Scaling the Rural: Reflections on Rural Cultural Studies

Abstract

How can cultural analysis be brought to bear on the rural? This central question for rural cultural studies prompts our exploration of how the rural has been delineated and interpreted in the developed West, as a departure for thinking about new intellectual approaches to rurality that span spaces, times and academic disciplines. In this paper we adopt a broad schema, discussing insights from rural studies, cultural geography and history. As Michael Woods (Rural Geography) has handily pointed out, ‘rural’ is one of those curious words which everyone thinks they know what it means, but which is actually very difficult to define precisely. Attempts by academics to define and delimit rural areas and rural societies have always run into problems, sometimes because the distinctions they have drawn have been rather arbitrary, sometimes because they have over-emphasised the differences between city and country, and sometimes because they have under-emphasised the diversity of the countryside. (15, emphasis added) The complexity and variations of rural environments, economies and populations in Australia is illuminated in our discussion of how the rural may be conceived of through five different scales: the global, the national, the state, the regional or local, and the bodily (or at least at the level of individuals). We extend existing debates about defining ‘the rural’ and ‘rurality’, seeking a more nuanced multi-scalar reading of the meaning of the rural within contemporary Australian culture and society. The spatially specific aspect of this broad sketch is particularly germane to recent concerns in the discipline of geography about the social construction of scale (Marston ‘The Social’, ‘A Long Way’), and it responds to calls to pay greater attention to the role of scale in rural studies (Bell; Little and Austin). It also emerges from claims that the rural has been neglected in recent historical discourse (Darian-Smith) and that as a consequence much academic commentary on contemporary rural issues in Australia is ‘strangely disconnected from an understanding of the longer course of Australian rural history’ (Davison and Brodie xi). We hope both to draw upon and move beyond our specific disciplinary backgrounds in geography and history to engage with a new framework for thinking about rural cultures in Australia.