Living Villages: A frameworking review of academic and cultural perspectives on rurality

Despite a renewed political and academic interest in the topic, there is still a general lack of knowledge and understanding when it comes to rurality and rural lives. At the same time, the knowledge that we do have is often distorted through a predominantly urban lens. These facts make it difficult for those wishing to enter the fields of knowledge and practice to get a good grasp on what to expect or on what work is necessary for a successful project. Unfortunately, grasping rurality as a whole is near- if not completely impossible, due to the highly diverse and locality-specific nature of rural places, peoples and cultures. As part of an emerging research strand on music in rural contexts at the Hanze research group Music in Context, this paper brings together various strands of thought, theories and (auto)ethnographic knowledge, not to create a definitive answer to the question ‘what is rurality?’, but rather to provide handholds for social-artistic researchers and practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of their particular rural context and to reflect on their own assumptions about rurality. These handholds include questions such as: Are there actually inherent differences between rural and urban? How is the rural imagined? How do those images affect rural realities? What elements make up rural culture? What do culture and creativity mean and look like in rural contexts? And what are common pitfalls when working with rural populations? Together, these questions, among others, create the beginnings of a framework for approaching and working in rural contexts, allowing researchers and practitioners to be better informed and prepared when engaging with the field of study and/or practice.