The purpose of my paper is to re-examine the question 'How to be rural', posed by the sociologist Marc Mormont in 1990. By way of ontological reasoning, I hope, it is possible to find a constructive concept of the rural. A... [ view full abstract ]
The purpose of my paper is to re-examine the question 'How to be rural', posed by the sociologist Marc Mormont in 1990. By way of ontological reasoning, I hope, it is possible to find a constructive concept of the rural. A concept such as this would enable us to understand the many different ways of considering ourselves to be rural. Constructiveness also calls for an inspiring and spirit-raising concept of the rural, so that we not only define rurality as remoteness or peripherality with regard to civilization and progress. Opening up the concepts used makes it possible for us to understand and evaluate the objectives and activities of human beings – and the possible rurality adopted by them. An in-depth understanding gives us as rural social scientists a justifiable ground to take part in public discourse and to make recommendations on public policies.
The starting-point of my paper is the so-called cultural turn, experienced in rural research in the 1990s. For rural research, the cultural turn meant a growing influence of philosophies such as poststructuralism and postmodernism. After the cultural turn, we began to define the rural as a social construct or representation rooted in space. The problem, I think, with the current dominant conceptions of the rural is that they are based on a physical or geographical definition of space. In the current – modern, late modern or postmodern – society, rural space can also be regarded as an abstraction, a social construct that is largely detached from the material, physical space. In addition to concrete, literal geographical space, rural space can emerge, for example, as an abstract, metaphorical – social, cultural, psychological and/or affectual – space.
The recent explorations of the concepts of space, place, time and emergence, by the philosophers Jeff Malpas and Günter Figal, provide us with new intellectual tools for the conceptualization of rural and rural space. If we mix the thinking of Malpas and Figal, we are in the middle of approaches related to phenomenological hermeneutics and even, in the case of Figal, realism. In my paper, I try to apply the thoughts of Malpas and Figal in order to understand human beings, being human and being rural. Today, it is possible for us to be rural in many ways. From societal viewpoint, it would be important to emphasize such constructive modes of being rural that have reformative capacity with regard to society.
