfrom the Chair of the Women’s Institute Federation inDevon makes clear, ‘membership of the WI is about givingto the community. It is also about friendship, educationand helping each other. In many ways as rural post officeshave closed and the church has withdrawn it is the WI that

holds the community together’ (Daily Mail, 10. 6. 2000.Emphasis added). The NFYFC similarly sees itselfoccupying a key position for promoting community values.For example their introductory statement states ‘the idealof citizenship is fundamental to YFC and is provided bycreating an awareness of community responsibility’(www.nfycf.org.uk).

There is a plurality in the role of these rural socialorganizations; they are about leisure provision, but theyare also about the construction of ‘villageyness’ and anetwork of belonging. Being a member of the NFWI or theNFYFC involves a process of being bound in to the villageand/or the locality. In this way these rural socialorganizations can be seen as taking up possibly conflicting,or at least ambivalent, places in the terrains of ruralidentity—as ‘border guards’ and/or ‘defensive sites’ inwhich (white) English ethnicity and ‘village values’ are

2The Women’s Institute is perhaps the best-known rural organization.

The first institute was established in North Wales in 1915 and it was and

remains the largest social, and women’s, organization in England and

Wales (www.womensinstitute.org.uk). Today the NFWI has a quarter of a

million members spread across 8000 locally/village based institutes that

are themselves organized into 70 county and island federations in England

and Wales. The national executive and head office is in London. The

membership base is heavily clustered in the 50–65 age range and has

significantly lower numbers of younger women members. The membership

base has no profile on ethnicity (Wallman, 1986). NFWI has a monthly

magazine titled Home and Country.3Like the NFWI the NFYFC is an old organization. It was established

in Devon in 1931 and it also has an extensive structure and a significant,

although smaller, membership. There are 700 Young Farmers Clubs

existing in England and Wales. These are grouped into 49 Federations

which themselves are organized into six regional areas in England

(www.nfyfc.org.uk) The organization has approximately 20–25,000

members in these locally based clubs and members range from 10 to 26

years old. The national executive and head office is based in the National

Agriculture Centre in Warwickshire. The organization has a quarterly

magazine, Ten26. As with the NFWI the NFYFC have a particular

association with gender although for the NFYFC this is a masculine

association. This is somewhat misleading as the NFYFC has an estimated

50/50 gender balance and, reflecting the changing nature of rural

communities, 50% of NFYFC members no longer have any direct

connection to agriculture.

reproduced and reaffirmed, or, as inclusive communityorganizations which are open and alive to the changingconstituents of contemporary rural worlds. By accessingthe voices and perceptions of their members the projectexplored this tension.

2.2. Case study areas, focus group interviews and access

In order to access the micro-social worlds in which theseorganizations predominantly operate, the research projecthas accessed and engaged with the members of localWomen’s Institutes and Young Farmers Clubs in threedifferent rural areas. It is clear from earlier research (Neal,2002) that the English countryside cannot be conceived as ahomogenous geographic, economic or social entity. Dif-ferent areas of rural England vary extensively across theseaxes and, in recognition of this, the project selected threecounty delineated geographical areas—Hertfordshire,North Devon and Northumberland—in which to approachlocal Young Farmers Clubs and Women’s Institutes.4

In total, we conducted thirty focus group interviews withlocal WI and YFCs in these case study areas. Increasinglyused in academic social research, focus group interviewsallow researchers access to group-based norms anddynamics and to the process of collectively produced socialknowledges (May, 1997; Green and Hart, 1999). It is thevery interactive character of focus group interviews that isvaluable because it illuminates ‘the comparisons thatparticipants make among each other’s experiences andopinions [which] are a valuable source of insights intocomplex behaviours and motivations’ (Morgan, 1997, p.15). Focus groups were envisaged as being particularlyappropriate for the project because they offered a forum inwhich members would be surrounded by their friends and/or acquaintances and this would help facilitate theinteractive discussion of topics that could be perceived as

4Hertfordshire was selected because of its location at the edges of north

London and its proximity to the metropolis and its consequent ‘commuter

belt’ identity. Despite this, and a heavy concentration of motorway

networks, Hertfordshire has remained ‘an attractive pastoral and

agricultural landscape’ (Municipal Year Book, 2002, p. 503). In Howard’s

End, a novel set in Hertfordshire and centred on ideas of class and nation,

Forster (2000, p. 198) describes the county as ‘England at its quietest, with

little emphasis of river and hill; it is England meditative’. It is also a rural

England that the census (2002) survey reveals as an affluent and

economically active region. It has a younger than national average

population profile and although its minority ethnic population is lower

than the national average Hertfordshire has a significant black and

minority ethnic population (4.8%). In contrast, North Devon was chosen

because of its relationship to a dominant imagining of an ‘authentic’

English countryside, i.e. the classic ‘chocolate box’, thatched cottage, rural

idyll. Because of this ‘identity’ North Devon is attractive to tourists and as

a retirement destination. This is reflected in its higher age profile and its

lower levels of employment. The inclusion of Northumberland was a

means of taking the project to the outer reaches of England with its

remoteness from the South East and its geographical proximity to

Scotland. The ethnicity profiles of both these regions evidence the

dominance of whiteness. The Census data shows 99% of the North

Devon population to be white and Northumberland to be between 99.3%

and 99.8% white.

http://www.nfycf.org.uk

http://www.womensinstitute.org.uk

http://www.nfyfc.org.uk


unfamiliar, emotive and complex (Farquhar, 1999, p. 47).Focus groups also directly related to the ways in whichboth social organizations operate i.e. WIs and YFCs meetin groups on a regular basis. In addition, the participation-led nature of focus groups means that they are lessdominated by the researcher than would be the case in anindividual interview setting. This was again importantgiven that locality and collective conversations were centralto the project. These were the advantages that we envisagedin the design of the project. The challenges and difficultiesof focus group facilitation were apparent to us as webecame more experienced in running them and it is thesechallenges that form the basis for the second part of thispaper. In many ways the predicted advantages of usingfocus group interviews did transpire. At the same timehowever there was a double edge-ness to these advan-tages—they could also become disadvantages as we discussbelow.

Access to the local clubs and institutes was negotiatedthrough local WI and YFC organizers. While the samplegroups most closely resemble the snowball method therewas an element of spatial sampling as we wanted to selectclubs and institutes that reflected the local geographies ofeach of the areas. Although establishing access was alengthy process, and complicated by their committeestructures, both local case study organizations were keento take part in the project. A willingness to be involved insocial research is often multi-motivated and the role of theresearcher, who they are and what they say, is only onepart of a complex set of reasons behind the willingness ofpeople and/or organizations to become respondents. Socialresearch does, to a large extent, depend on the goodwill ofpeople to become participants. We were, as our paper’s titlesuggests, unknown fieldworkers asking ‘strange’ questions.The one to two hour interview schedule was organizedaround a series of prompts (and pictures) which aimed toaccess perceptions of rurality, locality and attachment;imaginings of Englishness, nation and belonging; defini-tions of local and national change and continuity in thecountryside and views on the WI and YFC and theirconstituencies and roles in rural communities. In thiscontext the ways in which we, as professional outsiders,were situated by respondents and the ways in which wesituated ourselves, played a critical role in the researchprocess. How were we seen and perceived? How did weattempt to ‘de-stranger’ ourselves and persuade people towant to be part of the project? How did we build rapportand engagement and facilitate conversations which, at theirheart, sought to make the familiar strange?

2.3. Strangers, researchers, fieldwork and familiarity

There is an element of strangeness at the heart of socialresearch: theoretically—in encounters with ideas andinformation, and empirically—in designed encounters withothers (Cloke, 1994). Researchers are often unknown tothose respondents who are part of the ‘designed encounter’.

Researchers may also be asking respondents for intimate orrevelatory accounts. Given this, the status of the outsideror stranger researcher in the field is a complex one. In orderto scrutinize this relationship we have drawn on twodistinct but nevertheless connected theoretical approachesto the concept of strangers in social relations—the postcolonial theorist Sara Ahmed (2000) and the 19th centurysociologist Simmel (1950). These approaches have offeredparticularly appropriate frames for thinking through ourselves as strangers in the research process.Sara Ahmed (2000, p. 22, our emphasis) argues that

‘strangers are not simply those who are not knownybutthose who are, in their very proximity, already recognized

as not belonging, as being out of place’. She goes on to notethat the ‘stranger is not anybody that we have failed torecognize but somebody that we already know as astranger, as a body out of place. Hence the stranger issomebody we know as not-knowing, rather than somebodywe simply do not know’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 55). The momentof ‘knowing the not-known’ is one that includes a numberof co-ordinates not least those pertaining to ethnicity andnation, sameness and difference (Askins, 2006). Asresearchers we inhabited the place of the ‘professionalstranger finding out about strangers’ (Agar, 1980, p. 44cited in Ahmed, 2000, p. 56). We were strangers but wewere recognized as familiar and knowable strangersbecause we could be viewed, or were ‘readable’, throughour whiteness and Englishness. Our seeming sharedsameness with our focus group members fundamentallydisrupted our strangeness.However, if we were ‘known’ in the Ahmed sense of

strangers a sense of strangeness did remain. In ourparticular rural research site an ‘outsider’ was particularlyconspicuous and our readable familiarity did notalways offset our out of (local and discursive) placeness.Our focus on village based rural organizations wheremost people knew each other (and many had donefor years) accentuated our un-familiarity. In other wordswhile we traversed some stranger-to-familiar borderswithout difficulty there were still outsider borders markedby other variables that we had to navigate. Most obviouslywe did not belong to the villages, local areas or counties.Alongside this we were working in a geographic andcultural space currently associated with high profiletensions and struggles. The contemporary political climateand a populist polarization of urban and rural identitiescreated a necessity for mobility in the places that we, asresearchers, occupied. At times we stressed our own ruralattachments and other times we stressed our urbanoutsiderness.This spatial and social fluidity meant that Simmel’s work

on the figure of the stranger, conceived through the notionsof proximity and distance, had a particular relevance forour reflections on positionality. Simmel’s concept of thestranger offers a means by which to understand theresearcher/researched relation. Simmel suggests that ‘near-ness and remoteness’ are the inevitable elements of all

ARTICLE IN PRESS

5These controversies and events have lent the urban/countryside binary

a more acute currency of which we as researchers were aware and which

we regularly encountered.

S. Neal, S. Walters / Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 177–189 181

forms of social relations (Ritzer, 2002) and argues that therole of the stranger is a mainly a contributive one,

His [sic] position in [the] group is determined, essen-tially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from thebeginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do notand cannot stem from the group itself [y.] to be astranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is aspecific form of interaction (Simmel, 1950, p. 402).

It is possible to read the figure of the social researcherinto this definition of the stranger i.e. the figure that comesinto a particular group and encourages a particular type of(revelatory) social interaction. Simmel’s work spokedirectly to our experiences of entering the intimacy of thefocus group setting from an outside(r) position and theways in which we attempted to manage this. Part of thisexperience and management was captured by Simmel’s ideaof the ‘objective’ stranger who is,

Not radically committed to the unique ingredients andpeculiar tendencies of the group and therefore ap-proaches them with the specific attitude of ‘‘objectivity’’.But objectivity does not simply involve passivity anddetachment; it is a particular structure composed ofdistance and nearness, indifference and involvement(Ritzer, 2002, p. 403).

This non-detached objectivity, combined with the(potential) mobility of the stranger can mean that,

He often receives the most surprising openness—confidences which sometimes have the character of theconfessionalyhe is freer, practically and theoretically;he surveys conditions with less prejudice (Ritzer, 2002,pp. 404–405).

Simmel’s comments here are especially pertinent to thesocial researcher or the ‘professional stranger’ as the‘surprising openess’ of respondents, informants, co-con-versationalists is what researchers tend to be seeking asthey design projects, negotiate access and draw up inter-view schedules. To stay somewhat or partially strange andoutside may then be beneficial to the process of finding out.However, Simmel’s concept of social geometrics alsomeans that proximity or nearness is part of our relationto those we are intending to ‘know about’. This need forliminality or ‘in-betweenness’ led us to reflect on who wewere in relation to rural spaces and the impact and effectthat our articulation of this relation had on the collectivenarratives we were told by those people we talked to.Although we turn now to our own rural relation we returnto view our fieldwork encounters through an Ahmed–Sim-mel bricolage of the stranger.

3. Recognized strangers, place relations and autobiography

We have argued that in the field we were recognizablestrangers—ethnicity, gender and class rendered us as(seemingly) immediately knowable. While we would not

want to, nor did we have to, vocalize our ‘sameness’ withour respondents we did choose to vocalize versions of ourgeographic attachments. Our own relation to the country-side was one we articulated and made known in ourdialogues with the people we spoke to in the project. At acertain level, indirectly, this process did of course situate usin the research environment through our sameness. Thisemphasis on our familiarity with the rural made us a morefamiliar and unremarkable presence. Our relationship torural place(s) came into play in our methodologicalnarrative in three key ways:

�
As a resource which could be called upon to facilitateaccess to the field and the ‘doing’ of the research. At thislevel our rural relationships worked as ways of makingus more recognizable and of building rapport. � As autobiographic narratives that disrupt the construc-
tion of both homogenized rural identities and polarizedrural/urban identities. This polarization is particularlyapparent because of the topicality and high profile ofrural concerns in the public and political arenas at thetime of the research.5

�
As part of our situatedness in the research siteinfluencing what our co-conversationalists selected totell us about their own experiences and perspectives andwhat we heard as our listening was filtered through ourexperiences and perspectives.
In other words, who we were and our (undeclared)ethnicity and our (declared) place relations constantlyreinforced and disturbed our familiar–stranger, insider–outsider research relation.There now exists a substantial commentary on reflexivity

and the self in the research process. The feminist culturaltheorist Elspeth Probyn (1993, p. 60) has argued that theuse of ‘the self in [particularly] ethnographic accounts andtheory is motivated by the postmodern claim that science,along with other metanarratives, is no longer sufficient tothe task of describing the world’. Certainly, the last threedecades have seen increasing interdisciplinary concern withthe complexities and legitimacies of the ‘speaking positions’of the researcher/author (Clifford, 1986; Geertz, 1988;Probyn, 1993, 1996). The direction of the research gaze, theplace of the researcher/s and the effects of the gender and/or ethnicity of the researcher in research settings, haveoccupied a number of feminist and anti-racist methodolo-gical accounts (Edwards, 1990; Frankenberg, 1993; Troynaand Carrington, 1993; Fine, 1994; Neal, 1995; Haw, 1996;Troyna, 1998). Our account of our selves in the researchprocess is located in this ‘practitioner’ approach, i.e. as aroute through which we can examine the ‘experientialmoment of interacting with others in the field’ (Probyn,1993, p. 22). At the same time our account is influenced by


those scholars whose work has engaged with autobiogra-phy and geographic attachments and identity/ies andreflected on the relational nature of these to empiricaland theoretical research and writing (see for exampleWilliams, 1979; Eyles, 1985; Cloke, 1994). In presenting theintersections between our autobiographic selves and theresearch encounter we are partially responding to Cloke’s(1994, p. 150) argument that, ‘it is crucial to acknowledgesome of the dilemmas in ethnography which arise fromtensions between the ethnographer’s self and the ethno-grapher’s attempts to describe ‘other’ subjects’ andpartially responding to the task that John Eyles (1985, p.8) set himself. This was ‘to make explicit my own sense ofplacey.I want[ed] to expose those values and presupposi-tions that influence my interpretations of places.

3.1. Sarah

Raised on a smallholding in the Pennines and then on asmall dairy farm in West Wales, I had, until I waseighteen, a highly rural upbringing. As child this wasfilled with ponies and farm animals and days spentplaying on the moors with my brothers or making secretdens in abandoned farms. As an adolescent living in thecountryside became characterised by an awful depen-dency on either the rare bus service (last bus 9.30 pm) orparental goodwill (itself a rarity with a moody sixteenyear old) and boredom. This teenage boredom wasparticularly spatialised as it centred on the desire for thecity and for London, the ‘ultimate city’, in particular. Iam not alone in the experiences of rural boredom and adream of living in London. John Eyles (1985, p. 12)thought of his childhood village as a ‘place to be got outof rather than enjoyed’. He directly echoes my ownmetropolitan desires when he too describes his inten-sions to escape ‘with total finality, the way many othersdo, by going to London’ (Eyles, 1985, p. 13). Similarly,in her anthropological study of Little Midby, a village inNottinghamshire, Anna Laerke (2003) describes how‘young people themselves told me of their longing toleave Little Midby behind, to travel and visit great cities,to move to ‘where things are happening’. For everybodyI listened to, boredom seemed to be the teenagecondition par excellence.’ For most of my post-eighteenlife I have lived in London and think of myself as deeplyattached to it. And yet there is a pastoral draw. A ruralembeddedness. The nature of the research project meansthat I recall and revisit the rural landscapes of my childand adolescenthood. My parents were urbaners butidealists. They were part of a 1970s movement of young,often creative, dissidents who were to the political left. Asort of small, beatnikish, anti-modernity movement thatsought to escape capitalism and industrialism, suburbiaand cities. They were drawn to rural remoteness, nature,a different way of life and self-sufficiency. Thesepainters, writers, potters, photographers and environ-mentalists bought ruined cottages or farms and taught

themselves traditional rural skills and crafts and tried tolive financially by them. I was raised as a vegetarian,without television, without an inside bathroom, until Iwas thirteen and, until I was sixteen, without electricity.My house, a beautiful 18th century farm that had longago been left to sheep and broken farm machinery, wasbought and carefully restored by my parents and theirfriends and farmed by traditional non-mechanisedmethods. We were out of place and different to ourfarming neighbours—our relation to the land and ourvegetarianism was equalled only in strangeness by ourlack of television. This out of place-ness was quiteapparent to me. Flagstone floors, range fires, gas lights,mullion windows, hay making by hand with a horse andcart may now make an unremarkable lead story in thecountry lifestyle magazine market but stood out in the1970s and 1980s. I can still recall my mix of longing anddisdain for a farmhouse with wallpaper, carpets, atelevision and a farm with a tractor. My love of horseswas in part my attempt to make a claim on aconventional, affluent, dominant rural identity. Butonly in part. My horse riding was of a non-conventionaltype—unconnected to riding school lessons and gym-khanas and more to do with freedom and the space ofthe moors that surrounded our farm. Reading Probyn’s(1993, p. 39) accounts of her and her mother’s love ofhorses I recognised immediately their ‘non-Pony Club’relationship with horses, of ‘having to buy cheap horsessaved from glue factories, a world in which riding was arough passionythe desire for being at the very edge ofcontrol’. When I was sixteen we moved to West Wales.Again this was motivated by my parents desire to seek aremoter rural. In West Wales I was more reassured. Inthe early 1980s West Wales had become attractive to asignificant number of English dissidents seeking ‘alter-native lifestyles’. While my family were still out of place(still farming Jersey cows, still vegetarian, still notelevision) there was an established and more dissidentcommunity, living in benders, tepees and convertedbuses, for example, who began to make us look lessstrange.

I have then an ambivalent rural identity. One in which Isee myself as ‘unincluded’. I don’t belong to (though stilldesire?) a certain dominant version of rurality. HoweverI am still clearly able to articulate a sense of belonging,despite my Londonness, to the countryside. So I am notexcluded. I see my rural relation as one shaped bydiscontent and the desire to escape from it and theenjoyment and familiarity of the return to it. Thisambivalence lingers over the fieldwork as the followingexample, documented in my field notes, evidences. At anearly stage in the project’s conception I visited Barbara,a key Women’s Institute organiser in Hertfordshire.

Barbara picks me up from the station and drives me toher large dairy farm that is a beautiful, semi-timberedTudor farmhouse. It is the kind of farm I longed for as a


child. It is July and sunny. We sit in her garden amongstthe hollyhocks and I talk to Barbara about the projectand other things. From where we sit I can see fields andhedgerows and trees. We are only about half-an-hourfrom North London but it would be hard to believe. Ifeel the need to mention immediately my own country-side connections. I notice and make a fuss of Barbara’sdog, Sam, a lovely smooth-haired fox terrier andcomment on what nice dogs they are. Barbara isimpressed that I recognise Sam’s breed. Fox terriers,highly popular in England in the 1930s, are relativelyrare these days. I have a fox terrier myself and I tellBarbara this. My dog, with his associations of nationand history, becomes a temporary symbol of mycontinuing rural authenticity (although his habitat isactually only North London parks). I am able to talk ofdogs and dairy farms (including milk quotas) and myvillages in Yorkshire and Wales. There is a Goffman-esque (1959) sense of offering a performance of ruralityand of a very particular rurality, the kind that I neverhad a convincing claim on when I lived in the country-side myself. However, this performance or ‘impressionmanagement’ (Goffman, 1959) is not a cynical exerciseto ease research access but rather a means throughwhich to build rapport, to say ‘yes this is familiar to me,I know this/your world’ and, after all, my own ruralrelation is part of my self. Neverthless, it is a deliberateperformance that draws upon a particular set of propsand resources and is heavily inflected by class, English-ness and whiteness. It conceals, in what Goffmandescribes in his dramaturgical approach as the ‘backregions’, the more dissident aspects of my ruralupbringing. The performance is not without its poten-tially discrediting moments, for example when I say Iwas never a member of the Young Farmers Club and myMum isn’t in the WI. These admissions are disruptionsto my rural ‘ performance’ and indicators of mydifferent rural identity. This different rural identityemerges again when Barbara invites me to stay forlunch. Lunch is a huge affair, the mythical farmhousetable piled high with food. Barbara’s husband and oneof her adult sons join us. What I had dreaded is ofcourse there on the table; big plates of nicely laid-outhams and a large, meat pie! When she notices mymeatless plate Barbara asks if I am vegetarian. When Iconcede this she asks for how long. When I reveal that Ihave been brought up vegetarian and that my farmingparents are themselves vegetarian there are againexclamations of surprise and doubt. Vegetarian farmers!How odd! Can they be real farmers?

(Sarah’s Fieldwork Diary 8/7/02)

What my biography and its interaction with thefieldwork evidences is the ways in which it provided ascript for me to use in a dialogical and rapport buildingmethodological approach. The unreliability of my scripttestifies to the extent to which my rural relation differs

from Barbara’s and is indicative of a more diverse ruralconstituency. Sue’s account of her rural relation presents adifferent narrative. It shows, on the one hand, how she, likeme, drew on it for methodological advantage while on theother hand her narrative evidences the instability of therural/urban binary and further challenges the notion ofdiscrete urban/rural boundaries.

3.2. Sue

I grew up in many different places in England but,unlike Sarah, I have never lived in the English country-side. My homes in childhood and as a young adult werealways located on the residential edges of towns orcities. Even when I left England, during my twenties andthirties, and became an ‘ex-patriate’ I repeated thispattern and lived in various residential or market areason the periphery of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largestcity. I have always lived somewhere between the urban,inner city centre and the countryside or bush.

My contact and ‘knowledge’ of the rural then comesabout not through a familiarity with the daily rhythmsof life there nor through the experiences of growing upbut through walking and other leisure activities. As asmall child I went on regular walks with my parents andthe family dog through the water meadows, bluebellwoods and along the river beyond the residential limitsof my first home. Later, in another home, the familywalked every afternoon to the beach across commonground with skylarks singing and back past a farm withhorses and cows in the fields. I have strong memories ofday trips to the Lakes and of my grandparents’ storiesabout the day trips they had also made there in theiryouth. As a teenager I became a Youth Hosteller andspent my first moments of time away from my familywalking with friends in the countryside of Kent andSomerset. The rural as child and as a young person wasfor me a space, an opportunity for personal freedom, aplace to play. As an adult I have carried on walking and,since returning from Tanzania, have spent holidayswalking in the English rural either on Exmoor orDartmoor, in Sussex, the Lakes, in the Pennines or theYorkshire Dales. Since returning it has also becomeimportant to walk during the week, or at weekends, as abalance to work and social life and in this way I havecome to know small areas of rural Norfolk, Suffolk andBerkshire. As an adult walker the rural continues to be aspace, a place in which to recover some sense ofcoherence and particular aspects of the English rurallandscape have become important to me and are key tomy continued presence in England.

Being a walker has proved useful in gaining access to allthree of our research sites and has allowed me, inconversations with organisers and with the focus groupsthemselves, to make some claim to having a stake inthe rural. In Devon I have walked through many of thevillages and the surrounding countryside where the


focus groups have taken place or where organisers liveand I have been able to talk about the village or askabout walking around there. In the long, slow process ofgaining access to Northumberland Women’s Institutes Iwas able to talk about a wonderful day’s walking I hadhad on Lindisfarne the summer before and my desire toknow Northumberland better, as a way of developingsome kind of relationship with the regional secretaryand demonstrating my enthusiasm for coming toNorthumberland again and learning a lot more aboutit as a region.My family, despite their suburban roots, have alsoprovided me with a certain access to the rural. In the lasttwelve years both my mother and my sister have movedto rural areas, my mother to North Devon and my sisterto an isolated farmhouse in Scotland after a number ofyears in South Devon. Neither are involved in farming,although my sister keeps some sheep, some chickens anda horse, but they are living in the rural, bound up withvillage life as incomers, and this has become a tenuouslink with the rural in my biography. Both my motherand sister talk about rural or village life and we havestarted attending County Shows where I wanderthrough sheds of different breeds of sheep, cattle andpigs and my mother and sister tell me about them. Mymother’s and sister’s presence in the rural have beenparticularly useful, and called on, during the conductingof the fieldwork especially in gaining access to Women’sInstitutes and individual YFCs, in the facilitation ofthese focus groups and in gaining a degree oftrustworthiness amongst other villagers. Early in theproject, the fact that I knew some villages in Devonquite well through visits to my mother and sister provedinvaluable when trying to gain access to the Women’sInstitutes there. A regional organiser who we weredepending on to agree to the Women’s Institute beingincluded in the research lived in a South Devon villagethat I knew and my knowledge of the village wasinvaluable during my first telephone conversation withthis organiser in turning me from a distant researcher ina university a long way away into someone with whomthere was a slight connection and someone who knewsomething of village and Devonshire life. Later whencontacting the individual Women’s Institutes andYoung Farmers’ Clubs in North Devon to discuss theirtaking part in the research, I was able to call on my localknowledge of the area and to reveal that my motherlived in a nearby village as a way of suggesting mytrustworthiness and my sensitivity to rural and villageissues. In the case of the Women’s Institutes, I was alsoable to suggest in this way that I might be a little likethem, that I shared in something of the same classed,gendered and ethnic identity as the members I wasspeaking to. In this way I used the fact that my motherlived in a North Devon village as a way of presentingmyself as knowledgeable, trustworthy and with someclaim to being ‘like them’ and worthy of being spoken to

and included. It allowed me to talk about their villagesand praise them and show on occasions that I knewsomething of their local concerns. This access to somelocal knowledge, and just the simple fact of havingheard village names before and knowing where theywere, was invaluable when facilitating the focus groups.

Another connection in my biography to a ‘rural-of-sorts’ is my regular listening over a period of twenty-twoyears to ‘The Archers’, Radio Four’s ‘everyday tale ofcountry folk’. (Even in pre-internet/web Tanzania Ilistened to tapes of the Omnibus Edition mailed to meby my sister). This fictional depiction of English farmingand village life has become a reference point, a source ofa knowing about the rural, in the sense that it providesme with a picture of what farming and village life couldbe like, of how the rural is represented amongst Englishmiddle-class urbanites, and, as such, a starting point forsomething to say when I am ‘in the rural’. This hasproved invaluable on a number of occasions during thefieldwork. During my first fieldwork visit to a farm withSarah to talk to Barbara (the regional organiser for theHertfordshire NFWI) I realised, as we drove into thefarm yard, that I had never been inside a farmhouse,talked to a farmer or been on an English farm beforeexcept when walking across farmland on one of mywalks. This realisation resulted in a moment of mildpanic.

What was I to say to Barbara? How could a make somekind of favourable connection so that she would bewilling to let me meet and talk to other WIs if I wasgoing to walk into her farm and say something stupidand behave like an ignorant townie? Surely she wouldsee me and my future questions to WI members as awaste of time, as too shallow and superficial? Surely mylack of familiarity would scupper the whole project. Wewould never get access!

(Sue’s Fieldwork Diary 30/9/04)

The panic was resolved by thinking of the variousfarming families depicted in the Archers and reassuringmyself that I could at least use that knowledge of afiction to ask some questions or make some commentseven if it was simply at the level of ‘is it really like theydepict it in the Archers?’ This got me through thefarmhouse door and gave me enough confidence to joinin the talk about the project.

3.3. Claims on the pastoral

We have outlined how we were able to call on aspects ofour biographies to make some claim to the rural, how wewere able to call on different connections to the rural toperform a certain kind of rural belonging. The followingaccount, from Sarah’s fieldwork diary, shows how ourdifferent rural selves were momentarily opened up in a


small interaction between Sarah, Sue and Barbara inBarbara’s farmyard.

Sue tells me as we park in Barbara’s farmyard that shehad never been on an actual working farm before. Afterour meeting Barbara accompanies myself and Sue toSue’s car parked in the yard. Sam, the dog is there andthere are pigs snuffling happily around their pen. Thepigs are quite beautiful, a sort of creamy colour withchocolate brown markings. Despite my ‘born and bredrurality’ I have no idea what type they are but Sue,despite never being on a working farm before, recognisesthe breed from the Archers and asks Barbara if they areGloucester Old Spots. Barbara confirms that they areindeed Gloucester Old Spots and then says they are dueto go for slaughter the next day. (Sarah’s FieldworkDiary 30/9/04)

What are these three momentary claims on the pastoral?For Sue the rural is a site of pleasure and recreation,whether in the form of walking through it or listening to arural soap programme—and the latter allows her toconstruct ‘real’ rural knowledge. For Sarah the rural is asite of formation and familiarity but also a site in which shewas/is out of place at the same time as being in place and inwhich she lacks the rural knowledge to identify the pigs.For Barbara the rural is a site of livelihood and living, therural where the sending of animals to slaughter is routineand unemotional. Is she shocking us ‘non-rurals’ inrevealing the fate of the animals and reminding us of the/her ‘real rural’ (harsher) world? It is a micro incident butone that challenges the notion of an authentic or unitarycategory of rurality.

Despite our combined dissident rural and suburbanbackgrounds, we were able to move into rural spacesreasonably effortlessly. We were able to selectively draw onbiography and related resources to provide performancesof rurality. This performance was one that incorporatedethnicity (silently marked out by our whiteness), class (weare university researchers, and could allude to a middle-class rural heritage) and gender (we are unthreatening andyoung(ish)). The question then is, to what extent did thenature of our fieldwork performances and entrism impacton the ‘truths’ and accounts that we were told and whichwe heard?

4. In the field: insider–outsiders researching rural spaces

4.1. Focus groups, performance and presentations of the

rural

If there were ‘rurally appreciative’ performances on ourpart as researchers then the experience of conducting thefocus groups was one in which the members of these alsoengaged, to a certain extent, in performance and impres-sion management. While the narratives from thefocus groups often appeared as contradictory, a centraldiscourse, in all the interviews, was a gemeinschaft

presentation of rural life. For the Young Farmers groupsthe idea of a harmonious and neighbourly communitytended to be presented through a ‘rural crisis’ narrative, asbeing under increasing threat and vanishing. For theWomen’s Institutes this tended to be presented through a‘rural idyll’ narrative, as still very much in existence. Inboth types of articulation the narrative of the caring ruralcommunity alluded to (a particular form of) Englishness.As Brian Short argues,

if the word ‘rural’ has its own aura, so too of coursedoes ‘community’. Put the two together and the effect isto multiply the mythology to something more than thesum of its constituent parts. Add ‘English’ and the effectis like a chemical chain reaction, which grows and glows,subfusing everything in a good green light—but anideological light, which can obscure as well as ornamentthe object of analysis (Short, 1992, p. 4).

There was often something of Short’s ‘good, green light’in the focus group conversations as this extract shows:

Penny: Just here [the village] is very pretty.

Lesley: Oh yes.

Pip: Oh yes, this green and everything.

Penny: With the thatched cottages.

Jan: Now we’ve opened up the church you know, that iswhat, actually that is quite a nice, when you walk up atnight, when the lights are on in the church and it’scoming shining out through the window, although itsdark you’ve got this light shining.

Penny: And what I love is that they’ve got the clockchiming again.

Jan: Oh yes (lots of murmurs of agreement).

Penny: And that’s what I like, that’s country life.

(Appleby WI, Hertfordshire 7/1/04)

This conversation brings to mind (Matless’s, 1994, p. 77)suggestion that the ‘nucleated English village tends to havea focus, often the church, physically, historically andemotionally at the core’. The connections that are beingmade between landscapes and villagescapes call on a senseof Englishness without any reference to the nation–stateitself. The summoning of nation in this way comes throughwhat Billig (2002) has identified as a ‘banal’ framework ofhailing national belonging. The members of the focusgroup make a chain of culturally specific meanings linkingthe landscape and their village—the green, thatchedcottages, the church, the clock. In doing so they assemblea geographical space to which their emotional attachmentis clear and they assemble a geographical space thatresonates with a familiar and dominant imagining ofEnglish ethnic formation.Through their focus on the social village the following

accounts similarly speak to Short’s ‘light’ withtheir emphasis on a ‘supportive’, ‘happy’ and ‘knowing’community:


Elsa: All my childrenywere brought up here and I’m sointerested that they have all come back to live nearbecause it is such a happy villagey/Shelia: When we bought our house the three previousowners of it all still lived in Little Greeningy.so people,once they get here don’t want to move away.Sue: So what is it about Little Greening then? You’vementioned that it is a happy village, you’ve mentionedthat. Tell me again about why.Elsa: I think that it is very supportive. (Murmurs ofagreement). Yes, we all support each other and knowwhat’s going on.(Little Greening WI, Hertfordshire 25/11/03)

Ava: I organise the British Legion Poppy round and myround takes me so long because I know the people sowell. It takes a long time because people say ‘alright wellcome along and have a cup of tea’ [lots of laughter]. Ittakes a long time but you don’t mind, it’s nice.Audrey: I used to find that when collecting the ChildrenSociety boxes. It was a real social event. [Lots of yeses]Irene: It’s because everybody knows everybody.(Haverfield WI, Devon 22/01/04)

The utopic notion of a ‘happy village community’ has aparticular tenacity in the idyllization of rural spacesalthough it is not confined to these. (It is an ideal typethat appears in highly urbanized spaces too.) It isimportant to stress that our argument here is not that wewere simply being given a ‘best narrative’ of our focusgroups’ villages nor is it to argue that accounts ofneighbourly and caring rural communities are necessarilyartificial. Rather our argument is a methodological andreflexive one. As ‘professional strangers’ we experienced aform of dominant consensus amongst the members of thefocus group that the caring village was the main narrativethat focus groups wanted to tell us. We are not suggestingthat this impression management was pre-organized oreven explicit but, rather, it was a product of the collectivesocial exchange between those known to each other and thepresence of an outsider asking questions about the(ir)countryside and their senses of belonging. The interactiveemphasis on an endangered or existing gemeinschaftpresentation does not mean that there was not tensionsin these accounts—there were—but what is notable is theextent to which this narrative of pastoral life was privilegedby the focus group members and dominated what theyselected to tell us. This made Short’s reference to thedifficulties of scrutiny in the face of the ‘glow’ of the notionof English rural community particularly appropriate for us.

Challenges made within the focus groups to ge-meinschaft narratives tended to be limited and very muchframed within the bounds of what the rest of the groupagreed with. More diverse or competing narratives werethen more difficult for us to elicit and access. This difficultyis captured in the Appleby WI discussion when Ruth, whohas lived in the village since 1987, alludes to her senses ofisolation and divisions within the village:

Ruth: I mean I found that the only way that I wasmeeting people was through the WI or through the pubor things like that. But I think that a lot of peoplewho’ve got dogs or children at school do meet thevillagers butyI find it quite a classy type of village.There’s a lot of class distinctions in the village. I don’tknow if you think that? [This question is to the rest ofthe group].

Others: Never noticed it.

No.

No.

But you’re in the middle/

Ruth: We’re right in the middle of two different classesof people.

Olive: I suppose you are yes.

Others: Yes, yes.

Ruth: Yes.

Sue: When you say in the middle do you meanphysically?

Ruth: Our house is physically in the middle if peoplewho are yeah well off and/

Someone: Yes.

Ruth: And people who actually work on the farm, theyused to be farm labourers.

Someone: That’s right, yes.

Ruth: And it’s, it’s still therey.as far as the classsociety, which I know people hate that word but I stillthink its around, would you say fifty–fifty?

Jan: I wouldn’t have thought that much nowy.There isno squire here now is there?

Someone: No.

Jan: And to me it’s classless but that’s just the way I am.

(Appleby WI, Hertfordshire 7/1/04. Page 4 of transcript)

It is possible to see from this exchange that Ruth offersher observations about class to the group to verify.However her claim is particularized by the other groupmembers and attributed not to the village but to Ruth’stwo neighbours. When Ruth tries again to assert a half-and-half division in the village this is rejected by Jan.Reading the transcript of this discussion it is possible to seehow Ruth’s comments on social difference in the villagecontinue to linger at the edges of the group’s conversation.For example, later in the discussion it is returned to:

Pip:yyes there’s a huge mixture and mostly we get onfine but there’s always an odd oney

Jan: Ruth was saying about the different classes but I dofind they mix.

Lots of voices.

Someone: I think Ruth agreed with that.

Pip: Most of us mix.

(Appleby WI. Page 11 of transcript)

Again the idea of a harmonious community is re-presented as the dominant account and while support forRuth is voiced within the group it is expressed in terms ofRuth having conceded to the argument on mixing. Much


further into the discussion Ruth’s position on class is againreintroduced by Olive, a long established resident of thevillage.

Olive: I find it more sort of friendly than say Ruth does,she feels more of a split, I never did.

Ruth: Well I probably said that wrongly/

Olive: No, no (Ruth is trying to carry on speaking andjustify/explain what she meant) and I think it dependson your attitudey


Ruth’s raising of class appears as a whisper of anotherstory that appears and disappears during their discussions(we have provided the transcript page numbers to helpconvey a sense its presence within the group’s discussion).The excerpt above marks the final reference to Ruth’scomment. In saying that she ‘said it wrongly’ Ruthdistances herself from the idea of a divided villagecommunity.

It is not clear what Ruth’s experiences of the focus groupinterview have been. It may have been an uncomfortableexperience in that she alone offered a more critical versionof life in their village. It is interesting that, towards the endof the group’s conversation, it is Ruth who suddenlyquestions Sue’s questions. In doing so she opens up thelegitimacy of Sue’s presence in the group. It emerges after along discussion about the local landscape, and what it isthat makes them feel at home in it:

Ruth [to Sue]: Why are you so interested in what welike?6

Sue: Because we’re, one of the things we’re interested inis about people’s feeling about the landscape and whatthat has to do with their feeling about who they arey

Penny: It seems to be quite a theme with us.

(Lots of people saying yes).

Jan: We like where we live.


It is certainly possible to read a (re)positioning here ofSue as an outsider. The raising of the strangeness of Sue’spresence/questions works as a reminder to Sue of her statuswithin the group. At the same time there is a certainelement of finality in Jan’s, ‘We like where we live’statement. It is inclusive of Ruth and re-locates Sue to aplace of social distance.

4.2. Focus groups, unease and proximity and distance

It is through such encounters that Simmel’s concept ofthe stranger held such resonance and relevance to ourfieldwork presence. We have discussed our own nearness torurality and our ability to draw on a particular (classed andethnicized) set of resources to perform rurality and renderus recognizable and less strange. At the same time, the

6Sue had explained the project in her introduction and the group had all

signed a consent form on which the aims of the project were listed.

contested nature of our enquiries of the group modified theSimmelian strangeness of Sue. Because the focus groupinteractions were between people all known to each otherand were publicly expressed then admissions and revela-tions were withheld or withdrawn (see above). Sue’srelation of nearness and distance within the focus groupswas then labile. She could inhabit one or the other in quicksuccession and move between the two. Sue was able, tosome extent, to self-assign herself to either position but shewas also assigned to either by the group. The followingextract from a Young Farmers focus group interviewillustrates this instability and way in which nearness andremoteness are washed through by the tensions andcontestations as to who inhabits rural spaces.The members of this focus group are nearly all connected

to farming and had lived in Hertfordshire almost all oftheir lives. The wider group discussion, unlike the WIdiscussions detailed above, was one in which articulationsof exclusion and rural cultural loss predominantly featured.For members of this group there is a narrative in whichthey, and ‘their rural heritage’, are threatened by the ‘olddanger’ of gypsies on the one hand and a ‘newer danger’ ofwealthy urban incomers on the other. It is at the end of thediscussion that Sue’s outsider status re-emerges for thegroup:

Dave: What do you think of us then? What do we comeacross as? As you’ve been sitting there, from a town?(Laughter in the group)Sue: You’re putting me on the spot now! What do Ithink of you in terms of whether you’re country people?Dave: Yeah. Do you think we’re a bunch of whiners?Sue: Not at all. Oh no. I don’t think you’re whiners atall. No it’s been very interesting.Steve: She’s just saying that.Sue: Do I lie so badly! (Laughing and then serious). No.Actually what you have said has been very interesting.Really. You’ve been saying things I wasn’t expectingyou to say.Paul: Are your views the same as ours then or not? Whatwe’re saying, do you agree with what we’re saying?Sue: Well I don’t know, I don’t know because I’vealways lived in a city or town. I’ve never even lived in avillage so I don’t know any of those perspectives. But it’sgood to hear themy

(Young Farmers Club, Hertfordshire 24/1/04)

There is some unease amongst the group about theopenness of their accounts to Sue and the extent of whatthey feel they have revealed to her. There are clearlyanxieties evidenced by the group’s demand to know whatSue thinks, the harsh self-description as ‘whiners’ and theneed to know if their perspectives concur with what Suethinks. While Sue does seek to respond to this anxiety andreassure the focus group members when she is pushed byPaul to reveal her own thoughts Sue invokes her distanceand stresses her urban, non-rural identity as a strategy ofavoiding having to openly associate or disassociate herself


from the conversation that has taken place. That this doesnot dispel worries as to how the group’s views may sound isdemonstrated in the response that is then made to Sue. It isto Sue’s self-assigned urban-ness that the response directlyspeaks to as one of the group (not identifiable) then extendsa highly qualified welcome to the rural,

It’s not that we’re against townspeople. (Lots of ‘Nos’from the group). They are more than welcome to cometo the countryside as long as they don’t make a mess andrespect our way of life and don’t want to change it.(Young Farmers Club, Hertfordshire 24/1/04)

It is in the final exchanges between the group membersthat Sue’s nearness and positive presence within the groupis reinvoked. In an appreciation of the interview providingan opportunity to speak Sue is momentarily placed in aposition that reflects Simmel’s suggestion that the strangercan inhabit the role of a confessional. This can be heard inthe following comments from Steve and Paul:

Steve: It’s good to get things off your chest isn’t it?Paul: It is actually.(Young Farmers Club, Hertfordshire 24/1/04)

It is in such conversations that Simmel’s social geo-metrics seem to be particularly apparent in the researchcontext. As Ritzer argues the peculiar location of thestranger can allow access to unusual patterns of interactionin which ‘the stranger becomes an organic member of thegroup’ (2000:161; Simmel, 1950, p. 408). This ‘peculiarity’is evidenced in the exchanges between Sue and other groupmembers and is there in Steve and Paul’s comments as wellas in their previous enquiry as to Sue’s thoughts andjudgments of them.

5. Conclusion

We began this paper by arguing that in analysing theprocess of collecting the data and entering the field, lightcan be shed on the site of the research gaze. While this is byno means a new argument our fieldwork accounts are areminder of its pertinence. The research processes steeredus into a reflexive re-thinking of our autobiographies,connections and ambivalent attachments to the rural andthe limitations and leakiness of urban-countryside borders.Our own, diverse rural relations provided us with certainsemi-marked footpaths into the world of our research site.Having these ‘maps’ assisted our access negotiations andfed into the conversations and discussions in the groupsand into our hearing of those narratives at the time of theinterviews and in the (re)reading of the transcripts. These‘maps’ and the wider contested contexts of what rurality ‘is’also influenced the ways in which we were placed in termsof perspectives being voiced. However this did notnecessarily render the meaning-making process any clearer.For example, on the one hand we heard many of thegroups we spoke to present a narrative of a happy, ‘morallyaffluent’ (Short, 1992, p. 5) village with caring, neigh-

bourly, ‘mixing’ communities. On the other hand, did wehear this account ‘more’ because it is one that jars with our‘knowledges’ and experiences of the rural?We have argued that Ahmed and Simmel’s notions of the

stranger provide a structure through which our fieldworkrelation can be narrativized. Hetherington has suggestedthat ‘when the stranger arrives in our midst, and comes toreside in a world with which we are familiar, anxietiesoccur’ (2000, p. 169) and this does have applicability to theresearch setting. Our research design, in which the focusgroup members were all known to each other, were friendsand neighbours and part of local rural networks, accen-tuated our outsiderness. In the micro arenas of theinterviews we have shown, in our accounts, how therewas anxiety and guardedness as well as revelation andintimacy. This range reflects our articulated positions as‘rurally appreciative’ strangers who could self-ascribe or beascribed by the groups to near and remote locations withinthe shifting social geometries of the interviews. Ouroccupation of either of these locations was inherentlyunstable and was disrupted and challenged by (a) groupmember(s). However, we would conclude that whilst ourstranger-ness as researchers was largely positive in theSimmelian sense—there was a desire to tell us ruralstories and generally an enjoyment in telling them—ourstranger-ness was always bounded, and contained in theAhmed sense, by the familiarity of our whiteness andour Englishness.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust whosupported the project. We would like to thank the membersof our focus group interviews for so generously giving theirtime and participating in the research. We are grateful tothree anonymous referees and the Editor for theirinvaluable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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Further reading

Cohen, A., 1982. Belonging, Identity and Social Organisation in British

Rural Cultures. Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Murdoch, J., Pratt, A., 1997. From the power of topography to the

topography of power. In: Cloke, P., Little, J. (Eds.), Contested

Countryside Cultures. Routledge, London.

Walters, S., 2003. Bangladeshi pupils: experiences, identity and achieve-

ment. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Oxford University.

strangers asking strange questions? a methodological narrative of researching belonging and identity...

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