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Once, rural life was its own measure: it was an ancient
way of living upon the land between the town and the wood. In the modern
reduction of traditional life forms to fragments or single aspects of
the earlier richness and fullness, rural life is collapsed into husbandry
or farming thus distorting and decontextualizing even these activities
to the point that their original significance is lost. Of course, husbandry
and farming are critical, essential, features of rural life, but these
basic occupations occur as part of a larger web of activities and occupations
that are elaborately evolved and integrated into a pattern of living that
is more than farming or husbandry.
Any adequate understanding, verstehen, of rural life must avoid
the fragmenting and reductionistic tendencies of Cartesian epistemology
in social analysis. Rural life is not an aggregate of either a few or
many discrete functions; it is not a specifiable and fully explicable
set of exteriorized relations; it cannot be fully rendered by the detailings
of demographics and economics, by the focal enumeration of formalized
obligations. Rural life is a dynamic entirety, a whole, elusive to reduction
to parts, rather like an ancient and continuing dance than a building
for which there is a detailed blueprint.
Rural life, then, must be understood in part intuitively and sympathetically,
not analytically and descriptively. In the talk of farmers, sometimes
in the sermons of preachers, in the gossip of young people on the porch
at the store, what is not said may be the whole point of discourse:
a conversation may wander through a dozen threads of gossip and never
quite state but only imply at every point what was already known to be
the case. That is the sense of the expression "to talk about
it;" talking "about" something is not the same as saying
or naming. This indirection and polite obliquity makes the meaning of
many forms of rural life systematically elusive to the objective chronicler.
The wise chronicler learns this: of the really important things, you can
know only if you don't ask and if you do ask you will never know. The
one who would know must understand, and the one who would understand knows
that there is much that cannot be known or said.
Rural life may be the mode of existence in the modern world that represents
the most anti-Cartesian enclave remaining against the ravages of the searchlights
of modern reason and objectivity: rural life is inherently traditional
and covenantal and ambiguous. It is not susceptible to reduction to a
single or mono-interpretation. The hermeneutic of mono-interpretations
is the typical social science expression of Cartesian reductionism. Such
mono-interpretations of rural life transform farming and husbandry into
agri-business: essentially economic and occupational explanations of life
forms; such interpretations do not recognize the multi-layered richness,
spatial array and diversity, and temporally extended covenantal community
on and of the land in terms of the life of which any activity or occupation
acquired its meaning and sense.
Rural life is preeminently lived: not discussed, not thought about, not
outlined or drawn, not listed or accounted for: nor even written. It is
spoken and done and danced and handled and sung and built, but these forms
are significant only in the doing and the recalling of the doing of them:
they have no life of their own beyond the living. For this reason rural
life is fragile, evanescent, vanishing: it the moment it is grasped it
disappears. Today as it is being grasped and handled and interpreted,
it is most susceptible of disappearing. At best, we can peek around the
corner of the barn, step through the gate by the shed, smell the distant
sweetness of hogs in the wind, but we cannot hold or turn it around and
look at it or say what we know before thought ever rises to speech.
The land and its people are there.
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