Paper short abstract:

Based on team ethnographic research we have been conducting in a Slovak-Hungarian village in Southern Slovakia since 2008, we argue that rurality is constructed both as heritage and utopia according to the mode of the rurality in question and that both influence sharing and negotiating of relations and statuses of village inhabitants.

Paper long abstract:

Villages (at least Central European ones) have been for long conceived as a rural spaces endowed with specific “rural culture” established on the concept of rurality. Based on team ethnographic research we have been conducting in a Slovak-Hungarian village in Southern Slovakia since 2008, we distinguish three main modes of rurality operating in Czech and Slovak villages: (1) rurality as an embodied practice, (2) constructed rurality and (3) rurality as a tool of de/legitimization. These draw on the one hand on rurality as a social fact and on the other hand of rurality as a discursive formation, comprising of expert, public and participatory discourses. We thus argue that rurality is constructed both as heritage and utopia according to the mode of the rurality in question and that both influence sharing and negotiating of relations and statuses. Stressing the importance of rurality in the individual life projects of village inhabitants leads us to an employment of an alternative concept of post-rural worlds.