This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins by addressing why and how a series of contested concepts: rurality, ethnicity, community powerfully and simultaneously intersect in the phrase 'the English countryside'. It argues the increasing turbulence as to what the rural means and the shift, as Michael Woods has put it from 'rural politics' to the 'politics of the rural'. The chapter examines the phenomenon of the rural community. It is concerned with reviewing the concept of ethnicity and the ways in which locationality, non-human things and the corporeal are integral to processes of ethnic identification. The chapter focuses on entanglements of the relation between ethnically invested spaces and notions of community. It returns to the notion of ethnicity and the argument as being assembled through composite mixes of the human and non-human and suggests that this may work against the totalizing and excluding tendencies of ethnic formation.