Paradoxical Conjunctions: Rural Property and Access to Rural Resources in a Transnational Environment

According to Haugen and Lysgård (2006:176), it is not so much the postmodern turn that changed concepts of the rural sphere in recent years, but the "cultural turn," especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. The result has been "the whole system of beliefs about the rural [was] questioned," so that "rurality may be understood as a social construction where the meaning of the term is floating, changeable and contextual" (Haugen and Lysgârd 2006:176). The main body of rural sociology, on the other hand, remains "functional" in tone and "policy-oriented" in focus, with the rural "treated as a fixed category" and defined by criteria such as population density and a lack of social services (Haugen and Lysgård 2006:176). Here the main contrast of traditional rural society with cosmopolitan urbanity remains entrenched (see for example Brown 2007; Collins and Quark 2006). In this survey of recent literature, we were struck by the way that the rural sociology literature employs a set of "ruralisms" that remind us of Tsing's (2000) discussion of "globalisms" (see for example Tovey 1998; Mormont 2003; Pratt 1996; Haugen and Lysgård 2006; and contributions to the edited volume by Havnevik et al. 2006). In addition to the conflation, futurism and focus on circulation that Tsing outlines, however, we find an additional set of rhetorical devices that take the form of binary oppositions, including: tradition versus modernization; sociality (proximity and intimacy) versus individualism (in the neo-classical economic sense); communitas versus civitas; place of production versus place of hedonistic consumption; rural (read "natural") landscape versus industrial "blight."