A rural sense of place: intimate experience in planning a countryside for life

摘要

I come to the countryside not from the distanced view of the parachutist seeing a landscape but from the culturally intimate (Herzfeld, 1997) view of an ethnographer who has carried out extended fieldwork in two locales, a village in Nepal and a hill sheep farming community in the Scottish borders, whose inhabitants experience themselves as living in rural places. In making this distinction between a distanced and an intimate view of the countryside, I am reminded of Michel de Certeau's graphic account of the difference between the experience of New York city based upon the distanced view (now tragic) from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre, the view of the architect, of the city planner, of government, a view of voluptuous pleasure of "seeing the whole" (1984, p.92), and the experience of New York city constituted from an intimate sensual view of those who use it, walk in it, live in it and thereby create it as their place. In pointing to the differences between these two modes of seeing and understanding and locating myself in one of them, I do not imply a critique of the other. Rather, my aim is to bring to Wakeford's discussion about and planning for a countryside for life a conception of rural that attempts to capture the culturally intimate experience of those who live in it. Note here how I have shifted the nature of the project of understanding from 'countryside' to 'rural', from a type of space, i.e. a landscape, as object of understanding by an analyst (including planners) to a type of experience of a relation between people and place. Note also that I purposely use the adjectival form of the word 'rural' ungrammatically without a noun that it modifies to disturb us into recognizing that it is the referent of the word that I am treating as problematic.