ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fantasy becomes enacted so that community shifts from its abstract status into a material 'thing' that is created, sustained and experienced in and through everyday discourse and practices. It is the idea of the social experience of community or the 'structures of community feeling' which this extract appears to describe that lies at the heart of the chapter. It begins with a return development of some of the sociological tussles with the concept of community that concerned and debates on conviviality in urban settings to ask if these can connect with and help make sense of rural practices of community-making. It is the ambiguities in the regulatory and/or reciprocal role of social leisure organisations and the potential limits of conviviality in rural social relations. It is in Susan's comments in the Farleigh WI focus group about being introduced to the WI by a neighbour to address the fourth aspect of the 'trouble' with community.
