ABSTRACT
In ‘Recognizing rusticity’, Gerald Creed and Barbara Ching (1997) propose an archaeology that digs around in ‘places that are culturally remote: in the sticks, in the middle of nowhere, in the backwaters of this country and many others, in a word, in the countryside’ (Creed and Ching 1997:1) in order to think about the role of the rural/urban distinction in structuring cultural hierarchies in contemporary society. They go on to argue that contemporary theorizations of identity politics have largely disregarded the social and cultural identifications made around this binary-a neglect that is only beginning to be addressed from within what we might call ‘rural cultural studies’. Of course, as with all of the other structuring binaries of identification, the rural/urban distinction is loaded: the rural is marginalized while the urban is centred (and the metropolitan doubly so).
