Childerley Nature and Morality in a Country Village

Name: Childerley Nature and Morality in a Country Village
Price: 13.26 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780226041988

ISBN-10: 0226041980

ISBN-13: 9780226041988

Edition: 1995

Authors: Michael Mayerfeld Bell, Christian P. Drury

List price: $37.00

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In Childerley a twelfth-century church rises above the rolling quilt of pastures and grain fields. Volvos and tractors share the winding country roads. Here, in this small village two hours from London, stockbrokers and stock-keepers live side by side in thatched cottages, converted barns, and modern homes. Why do these villagers find country living so compelling? Why, despite our urban lives, do so many of us strive for a home in the country, closer to nature? Michael Bell suggests that we are looking for a natural conscience: an unshakeable source of identity and moral value that is free from social interests--comfort and solace and a grounding of self in a world of conflict and change. … During his interviews with over a hundred of Childerley's 475 residents--both working-class and professional--Bell heard time and again of their desire to be "country people" and of their anxiety over their class identities. Even though they often knowingly participate in class discrimination themselves--and see their neighbors doing the same--most Childerleyans feel a deep moral ambivalence over class. Bell argues they find in class and its conflicts the restraints and workings of social interests and feel that by living "close to nature" they have an alternative: the identity of a "country person," a "villager that the natural consicence gives." Yet there are clear parallels between the ways in which the villagers conceive of nature and of social life, and Bell traces these parallels across Childerleyans' perspectives on class, gender, and politics. Where conventional theories would suggest that what the villagers see as nature is a reflection of how they see society, and that the natural conscience must be a product of social interests, Bell argues that ideological processes are more complex. Childerleyans' understandings of society and of the natural conscience shape each other, says Bell, through a largely intuitive process he calls resonance. For anyone who has ever lived in the countryside or considered doing so, this book is not to be missed. It will also be of particular interest to scholars of British studies and the sociology of knowledge and culture, and to those who work on problems of environment, community, class, and rural life. "[An] exemplary piece of fieldwork. . . . These gentle conclusions . . . reminds us (when we most need reminding) of the skillful ethnographer's enduring capacity to make the everyday seem truly extraordinary."--Laurie Taylor, New Statesman & Society "Bell's achievement, and his perceptions, are impressive."--J.W.M. Thompson, London Times "Races along with all the gossipy compulsion of a blockbuster."--Frances Hardy, Daily Mill "I believe this view of how people relate to the different domains of their experience is absolutely right. . . . The reader, this ready anyway, finishes Childerley with the feeling that she has just returned from visiting a remote Hampshire village and has learned something, not just about that place, but about human social life lived in other places and lived through place itself."--Wendy Griswold, American Journal of Sociology

Book details

List price: $37.00
Copyright year: 1995
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 7/1/1995
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 292
Size: 0.61" wide x 0.90" long x 0.07" tall
Weight: 0.946
Language: English

Michael Mayerfeld Bell is Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his day job, he is principally an environmental sociologist and a social theorist, focusing on dialogics, the sociology of nature, and social justice. These concerns for the world have led him to studies of agroecology, the body, community, consumption, culture, development, food, democracy, economic sociology, gender, inequality, participation, place, politics, rurality, the sociology of music, and more. He is also a part-time composer of grassroots and classical music, and a mandolinist, guitarist, and singer.



Acknowledgments


Rounds



The View from Winter Hill



A parish on the Fringe Class and Community



A ""Slightly Feudal"" Village



The Front Door and the Back Door



Country People and City People Nature and Self



Finding Nature



The Natural Conscience Reflections



The Foreground and the Background: Class



The Pursuit of the Inedible: Politics



The Mouse in the Sprinkler Pipe: Gender Resonance



The View from the Bell Tower Methods


Notes


References


Index