The Fruit of Difference: The Rural‐Urban Continuum as a System of Identity1

Abstract

Abstract Today sociologists tend to doubt the rural‐urban continuum, the idea that community is more characteristic of country places than cities. Based on an ethnographic study of an English exurban village, I argue that the continuum remains an important source of identity for country residents, one from which they derive social‐psychological and material benefits. They root this conception of themselves as country people in nature, making this identity a particularly secure one. These real social consequences suggest that sociology should no longer doubt the reality of the rural‐urban continuum, at least at the level of the definition of the situation. It, therefore, should remain an important topic of sociological study.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 170 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.