ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the issues and tensions, considering their relevance to the understanding of rural communities. It considers studies of social, economic and cultural boundary marking as outlined in studies such as Lamont and Bennett, before turning its attention to concepts of culture employed within class analyses. It has been argued that the renewed 'culturalist' approach to class needs to pay greater attention to the concepts of culture, not least because of the range of conceptions employed. Drawing on claims that Bourdieu's concept of culture needs to are disaggregated and moral as well as socio-economic and cultural forms of symbolic boundary drawing recognized. The chapter has advanced the notion that rural studies of class might usefully adopt an assets-based approach to class which recognizes institutional, objectified, embodied, social and emotional forms of capital, as well as economic forms of capital such as the forces of production long recognized in Marxist and other forms of class analysis.
