ABSTRACT
As has been evident throughout this book, constructions of rurality in both geographical and cultural arenas have tended to map out maps and paint pictures in which social problems have been (if you will pardon the pun) blurred. In the fertile imagination of a band whose penchant is to reveal ordinary life ‘as it is’, the apparent idyll and charm of a rural setting is mapped against the reality of anxiety, boredom and corruption by power. Yet the focus here is the ‘man’ in the ‘very big house’ who used to be a successful city dweller but who escaped the rat race only to find that country life is not all that it is cracked up to be. As in Animal Farm, an escape from the old (urban?) tyranny is merely replaced by a new (rural?) tyranny. Thus the supposedly problem-free nature of rural life is exposed for the myth that it is, but the ‘victim’ in the spotlight remains assuredly in the mainstream of 1990s cultural values and socio-economic positions. In this chapter, I want to touch on a number of questions about the ‘otherness’ of the ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ in rural societies. These questions relate principally to the implications of a cultural turn in social science for the continuing identification of, and protest against, the ‘evil’ of poverty. Given that otherness is usually encountered in relation to selfness, I should immediately indicate my own moral biases here. My own geographical imagination is fired by social issues such as poverty at least in part because of a moral rootedness in Christian thought and socialist Christian ideologies (see Cloke 1994 for a fuller explanation of this), which identify poverty as both (literally) evil and a crucial target for political action. I have, therefore, a keen interest in the material
circumstances of individuals and households as well as in the power relations associated with the powerlessness of poverty. Similar concerns, of course, are traceable to other moral roots in other people. However, the ‘morality’ of geographies of poverty also involves a more Kantian concern to understand the moral suppositions which inform the lives of particular people in particular places. Driver (1988) has been prominent among those who have argued that ‘outside’ researchers need in some senses to unlearn their own moral presuppositions and instead to seek out those of their research ‘subjects’ in order to evaluate and interpret their findings. ‘Giving voice’ to marginalised people involves a restraining of the researcher’s voice as well as an amplifying of the voice(s) of the researched.
