ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what it means to live in a rural community. For many rural people, their community is a key component of their social world. In rural areas, the material form of a place interacts with local cultures. Natural disasters can devastate rural economies and the well-being of residents overnight, although they can also galvanise a community by increasing cohesion and strengthening local social and support networks. The gemeinschaft and gesellschaft have been central in literature concerning rural communities for more than a century. Rural communities with reasonably strong horizontal ties and a modicum of gemeinschaftlich interaction have the potential to provide identity, distinctiveness, significance, solidarity, constancy and liberation for their members. Rural communities can give a person a sense of identity, including the experience of belonging somewhere in the social and physical universe, and a feeling of distinctiveness.
