Afterword: Village space and the experience of difference and hierarchy between normative orders

The articles in this special issue contribute to a wider conversation about the ongoing prominence and complexity of villages as sites of human experience today. ¹ The contemporary world is a place of ever more elaborate and intensive configurations of spatial difference, spatial hierarchy and cross-spatial connection. This world is also increasingly urban and urban-centred. But our fieldwork has led this issue’s authors to think that understanding experiences and practices of rural people is critical to understanding the world at large and specific regions within it, because structures of rural life are of a piece with surrounding social formations. The authors converge in developing the following interlinked main themes: rural villages are translocally connected places; villages’ global connectivity is complex, in the sense that villages sit at the intersection of multiple structural processes and forces; and village-based people are highly reflective in their engagement with the plural orders running through their home spaces, and highly active in trying to shape anew the wider worlds in which their villages sit.

My goal in this afterword is to underline and further contextualise these themes. I do so by drawing comparative connections between the authors’ different ethnographic cases as well as my own research with Korowai of Indonesian Papua, and by adding some further framing language for describing our subject.

The first level of framing language I want to add is that the articles in this issue are concerned with how intensely rural people think about their condition of living historically by thinking about space. I use ‘condition of living historically’ here capaciously to include not only people’s senses of their lives’ relations to pasts and futures but also their senses of the general conditions under which they live, including inheritances of historically particular normative systems. I will lean heavily on a vocabulary of ‘order’, ‘social order’, ‘normative order’ and the like to gesture at varied complexes of institutions, ideas, categories, rules, value orientations, reflexive sensibilities about practice and other sites of order in human existence. I do not take words like ‘order’ to imply a mechanistic model of human action, or an assumption of the totalised coherence of structural fields in which people live. Rather, these terms are shorthands by which to move quickly to discussing those very issues of the psychology and coherence of conditions of life, while also realistically recognising that people do live by historically distinctive institutional and ideological conditions, as richly exemplified in the articles gathered here.

A second level of language I will advance is the hypothesis that a large part of why or how rural people think about history by thinking about space is that through spatial forms like their own villages, they engage with the existence of different and unequal frameworks for human living. And they do so in ways that are much more complex – and to borrow a term from Chio, much more ‘relational’ – than the globally popular account of difference and hierarchy that is condensed in the idea of history as progress from an archaic rural past to a modern urban future.

Settlement space as a figure of historical consciousness

From what Finnis, Chaudhuri and Chio describe in their essays, it is easy to suppose that when village residents think about or act toward Lindo Manantial, Kumily and Upper Jidao as spaces, they are thinking about or acting toward a larger historical condition. My suggestion that villages and other spatial forms are major sites of rural people’s historical consciousness is also something I have been led to through research with Korowai people of Indonesian Papua. I can sharpen what I mean by this idea through a brief account of Korowai involvement today with the spatial categories of ‘forest’, ‘village’ and ‘city’. These patterns also throw into relief an important general principle of anthropologists’ and political geographers’ approaches to spatial forms, namely that there is more to them than space alone.

For Korowai, the ‘village’ is as much an era and an event as a space. Numbering about 4000 persons, Korowai used to live only in individual or paired houses, built in widely separated gardens cleared from the surrounding lowland forest. Korowai describe this residential dispersion as motivated by desire for autonomy: spatial distance was a technique for avoiding being told what to do by others, and for keeping others from interfering in household food sharing and other aspects of close spousal and parental relations (Stasch, 2009: 25–63). But starting in the 1980s in one vicinity where Dutch missionaries lived for 10 years, Korowai began forming new centralised villages. Today there are village sites every few miles across the entire 500 square miles of Korowai land. These villages contrast sharply with the old spatial system of dispersed residence, including not only in number of people living together in one place but also in architectural style, permanence of location and extent of vegetation removal. In diverse contexts of discourse, Korowai periodise their history into ‘the time without villages’ (xampung-alin-alüp) and ‘the time when villages have been made’ (xampung-d∂tel-alüp). The geography of contrasting spaces is experienced as historical, and the time of history is experienced as geographic.

The new spatial order has not replaced the old one, but instead the two now coexist. Korowai speak widely of ‘village’ (xampung) and ‘forest’ (du-lebul) as contrasting residential and activity spaces that they fluidly move between. Across the early 2000s, for example, about one third of Korowai lived mainly in the new style ‘village’ settlements but travelled routinely to ‘forest’ locations, about one third lived mainly in the old style ‘forest’ spatial pattern but routinely travelled to ‘villages’, and about one third oscillated between houses maintained in both ‘village’ and ‘forest’ locations. Creation of permanent centralised settlements has thus involved an increase in people’s residential mobility, rather than a process of sedentarisation. The historical newness of centralised settlements is reflected in the pattern that all Korowai-language words for ‘village’ are borrowings from the intrusive lingua franca of Indonesian (e.g. xampung is borrowed from Indonesian kampung). While Dutch and Papuan mission workers first introduced the village form onto the landscape, and Indonesian state agents have also occasionally influenced the process, Korowai themselves have been by far the most active agents of village-making (see evidence in Stasch, 2013).

In periodising their history into an epoch without villages and the epoch when villages have been made, Korowai are using this type of space to think about a wider complex field of new institutional and social articulations. The physical presence of villages on their landscape is the single most salient figure by which Korowai talk metonymically about diverse new objects, practices, actors and institutions important to their lives, such as the Indonesian state, consumer goods, wage labour and international tourism. In everyday action, ‘villages’ are likewise explicitly understood as being not only physical spaces but also an overall social order. To create, join or visit a village physically is also to align with a new political ethos of refraining from anger when impinged upon, a new economic system of monetised procurement of manufactured consumer goods, an exotic new ethnic type of the ‘foreigner’ (laleo) or ‘village person’ (xampung-anop), a new language of Indonesian, and a new visual aesthetics of bright openness and being seen by others (see Stasch, 2013: 560–564). Korowai also reason about new interethnic, economic and political articulations of the current epoch using the even more alien spatial category of ‘city’ (xampung-tale, literally ‘big village’). Faraway cities such as the coastal capital of Jayapura are described as the prototypic, fully formed incarnation of foreigners’ social system of marketised social relations and mass consumption, the system more weakly embodied on the immediate local landscape by the new villages (Stasch, 2016).

These Korowai patterns echo similar forms of geography-centred thinking of history in other societies worldwide. ² They also illustrate that space is not an abstract container in which people secondarily act and think. Instead, distinctive forms of activity, thought, feeling and social or political relating create spaces, and are experientially immanent in those spaces. As fieldworkers and analysts, we are never studying just a space, but a spatial form as a mediation of wider arrays of human structures. The articles in this issue all proceed from this important basic principle.

Relationalities of the rural

Thus when Chio in this issue eloquently argues for ‘understanding the rural as relational’, she is discussing forms of interdependence not just between villages and cities as spaces, but between larger social, economic and ideological formations interlocked with those spaces. For example, she shows how the ‘contemporaneous’ and ‘co-constitutive’ relation between rural and urban is also a relation between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ as ideological constructs, and between ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘mainstream [Han] majority’ as categories of people. ³ Again, as fieldworkers and analysts, we are never just studying the rural: we are studying the rural as a concrete space that is also a relational entity made of its links to the urban, or made of its links to a manifold of urban and other kinds of spaces. The points that a space is more than spatial and is relational to other kinds of spaces are probably part of what Geertz was concerned with in the passage Vasantkumar aptly quotes in this issue: ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages…they study in villages’.

Finnis’ account of circular migration among Lindo Manantial villagers in Paraguay very directly illustrates how the relationality of the rural obtains not only in the medium of physical space but in ideas, values, feelings, conditions of life and kinds of social action. For her interlocutors, rural space embodies valued conditions of personal safety, control over one’s own life, close embeddedness in human relationships, maintenance of strong emotional bonds with children and the possibility of landownership. But rural space also embodies negative conditions of severe economic hardship. Meanwhile, urban space embodies valued conditions of monetary income and education, but also negative conditions of physical and social insecurity, and separation from social networks. Through physical movements between the two kinds of setting, Finnis’ interlocutors attempt to synthesise the potentials and defects of each. Although the spaces’ structural associations are opposed and seemingly incompatible, Lindo Manantial villagers in their subjectivity and their practical action synthesise them. Villagers are walking incarnations of the village’s presence ‘in’ city space, and the city’s presence ‘in’ village space. In their own decisions, Lindo Manantial people give further shape and strength to the relational co-constitutiveness of the spaces.

One relational argument about rural spaces that scholars are often inclined to make, and that has great empirical support, is that villages exist in the first place as a reflection of the political interests of centralised states in organising subject populations in administratively tractable locations and units, and that conditions of rural underdevelopment reflect the structural processes of a transregional or global economic system of rural-to-urban market articulations. ⁴ Such patterns are certainly important in the cases discussed in this special issue. Upper Jidao villagers’ processes of fashioning themselves as a spectacle amount to rural people being constituted in the image of urban tourists’ expectations and desires. This reflects in turn the central Chinese state’s will that the countryside redefine itself as an ethnic tourism destination, for the instrumental purpose of economic gain. In the wake of market-driven and state-regulated processes of the demographic depletion of the countryside through urban labour migration, the state fills the countryside back up again, but now with an aesthetic idea of rural beauty and with the consumer activities of visiting tourists. One practical vector of this process is the extension of characteristic tools and techniques of urban planning to the built order of village spaces. In a parallel way, part of the story of contemporary Kumily villagers’ lives is that the physical proliferation of restaurants, souvenir shops and similar commercial enterprises in the village over the last two decades is the local relational effect of the international expansion of ecotourism as a cultural and market force. Opportunities and terms of local engagement in this commerce are set by state political decisions about creation and administration of a formal nature reserve.

Those centre-to-periphery flows of causal determination are an important part of the relational makeup of village spaces, and an important part of the historical conditions that village residents engage with in their practice and experience of village space. But this issue’s authors all carry out a double-movement of at once reckoning in direct empirical and interpretive ways with centre-to-periphery lines of force, and locating those patterns in a more complex overall structure of rural relationality. There are several facets to what the authors do in this regard. One is that each author’s analysis, as Chio puts it, ‘embeds the village in multiple discourses and desires concentrated around the idea of the rural in the contemporary world’ (emphasis added). Thus, for example, Chaudhuri construes Kumily today as a ‘node’ at the intersection of a plurality of translocal institutional processes, including ‘international economic policies of structural adjustments’, ‘democratization of environmental governance policies’ and ‘grassroots level development aspirations and human-environment relationships’. And the authors document that the relationality of villages in those respects is as often in the medium of consequential ideas, alongside and intertwined with political or economic structures. The authors also trace lines of causal determination that flow from villagers’ positions to translocal ones, such as international actors’ cognizance of villagers as needed, independently willing collaborators in environmental governance. And especially, the authors look at villagers’ own consciousness and action, and the forms of creativity, pleasure, alienation or dismissal that they variously enact in relation to urban overtures.

As an experimental metalanguage for talking about complex configurations of rural relationality of this kind, and for maintaining an analytic focus on the experience and practice of rural actors themselves, I will further suggest that often the crux of rural relationality is that it is relationality across difference and hierarchy. In the remainder of this essay, I explore how we might integrate the point that the rural is relational, and the point that space is a site of people’s consciousness of their wider historical conditions of life, with attention specifically to people’s experience of difference and hierarchy of social orders: I explore, that is, how people’s thought and practice of settlement space is a major context in which they engage with the coexistence of alternative normative systems and conditions of life. In their practices of settlement space, rural people address questions such as: Which different orders and conditions of life are accessible to oneself, and which are accessible only to others? Which orders and conditions are superior to others in what ways, and which ones dominate and constrain other systems or extract value from them? How do different social orders and conditions of life interact with each other in single spaces or across different spaces, while remaining distinct and in tension? Where does this coexistence of different normative formations leave oneself, in attempting to fashion a life worth living?

Here too I will use certain analytic terms in deliberately inclusive ways. Under the term ‘difference’ (or ‘heterogeneity’), I will include the already-mentioned theme of the plurality of exogenous structural orders that impinge into and constitute village space; but also the otherness between rural and urban; and, the coexisting but contradictory values to which people in one place orient their actions; and additionally, forms of divided or conflicted self-consciousness, or in Chio’s words ‘the ways in which people live out and live through apparent contradictions’; and finally, senses of past, future or ideal possibility that differ from an actual lived present. And I will use ‘hierarchy’ to talk about the features of political, evaluative or emotional asymmetry found across that same variety of levels of human order. It may be that in the long run such broad terminological usage muddles more than it illuminates. But I am interested in experimenting with the categories in this capacious mode as an initial path by which to acknowledge the forms of fluid and direct interplay between these levels, and especially as a way to continue the issue authors’ project of putting at the centre of discussion the situation of rural-based actors themselves, experiencing and practicing the spaces around them.

Difference and hierarchy beyond the metanarrative of progress

For any inquiry into the spatial thinking of difference and hierarchy, a widespread ideological force to be reckoned with is what could be termed the metanarrative of history as progress. This metanarrative is often concretely expressed and experienced through a spatial idea that cities are the superior present or future, while rural settlements are the inferior past. This schema is a simple, highly non-relational model of human difference. It turns on a radical contrast between urban modernity and rural archaicness as two modes of life. And it is a simple model of hierarchy, in the sense that the model posits a blunt ranking of the two kinds of life. This model enjoys great currency in academic and popular thought, and is the common sense of development discourse in China, India, Indonesia and elsewhere. Yet the model’s usefulness for my purposes lies largely in illustrating how not to model space-mediated experiences of difference and hierarchy. Other more empirically adequate understandings of the relation of rural and urban can be drawn into relief through their points of contrast with this simpler framework.

Consider the views of cities held by Lindo Manantial villagers or by Korowai. Both groups see rural and urban as starkly contrastive, in line with the metanarrative of history as progress. Korowai view dispersed ‘forest’ residence and the new aggregated ‘villages’ as profound anti-types, and they view faraway cities as a further intensification of the village pole. Also in parallel to the metanarrative, Korowai nowadays often express admiration and desire for the urban social system of salaried jobs. Occupants of these jobs are stereotyped as living by bossing around subordinates and consuming readymade commodities acquired by purchase rather than toil. In their widespread talk about the imagined economic superiority of city life, and their enthusiasm for forming villages locally in the hope of gaining access to the utopian world of new consumables, Korowai themselves endorse something resembling the metanarrative of progress, with urban space as the defining exemplification of superior social conditions.

Other levels of these examples, though, make apparent a different and more significant structural pattern to people’s space-mediated practical and mental struggles with heterogeneity of social logics and with the relative powers or merits of those logics. One such level is circular migration. We have already seen that for Lindo Manantial villagers, it is by physically oscillating between village and city that people try to fuse the larger organisations of life activity linked to those spaces, to overcome the tradeoffs between rural family solidarity and urban income, or between other incompatibly space-specific goals. Sometimes they pursue this oscillation on a two-year periodicity, but the balancing act also unfolds across lifecycle time and gender difference: village is nursery and nursing home or a space of female labour of kinship care, while town is market-focused middle-aged adulthood or a space of masculine wage-earning. In any case, in Paraguay as in so many other places, cheap rural labour subsidises urban industry and middle class domestic order. Alongside urban society’s extractive relation to its rural hinterland, though, villagers support and subsidise ideals of rural space through their urban work. Urban activity is brought back to village space in the form of village shops stocked using urban wages as start-up capital, a house bought with migration income, or a flow of remittances. And beyond this economic dimension of the extractive relation of rural and urban, there are moral and emotional relationalities as well. Rural family closeness comes into its own as a felt idea from the vantage of the emotional hardships of urban time.

Korowai practices of oscillating between forest and village also amount to a case of interdependence between space-specific antithetic social orders (compare also Peluso, 2015; Schram, 2015; Smith, 2016). As a first clarification, I should underscore a counter-intuitive point about the Korowai category ‘village’ as such, already touched on. If a taxonomy of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ is to be applied to Korowai social experience of recent decades, villages are urban, in the sense that in Korowai discourse ‘village’ and ‘city’ are one pole and ‘forest’ is the opposite. This defies globally widespread stereotypy of village settlements as the paradigm of rural life. Recognising that for Korowai, it is forest space that is ‘rural’ and village space that is ‘urban’ can help us further appreciate what it means to take the dyad of rural and urban as the primary unit of analysis, rather than imagining each term of the polarity to be a stable essence independent of their historical relation.

Just as rapidly as the antithesis between aggregated ‘village’ and dispersed ‘forest’ residential forms came into prominence on their landscape, Korowai grew adept at practical synthesis of these spaces and their associated forms of life. Many persons integrate the two through maintaining houses in both kinds of places and moving steadily between them. Other persons (or the same persons at other times of life) synthesise them through kinship divisions of labour, in which different relatives specialise in different types of residence, and extend hospitality and economic or communicative aid to other relatives across the divide. These physical arrangements amount also to practical synthesis of village-associated social forms like marketised consumer culture and forest-associated ones like a political ethos of autonomy.

The understandings of difference and hierarchy of social orders involved in residential oscillations like these differ from the model of difference and hierarchy informing the metanarrative of history as progress. For Lindo Manantial villagers or for Korowai, both spatial poles are evaluatively superior to the other: each has desirable benefits. The relative ranking of urban and rural differs across the overall relation’s coexisting layers. And the issue of difference is not just between the spaces, as contrasting polar types. Rather the spaces are also heterogeneous to themselves, so to speak. In their residential oscillation, Korowai systematically draw on village resources for forest life, and on forest resources for village life. And they experience each spatial pole through the lens of yearnings or disappointments of the other. In these ways, the urban is again relationally ‘in’ the rural, and the rural ‘in’ the urban (in Vasantkumar’s sense). In all these kinds of cases, people inhabit and create a kind of meta-system of normative life, joining social orders that contradict each other but that also round out each other’s deficits and define or support each other’s value. People enmeshed in these multipolar worlds are thinking that complex heterogeneity of the overall social world they occupy, when they experience a specific type of space or perform a specific spatial practice.

Painful consciousness of city wealth

To make more ethnographically concrete this idea of a spatial form being heterogeneous to itself (or internally ‘splintered’, in the evocative image Vasantkumar draws from Graham and Marvin, 2001), let me dwell on experiences of emotion and desire. Raymond Williams (1973) in The Country and the City and elsewhere promoted the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ to describe how social orders and their historical transformation are lived partly at levels of emotional experience and activity not directly recorded in the discourse of formal institutions. Within this, I want to suggest more specifically that the coexistence of multiple orders is often lived by rural persons in the form of ambivalent, contradictory emotional structures of simultaneous desire and repulsion, or pleasurable participation and painful deprivation, in relation to other spaces or the coexisting alternatives of their own space.

My earlier outline of Korowai geography-mediated thinking of history was centred on villages. For Korowai, though, issues of emotion come even more to the fore around the spatial category of ‘city’. While almost all Korowai have had direct experience of villages, cities are remote to most persons’ experience. But urban space is discussed a great deal even by those who only know it by hearsay and imagination. Cities are a defining geographic form of the current historical epoch of increasing involvement with ‘Foreigners’ (laleo), a category in which Korowai lump together all new social strangers who have arrived on the margins of their world in recent times, including non-local Papuans, immigrants from other islands of Indonesia, and international visitors such as European or East Asian tourists and filmmakers. It is a central stereotype about ‘Foreigners’ as an ethnic type that they live in cities as their defining space (Stasch, 2016). As already noted, this space is paradigmatic in turn of a whole alternative social order turning on such features as marketised consumer culture and roles of hierarchical bureaucratic command. City dwellers are widely described as living in a utopia of unlimited money and of foods that are ‘just there’ rather than being produced through bodily labour. For urban dwellers, the idea of the rural often has a larger-than-life significance, as an exotic other to the city dwellers’ condition. So too for Korowai, the figure of the city and its exotic denizens is a fantasy space of inversion, suspension or further naturalisation of tenets of familiar life.

Against this overall background, a striking expression of emotional ambivalence toward cities and all they incarnate is the new Korowai verbal convention of describing death as urban travel. Over the last 20 years, it has become common for gravely ill persons to make statements on their deathbeds like ‘Oh mother of my child I’m going to the big village’, ‘I’m going to Jayapura’ or ‘I’m going to Singapore’. Korowai understand these statements to refer to actual travel to the geographic city by a post-mortem component of personhood, the animate corpse-like monster called laleo or ‘zombie’, the same word which has in recent decades been additionally repurposed as an ethnic label for all new human ‘Foreigners’. This physical passage and the destination city are also described as being hard for living people to comprehend with any clarity. The dominant emotional force of a dying person’s statement like ‘I’m going to Singapore’, and of survivors’ parallel descriptive statements like ‘She went to the big village’, is to express painful grief about separation between the dead and their living kin.

The emotion of grief, and people’s grief-addressing ritual actions following death, is systematically ambivalent. In these areas of experience and expression, feelings like sadness, loss, fear or anger reflect the way that a dead person is an exceptionally vivid mental presence and a focus of intense desire, while also being profoundly unreachable via normal perceptual and interactional channels (Stasch, 2009: 208–254). The reason Korowai have widely taken up the new verbal convention of describing death as travel to a city seems to be that there are affinities between this contradictory emotional structure of bereavement and the contradictory emotions of people’s current historical condition in relation to new structures of the market economy and interethnic hierarchy. Urban wealth and foreigners’ positions of social superiority are vivid mental presences and objects of desire in Korowai rural life today, but they are also remote, inaccessible and fearfully strange. Korowai I have spoken with sometimes link the idea that the dead go to cities to the fact that they have been yearning to go there in life and enjoy urban wealth, but have never been able to do so: the representations partly follow a logic of wishful thinking, or taking solace in post-mortem rewards. But another element in the representations is revulsion, horror and deepening of deprivation. Imagery of cities and the zombie dead in them is monstrous as well as utopian. Korowai fear being killed by any contact with the dead, and they fear the alienness of urban technologies, violence and sensory conditions. When relatives of a dying or deceased person hear the person’s death described as passage to a city, the distance and strangeness of that imagined urban space further underline the living people’s lack of access both to city wealth and to the companionship of their lost relative (see again details in Stasch, 2016).

In other words, spatial hierarchy hurts. Persons in different spatial positions live the political geography of one kind of space dominating another, being superior to another in value or virtue, or being figured as temporally advanced in contrast to another space’s backwardness, as contradictory structures of consciousness. When spaces are densely relational – and the relations between them are saturated with contrast and hierarchy – then even someone who lives in only one kind of place and is strongly identified with it, in another sense lives in different places and lives in hierarchical disparities between those places.

Rural modernity

I have outlined these aspects of Korowai discourse about cities less with a goal of grasping nuances of the specific case than of exemplifying the worldwide pattern of people experiencing geographies of rural and urban in charged emotional and moral terms. There is also a wider comparative salience to the way that relations of hierarchy and difference of conditions of life between rural and urban spaces recur in ‘internal’ geographic experience of rural life itself. Alternative orderings of how people can live not only coexist in the polarity of rural and urban spaces but also as people’s pain, exhilaration or reflexive deliberations in relation to life in any one space.

This theme of difference and hierarchy of social orders being ‘internal’ features of life in a specific kind of place is a useful frame for thinking about what is at stake in the most basic subject of this special issue as a whole that of rural space being globally connected. The different rural settlements we have studied are at once concrete and translocal: global forces, processes and institutions run through the very fabric of these villages or other rural spaces, as specific places (see also Sorge and Padwe, 2015: 242). Practical patterns of rural relationality I have touched on, such as circular migration in Paraguay or Korowai imaginative preoccupation with cities in the midst of forest life, are examples of such connectivity. But the articles by Chaudhuri and Chio develop this theme with special vividness, particularly surrounding the forms of global connectivity of consciousness and practice that, extending the work of other authors, Chaudhuri calls ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ and Chio calls ‘rural modernity’.

In Chaudhuri’s fieldsite of Kumily village in the mountains of inland Kerala, many local tour guides, souvenir shop workers, homestay owners and other ecotourism-connected villagers are economically poor and have not travelled widely, but they know themselves to be ‘global environmental citizens’. They possess nuanced knowledge of foreigners and their international worlds, are experts in ecological bioscience, are well-versed in principles and methods of global conservation advocacy, and see as a normal state of affairs the rapid change of conditions of daily life or the coexistence of multiple perspectives on environmental objects (see also Causey, 2007; Meiser and Dürr, 2014; Notar, 2008). They live out these qualities of life in close integration with their status as residents of a rural village landscape. In a similar way, Chio documents how Upper Jidao villagers are not just objects of folkloristic interest on the part of Han Chinese urbanites, but are well-versed themselves in the idea of being seen as bearers of fragile rural and ethnic beauty, different from urban conditions. And Upper Jidao residents are well-versed in projects of model-driven fashioning of village space to match an urban-mediated ideal of proper rural tradition.

Academics are accustomed to irony-tinged theorisation of endangered, disappearing ‘tradition’ or ‘authenticity’ as a modernist ideological form, projected from within structural frames of nationalism, Enlightenment knowledge disciplines, uneven development and industrialised tourism or other market structures. Upper Jidao villagers know and live this mixed, plural rural condition directly and unironically. They matter-of-factly do ruralness in a managerial fashion, as Kumily persons matter-of-factly do relations with the environment through committees and bureaucratic regulations. In Chio’s words, the analytic construct of ‘rural modernity’ is ‘not intended to denote a contradiction between opposing conditions’, but is simply how people live.

Here too the metanarrative of history as progress toward the telos of urban modernity can provide a useful reference point. Patterns of subaltern cosmopolitanism and rural modernity are intellectually captivating because they both follow and defy the central terms of that metanarrative. There are at least two intertwined layers to this defiance. First, while the patterns trade in the high modern currency of global connectivity itself, for global connectivity to be found thriving in rural lives goes against the metanarrative’s core expectation that the urban is the paradigm of the connected (an expectation also trenchantly dissected by Vasantkumar). Chio in describing rural space as not ‘something left behind by modernity’ is saying the normal metanarrative is simply wrong. Not only are rural people participating in cosmopolitan institutions of science, environmental advocacy or rational architectural modelling, but they are in possession of modern, urban consciousness. They are so globally connected that there is fluid back-and-forth movements of forms of thought and feeling between their minds and the minds of city people. Upper Jidao people develop forms of consciousness even more complicated than urban visitors, in the sense of responding to the urban visitors’ orientations by taking a stance in relation to them. The imperative to ‘make a spectacle of yourselves’ for those urban visitors becomes a task and focus of reflection. In similar ways, Chaudhuri documents the consequential ways that an environmentalist ecumene is constituted out of rural people actively looking back at tourists and international actors, amidst the mobile foreigners’ processes of looking toward the local. They do so in forms as subtle as judging the relative virtue of different tourists according to the extent to which they are inquisitively ‘interested’ in the object of their tour, or as broad as the overall village-wide decision to embrace environmentalism and make the conservation project and local ecotourism industry actually successful.

A second level of simultaneous embrace and defiance of the metanarrative of progress lies in the content of that consciousness. In broad outlines, the project of environmental conservation advocated by some Kumily villagers and the project of cultural heritage preservation advocated by Upper Jidao villagers have in common that they are a reversal of the metanarrative of progress, relocating the desired good from urban industrial and technological modernity back to the anti-urban idyll of rustic village society or wild nature that the metanarrative of progress normally denigrates as archaic and inferior. ⁵ As Chio puts it:

[R]ural ethnic tourism destinations like Upper Jidao are exactly where the presumably uni-directional, teleological developmental drive (out of social and economic backwardness and into modern living) crashes into the multi-directional demands of the tourist encounter (driven by the search for difference and escape from the pressures of modern society).

Counternarratives owe a great deal to what they reverse. The element I would like to highlight that is common to both the metanarrative of progress and preservationist frameworks elaborated out of it is critique, or the opening of a distance between one’s life and what else might be desirable or possible, and contemplation about what to do in the space of that distance. Upper Jidao villagers engage in highly organised, space-focused projects and debates over how to improve and surpass the village’s existing conditions, and how to make the village more successfully match an ideal of rustic picturesque rural integrity. Arguably there is a lot of ‘progress’ (as a template for thought and practice) in this organisation of action, including in its commercial dimension of seeking to make a good living from tourism. The distance between oneself and one’s conditions in the critical project of self-surpassing improvement is one facet of what I would characterise as the internal heterogeneity of Upper Jidao life: the systematic coexistence and conjoining in the village of seemingly antithetical normative logics and physical or social qualities. People seek economic and moral betterment, a kind of progress, through the romance of rural rusticity. They seek to use managerial methods of planning and model-led spatial and social design to realise most fully the qualities of rustic aesthetic wholeness of the anti-urban idyll. The idea of spectacle, of ‘dressing up and putting on a hat’, entails a certain consciousness of a divide between a visual domain of frontstage appearances as their prime meeting ground and instrumental currency of involvement with tourism customers, and another level of one’s general condition of being, such as actual economic motives or an overall wider backstage field of embodied more-than-visual dimensions of life. Villagers build with concrete (perhaps for reasons of durability, strength, prestige, cost-effectiveness and so on), but also strive to put forward wood as the dominant village surface.

The continuous reconciliation, hierarchisation and rehierarchisation of these heterogeneous and even mutually contradictory organisations of life seems to be the primary work of space in Upper Jidao villagers’ lives. And there seem to be broad similarities between how the spaces of their village are saturated with questions of alternative normative possibility, and how Lindo Manantial residents or Korowai likewise engage with questions of the links and hierarchies between different conditions of life through their practices of space.

Conclusion

A certain program for anthropological inquiry follows from this issue’s several ethnographic and conceptual accounts of the global connectivity of rural spaces. Namely, we should inquire into the structures of connectivity linking rural space with translocal social and cultural orders, in ways that do not take rural and urban themselves as each integrated blocs, but instead focus attention also on the internal heterogeneity or ‘splintering’ of rural and urban spaces. Processes of linkage, binding, segregation and contradiction do not map in a simple way onto the rural versus urban binary, but crosscut it. Probably these are patterns that have long unfolded across all different kinds of societies. Yet it might be a reasonable understanding of ‘modernity’ in particular to think that it is characterised not by ‘progress’ or by increased connectivity alone, but by various patterns of the intensification of the processes of spatial connectivity, spatial hierarchy, spatial otherness and spatial separation at play in and across specific places.

Elaborating on this analytic agenda of the study of spatial connectivity in its pluralistic and hierarchical aspects, I have tried to underline further the importance of not taking spaces themselves as units of analysis, or irreducible primes, when charting the lines of determination that flow between spaces, and between specific organisations of space. Rather, I have emphasised the value of recognising how spatial forms densely work for people as mediations of multilayered organisations of social life. In living in and talking about concrete space, people are also living a geography of ideas and values. This further complexity to the mediated and mediating character of spatial forms also complicates the accounts we need to give of rural, urban and the articulations between them.

In his suggestively influential concept of ‘heterotopia’, Foucault (1986, 1998) developed the idea that there were exceptional kinds of spatial institutions that condensed in themselves an opening up of plural counter-normative possibilities, departing from or warping the normative structures and limits permeating more routine spaces of a society. My explorations of the theme of heterogeneity of social orders here have been in line with broad features of Foucault’s concept: that spatial forms are imbued with wider normative frameworks of life, and that there can be an affinity between concrete spaces and the thinking of normative otherness. However, I have suggested that a condition of heterotopia is not so much exceptional as routine to spatial life, such as life in specific forms of settlements.

Why might spatial forms like a village work particularly powerfully as a mediation of the experience of social order? To live historically is to live by normative arrangements inherited in time, harbouring not only disparities and tensions between positive features of overall inheritances but also oblique modes of awareness of the contingency of the normative commitments themselves, and possibilities of living otherwise. The diverse spatial forms composing a village or city – and the social institutions built into those spatial forms – are not only a concrete physical medium of that inheritance of norms and categories in the processes of time. For the situation of an embodied actor, those spatial forms are perhaps an allegory of what it is to be surrounded by conditions that exceed one’s own life. And spatial forms like distance between forest, village and city and difference of the built forms within specific spaces are not only concrete physical channels of political articulation between different elements of a society but also perhaps an allegory of what it is more generally to be part of a harshly differentiated and stratified social universe.