| dc.description.abstract | This thesis discusses the relationship between place and identity in a small town in a rural setting in England. I use an approach inspired by phenomenology, where I look at how people dwell, their everyday steps over this particular landscape. I claim, contrary to some social theorists, that place continues to play an important part in everyday life in postmodern space, as people are searching for belonging to some place or other. Place can therefore be seen to be one important factor in the production of identity.
Welderfield is an ambiguous place. Situated in the midst of England it has by no means escaped the flows of globalisation or other effects of our postindustrial space, yet for many of the residents evidence of postmodernity is played down. Instead, there is a focus on pleasant social practices imbued with elements of the past. There seems to be what I call a romanticising by the residents over this town in a quest for a rural identity. This, I claim, is done through place-making: Particular pieces of the landscape become invested with meaning through our everyday activities, and thus become places as opposed to merely points in the topography. I suggest that people through their place-making practices produce certain senses of place, and that this in turn partly determines how people see themselves. The conflict I witnessed between the traditional and the modern, between nostalgia and the present, is minimized through each individual place-making practice.
I conclude that the residents of Welderfield experience affiliation to their place despite of, or perhaps even because of, processes of globalisation in postmodernity. I suggest that in this place, a sense of groundedness prevails over uprootedness, and that this in turn produces a certain identity which I have called a rural identity. | nor |