What is Neo-Rurality? Reflections on the Construction of a Multidimensional Object

Abstract

This article explores the concept of neo-rurality as an analytical tool, aiming to create a conceptual proposal that collaborates with the development of the study of this social phenomenon. Even though the neo-rurality object has been analysed particularly in Europe, it is underexplored in Latin America. This situation generates a remarkable theoretical-methodological absence when considering the importance of context in this research. For this reason, we aim at problematizing and reshaping the analytical and empirical challenges that the city-countryside movement represents for social sciences in general and for those studies that address this reality from a particular point of view (communication, migration, and movement). The analysis arises from the assumption that the concept of neo-rurality is a misleading pseudo-concept since it defines a phenomenon that is, in fact, more complex than what the label suggests and widens the rural-urban dualism. In summary, this way of typifying the phenomenon pushes us towards a wrongly-built object. Given this scenario, on the basis of an ethnographic case, this essay reflects on the nature of the neo-rural knowledge and its sources, inquiring about a complex, emerging, dynamic, situated, identified, multidimensional (temporal, spatial and experiential) and transdisciplinary historical phenomenon.