Hathersage: an accidental community research project.

Introduction.

Richard Jenkins

Sociologists and anthropologists become involved in this or that research project for reasons that are rarely strictly intellectual or 'scientific'. Much like researchers of all kinds, in all disciplines, personal interests and politics often play an important role in setting the detail of our work agendas. So much is widely acknowledged. What is less often admitted is the significance of external requests or demands, on the one hand, and sheer serendipity, on the other. I think that both are probably much more influential than we care to admit. This is one such case. In the autumn of 1999 I was contacted - by e-mail and telephone - by two residents of Hathersage, a village of about two thousand people, lying in the to the south of . They had discovered, by consulting the Department of Sociological Studies' web-pages, that I was interested in the Millennium and its social impact. As part of a small group of Hathersagians who were involved in the community's Millennial celebrations, and since Hathersage had been mentioned in the original Domesday Book of 1086, they had thought it would be a good idea to do a social survey of the village, a

1 Domesday Book 2. They wondered if I would be interested in talking to them, or even giving a hand, since they had no experience of this kind of thing and would welcome the input of an 'expert'. The work had begun, and the questionnaire was almost finalised, but would I be interested in popping along to meet them? Needless to say it was an invitation that I found impossible to refuse. Apart from the work's intrinsic interest - communities, once you start to look at them, are always fascinating - there was the striking coincidence that I had already talked to one or two colleagues about research in Hathersage, as part of the preparation of an unsuccessful grant application concerned with the social construction and impact of the Millennium, and the fact that genuine 'user-involvement', a criterion much beloved of the Research Assessment Exercise, is not so easy to come by at the non-applied end of the social research spectrum. Here was user-involvement, and 100 per cent genuine, if ever I saw it. The next six months or so saw me make the trip out to Hathersage many times, and become ever more closely involved with the local research group, all of whom, to differing degrees I came to consider my friends. On the personal level getting to know them and getting to know the village better were genuinely rewarding experiences. Discussions were sometimes quite tough, about this or that aspect of the process, but we stuck at as a group. Round about Gala time, when our report finally appeared (see the review by Sharon Macdonald, who grew up in Hathersage, later), a degree of satisfaction was also in order. Allowing for the fact that this was a amateur enterprise, with most of my professional input at the writing-up stage, the local audience has a good deal into which to sink its teeth, and the group had a good deal of which to be proud. I had, in the questionnaires, access to a data set which, despite its flaws, was also likely to be academically useful. Likely to be useful, yes, but I have to admit that I had, at that time, no idea of exactly how, or in what context. The material was limited in some respects. Thank goodness, chance intervened again: it was another phone call, in the autumn of 20o0 this time, from my old friend Poul Pedersen of the Department of Ethnography and Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. One

2 of his master's students, Anne Henderson Bissenbakker, was interested in the possibility of working with me for a semester, as one of her research placements. Did I have anything that she could do, that would be useful to both if us? Anne and I corresponded by e-mail, and met in Aarhus in December: the work that she really liked the sound of, from the list of options that I had suggested to her, was a study of local identity in a Derbyshire village. So, that was settled. Anne began work in Hathersage in February and is finishing her fieldwork as I write, early June 2001. An introductory field report written by Anne also follows, so I will say no more about it here. Now we have the questionnaires and a body of detailed in-depth interview material (supplemented by some participant observation data, too), which gives us the basis for some more thorough analysis. So watch this space. And the moral of this tale? First, always keep your eyes peeled for a worthwhile research opportunity, and second, you quite know what to expect, just around the corner. Thank goodness.

Identities in Conflict: an anthropological study of Hathersage.

Anne Henderson Bissenbakker

After 4 months of in-depth interviews and the obligatory participant observation in Hathersage, a Derbyshire village of just under 2000 inhabitants, I am now more confused than ever about the main focus of the study that was to be: local identity. Firstly, identity must be corrected to identities. Hathersage is not a place one can describe in the singular! It is an accumulation of a multiplicity of imagined,

3 envisioned and performed identities. These identities are, secondly, not easily distinguished from each other. They often seem to be confused and even self- contradictory in people’s perceptions of both their own and other’s identities. To make matters worse; by doing a study in I am challenging my own split identity. Having been brought up in Denmark by a Danish father and an English mother, I am confronted daily by the consciousness of being neither a native to this country nor a total stranger. I am still very confused and unable to distinguish the two identities within me from each other (although the public transport in England has probably made me feel slightly more patriotic in favour of Denmark than is reasonable!). Therefore this article might well have had the title: ‘Making the Exotic out of the Well Known?’ In many ways, moving to England was confronting a country and a culture that I am very close to and intimate with. I have been on visits here so many times and missed the place and people so often when back in Denmark. But this time, as well as moving to my ‘other home’, I have been looking at England wearing my academic spectacles; as an anthropologist. The question mark, of course, points to my doubt about whether England is at all ‘well known’ to me (especially since I have never ventured so far north before). But one could also turn the question around and ask whether I can make anything exotic out of the English village I have been studying that seems so ordinary and familiar to me in its similarity to the Lincolnshire village where my grandmother lives. Am I possibly the kind of social researcher which Sharon Macdonald seeks, when she recommends someone who is “neither a ‘proper’ insider nor a full outsider”1 to do research on Hathersage? Macdonald’s point however, is that it is not clear for the inhabitants themselves who are insiders and who are outsiders in Hathersage, neither can she, who grew up there, be definite about her own status. Then how can I possibly position myself? There are several things to complicate the matter, apart from being half Danish. In Hathersage, even people who have lived in the village most of their lives are not classified as ‘locals’ by the “real” locals (at least 2 generations in the

1 See: Macdonald, Sharon: A Village Reviewed: Reflections on Belonging and Local Knowledge, p.5.

4 graveyard is the ‘official’ test). How then can I expect to be accepted as part of daily life in this village? Also, as Hathersage Reviewed2 will tell you, the average age in Hathersage is way over my age, and about 25% of the inhabitants are above the retirement age. Will I blend in unnoticed? Lastly, I cannot possibly afford to live in Hathersage, so the idea of being a traditional “When in Rome… anthropologist” had to be discarded, and I must accept the limitations of my study. What then can I say about this village? The first thing that struck me driving into Hathersage was that this was not a village, it was a town! It had traffic lights, a car park, five pubs, two banks and the traffic was heavy. This observation would be contradicted by all the inhabitants of Hathersage, without fail. Every time I forgetfully called Hathersage a town I would be interrupted and corrected to village. This, I guess, is where I must accept the differences between the indigenous and the Danish interpretation! But pointing out these town-like features is important if one is to understand one of the main anxieties in the village about its own identity. This concerns tourism. Hathersage is situated in the Peak National Park. In the spring and summer, the village receives busloads of tourists who come to walk in the hills or simply stop to see a ‘real’ Derbyshire village. All through the year climbers use the village as a base to sleep and eat in. Many houses in the village offer B&B services and there are several shops, cafes and pubs that cater for the tourist industry. As many of the inhabitants acknowledge themselves, if it were not for tourism, the village wouldn’t have facilities such as banks and a good variety of shops. But it would not be as busy with the loathed traffic, either, and double yellow lines and car parks would be unnecessary. This ambivalent feeling towards tourism is founded in resentment about being dependent, especially for work, on the outside world, on the one side, and the wish to be a lively and busy community, on the other side. The impact that tourism has on the village has especially been striking in the last couple of months, during the foot and mouth crisis. The village has seemed

2 Jenkins, Richard et al.: Hathersage Reviewed. A Snapshot of a Derbyshire Village in the Year 2000. Domesday Book II, 2000. Hathersage: Hathersage Millennium Group.

5 deserted in the daytime, when the children have been to school and the working- population has been to work in Sheffield or elsewhere. Furthermore, several shops are struggling to survive because their main income stems from tourism. A few villagers call it a ghost village and probably more people than those who would admit it miss the liveliness of the place that tourism brings. But the ambivalent feeling is much more complex than a simple division of opinions for or against dependency on the outside world. It is connected to the many identities that the inhabitants of Hathersage imagine and envision. A definitive map of the categories of different identities in Hathersage cannot be presented, because my argument is precisely that these feelings and identities are not always coherent. Instead, an outline can be sketched of some of the conflicting expectations that the inhabitants have with respect to the image and identity of the village. Because of its ideal situation, in beautiful countryside and just ten miles from Sheffield, Hathersage has become an ideal home for people who wish to retire to somewhere peaceful but don't want to be cut off. Also Hathersage is within an acceptable distance from several larger towns and cities, for people to commute to for work. Since the 1960s a large number of people have moved out from these towns to settle in Hathersage, in search of the quietness and beauty of the place. The village has become so popular that house prices have gone up tremendously. The village that was previously a fairly small working-class settlement is now the largest village in the valley and decidedly more middle-class than ever. This expansion of the village has naturally transformed it into a less insular place, but also to a place where people are less familiar with each other. In some ways the ‘newcomers’ have spoilt exactly what they came in search for, an idyllic lifestyle in a quiet and intimate community in the country. These ‘newcomers’ now resent a further expansion and transformation of the village as much as the ‘locals’ do, because their romantic imaginations and expectations of life in the country are not being fulfilled. Generally speaking, the ‘newcomers’ feel that a further expansion of the village would transform their own lifestyle into something similar to what they have escaped from, urban life.

6 To understand the resentment expressed by the ‘locals’ about the transformation of the village as a consequence of its popularity, one can look at very obvious problems such as the need for cheap housing for young local couples who wish to stay in the village. The ‘newcomers’ are also aware that ‘locals’ are being ‘priced out’ by more affluent outside buyers. But there is another feeling of anxiety that I have heard expressed in different ways. This is related to the feeling of unfamiliarity, which is perceived to be a result of the rising number of people living in the village. With the many new faces in the village it is no longer always possible to tell whether a new face is a new inhabitant or a tourist. Both older and younger ‘local’ people in the village fear that the village will just become a place where people come and go, but never settle for a long time, so that their faces will never become familiar. As Hathersage does not offer any school education past primary level and only few trainee jobs, the village cannot offer a future for many of the young people who live there now. A lot of these young people, ‘locals’ and ‘newcomers’, plan to leave the village to go to university and those who wish to return cannot be sure of being able to afford a house in Hathersage. In contrast to this inability to offer a future for young people, Hathersage is a popular place to retire and there are obviously people who will only be living there for a short period of their lives. They do not bring a future to the village, but rather a feeling of temporariness and, to the ‘locals’; non-commitment. Ironically, some of the ‘locals’ have expressed a concern about the new people in the village ‘taking over’. This is because many of the people who choose to live in Hathersage are retired, and have lots of spare time to get involved in the many activities that go on in the village. So at the same time as being viewed as semi-outsiders and uncommitted to the community, a lot of the ‘newcomers’ are actually very involved in the village organisations and events and quickly get to know each other and the ‘local’ people who participate in these activities. But even people who are heavily involved in activities in the village, and who have children in the local school, who now view themselves as local, are not perceived as ‘real’ locals when within the village boundaries. They don’t have

7 family roots in the village and they generally don’t work in the village. It is not possible to discriminate fully among people who live in Hathersage but work elsewhere, because many of the ‘real’ locals are also forced to work out of the valley, as there are not many jobs locally apart from farming and catering for the tourists. The ‘newcomers’ have moved to the village by choice, most of them are well off and have chosen to live in Hathersage because it was their idea of a perfect place to live either to retire or to bring up children. They don’t have the ties in the village that the ‘locals’ with extensive family networks feel they have. It is not unthinkable that the less affluent ‘locals’ view this mobile lifestyle with a mixture of envy and indignation. An illustration of this mixed feeling is the unofficial name of the area in the village where the rapid and extensive building of residential homes went on from the 1960s onwards. This area houses many of the people who are still known as ‘newcomers’. Despite the high house prices, the area is quite publicly known as “Shanty Town”. A couple who have lived in the village for seventeen years explained to me with a grin that it was so named to “keep them [the well off inhabitants] in their place”. Hathersage has experienced demographic changes several times. First when the railway was built and it became a busy industrial town. Then it was back to being a village again when the mills closed down. But the demographic changes that have happened since the major expansion in the 1960s are of a different kind. This time people are moving out into the countryside, not because they need to, but because they want to. Hathersage is balancing on the border between being a working village and a ‘leisure’ or a tourist village. There are only a few farmers left and other businesses in the village are mainly surviving because of the tourist industry. What the village can offer is itself, as a tourist attraction. But the fear that this is its main identity bothers both newcomers and locals. Perhaps their concerns have different motives, but if the village cannot project to itself a future, it could become a pretty, empty shell with which people cover themselves for a while, before leaving again for another place, like snails.

8 On the other hand, because Hathersage is a sought after village, the people who choose to live there are generally very interested in sustaining it as an active and caring community. There will be battles fought over how the village should develop, and there are people who are already thinking of ways to change the village, from being so dependent on the outside world to “taking the development into the hands of the village again”, as it was put to me. These battles will be symbolic battles of identity, fought by people with different visions of how the village ought to be. The outcome will be a mixture of, and change according to, the imaginations and expectations that the inhabitants have of village life.

It is my hope that the inhabitants of Hathersage will recognise my interpretation of the conflicts in the village, and it is up to them to decide whether I have been something more than a tourist myself, in this study. I was made to feel very welcome by everybody in the village and perhaps my ignorance on certain subjects because of growing up in another country, gave me a positive ‘outsider’ status that encouraged the confidentiality that I believe people to have given to me. But have I succeeded in ‘making the exotic out of the well known’, or am I simply repeating to them things that are too well known to be exotic?

9

A village reviewed: reflections on belonging and local knowledge.

Sharon Macdonald

When Richard Jenkins told me that he was going to be carrying out some research in Hathersage, I felt a wave of rather mixed and not entirely identifiable feelings. Having lived in Hathersage since the age of eight until I left to go to University, I felt a little as though Hathersage was ‘my’ village and that perhaps Richard should have had to ask my permission to look at it! At the same time, I found it fascinating that another sociologist-anthropologist should look at my ‘home village’ and was intrigued by what he might discover (and not just about me - no doubt another element of my mixed feelings). Moreover, as a sociologist-anthropologist who has looked at village life elsewhere in Britain, it seemed poetic justice that a piece of my life-world should come under the social-scientific microscope; and I looked forward to learning more about the place which had often acted as an implicit source of comparison in my work in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Richard became involved in looking at Hathersage at the request of a group of Hathersage inhabitants (the term ‘Hathersagians’, interestingly, never seems to have gained currency) who wished to conduct a ‘Domesday’ style survey of the village at the Millennium. The collectively authored Hathersage Reviewed: A Snapshot of a Derbyshire Village in the Year 2000. Domesday Book II is the

10 outcome of this project3; and there is also a companion booklet of recollections by various villagers called Hathersage Remembers4. Thinking also about my own work in Skye, one of the questions which the study of Hathersage raised for me concerned the nature of ‘local knowledge’: would these booklets simply play back knowledge that I already had about the place or, as I uneasily suspected, prove that I really knew very little about it indeed and even that I had never properly belonged at all? In Skye I had often worried about how much I - as an outsider - really knew, and whether this went beyond the knowledge of most, or any, of the more permanent inhabitants. Now, in the reverse position, I found myself wondering about what on earth I did actually know about the place in which I had spent so many years of my life - a place in which I had spent longer than all of my ‘fieldworks’ put together. Before looking at Hathersage Reviewed I ransacked my memory banks to see what I knew about Hathersage and what kind of place it seemed to me, and I explored the cartography of my own knowledge - how it was shaped and constrained by my particular experience and social positioning. My most immediate and overwhelming perception was that I had always thought of myself as an ‘outsider’; and that sense was no doubt related to the fact that in my memory I had contracted how long I had lived there, thinking of it as a fairly brief period. I had, however, spent at least ten years (excluding all the return visits ‘home’) in the village, longer than I have lived anywhere else, and these had been the so-called ‘formative years’. The self-perception of being an outsider was certainly partly a function of my pre-Hathersage experience: a childhood in which I had not stayed in any place for long, in which I had already experienced being ‘the new girl’ more often than I liked, and in which the individualistic Bohemian outsiderness of my father’s occupation - as a sculptor - seemed to inform our family self-identity more than did that of my mother - ‘the’ district nurse (of course she wasn’t the only one,

3 Michael Shuttleworth, May Ainsworth, Graham Bungard, Sue Clendon, Richard Jenkins, Dave Jenner and Brian Ward Hathersage Reviewed. A Snapshot of a Derbyshire Village in the Year 2000. Domeday Book II, 2000, Hathersage: Hathersage Millennium Group. 4 Bob Dawson and Ryland Clendon (eds) Hathersage Remembers, 2000, Hathersage: Hathersage Millennium Group.

11 but in my childhood her job always seemed to be preceded by the definite article: ‘Is your mother the district nurse?’), surely one of the potentially most ‘deep in’ village roles. We lived in a part of Hathersage that I learn from Hathersage Reviewed counts as the centre of the village (just) but in my personal cognitive map we lived on the margins, detached, and, in terms which I have often unselfconsciously used, en route out of the village, on the way to Sheffield. Many of our neighbours, however, I certainly saw as locals, even though their houses too were perched up on the road ‘out of’ (or, for them, maybe it really was ‘in to’) the village. Mr and Mrs Botham, who ran the farm across the road, for example, seemed to me quintessentially local - their farming connecting them more fundamentally with the place and, in my youthful conceptual geography, the fact that they were elderly and that their house was old-fashioned also made them seem more ‘of the place’. Our next-door neighbours, the Daltons, who matched the ages of the members of my own family almost exactly and who also had a father working in Sheffield, also managed to be much more local than us. They had lived there all their lives, were bound into village networks of kin and of the chapel, and - a perhaps surprising category in this reconstituted mental checklist of belonging - they seemed to project themselves into the future in the village, to envisage themselves as staying, to draw their own personal boundaries in village terms (at least, that was what I imagined). All this made them more Hathersage than we were or ever could be. Yet the inhabitants (whose names we did not know) of the house (which we referred to as ‘the one Arthur Scargill nearly bought’) to the other side of us were certainly even more ‘outside’ than we were. Absent for long stretches of time and always apparently heading away from the village, their home there did seem to be a dormitory, and a part-time one at that. By contrast, we were relatively deeply enmeshed in village life: my sisters and I attended the local school and went to chapel Sunday school (our non-believer parents claimed that they sent us along so that we would be able to ‘make up our own minds’, but I suspect they were just in search of a little Sunday morning peace and quiet); we went to Brownies and Guides, and Junior Guild, and from house-to-house bob-a-jobbing; we dressed up

12 in fancy-dress and made miniature gardens on biscuit-tin lids for the Gala and went carol singing at the crib at Christmas; we swam miles and miles in the Hathersage pool (you had to keep swimming or you froze); we bought our school shoes at Mrs Basham’s, groceries at Mr Ramsden’s, and sweets at Mrs Marmion’s; and I waited tables and served behind the bar of the Hathersage Inn. If we want to look at matters in quantitative interactionist terms, my sisters and I undoubtedly must have engaged in millions of ‘interactions’ with numerous different Hathersage inhabitants. Moreover, many villagers knew our mother; and our grandmother, who came to live in the village after us, was an endless source of gossip about all sorts of Mrs So-and-sos whom we had never met, but with whose lives we were sometimes rather intimately acquainted. Overall, we surely gathered plenty of local knowledge and experience - but was this enough to make us ‘insiders’? The micro-sociology of belonging - ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’ - is something about which I have written elsewhere and on which there is a considerable literature in the anthropology of Britain.5 Thinking back about Hathersage confirmed some of the insights that I and others have had in relation to other places; though it also made me aware that matters could perhaps be more complex still. Categories such as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ may reflect to some extent real differences between kinds of inhabitants - those, in the words of Hathersage Reviewed, who are part of ‘an inter-related network of local families, some of whom are very deeply-rooted in the parish and the surrounding area’ and ‘those families and households, today making up nearly half the village, who have come to live in Hathersage fairly recently and whose social roots in the community are, as yet, still relatively shallow’ (p.19). These categories also become a key means of articulating ‘villageness’ and are invoked to express different moral

5 See, for example, Sharon Macdonald Reimagining Culture. Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance, 1997, Oxford: Berg; Anthony P.Cohen (ed.) Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, 1982, : Manchester University Press; Marilyn Strathern Kinship at the Core, 1981, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Nigel Rapport Diverse World Views in an English Village, 1997, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Nadia Lovell (ed.) 1999 Belonging and Locality (London: Routledge); Jeanette Edwards 2000 Born and Bred (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

13 values and life orientations. Quotes in Hathersage Reviewed such as, ‘People who come to live in the village think they can “rule the roost” and won’t listen to the “natives”’ (p.20), illustrate something of this. Yet while there may be talk of ‘us and them’, as one of the respondents to the Hathersage Reviewed team also put it, it is often far from clear who exactly is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ - a point which Hathersage Reviewed notes. One reason for this is that although such ‘insider- outsider’ talk is rhetorically useful, particularly in relation to contested issues (such as house-prices), in practice matters are often much fuzzier and there is a relativity of belonging. In relation to a farmer working land worked by his father and his father before him, I was undoubtedly an incomer. But, had Arthur Scargill moved in next door, I would, by comparison, have felt like a deep insider. Belonging, then, is not just an either/or categorical matter: it is also potentially a journey (or, in uglier sociological language, a process). One can belong more or less; and one can come, over time, to belong more - and, sometimes, less. So, it’s a kind of continuum - but a wriggly or lumpy, rather than neat and smooth, one. In response to the Hathersage Reviewed questionnaire, one person says that they ‘feel that [Hathersage] would be a good place to “join”’ (p.20) - a recognition that although they already reside there, they do not yet fully belong. However, there are no clear rules and regulations for ‘joining’ the club of ‘village community’, and participating in village life does not necessarily equate with ‘joining’ and even more certainly it does not necessarily propel ‘outsiders’ to ‘insider’ status. The plethora of village voluntary associations and activities may, however, be testament partly to the wish of some of those who feel themselves not yet part of ‘the community’ to ‘join’. Hathersage Reviewed notes that there are eighty-four such organisations, ranging from the Horticultural Society to the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, which works out at one organisation per twenty-two residents (p.49). Yet I suspect that just as I found in the Isle of Skye, however many local organisations a person joins, this is not enough to turn them into an insider - and, indeed, joining too many is almost certainly a sign of being not local. Inching along the road to insiderhood also entails mastery of more subtle matters such as not ‘trying to rule the roost’(as the quote

14 from a ‘born-and-bred local’ above put it), not trying to change too much, going about things in certain ways, and - in an interesting twist that means that somebody can disrupt all usual expectations - becoming a ‘local character’. The latter brings me to another point about ‘village-ness’: people. When I thought back about what Hathersage meant to me, my thoughts were full of people and ‘local characters’. Almost all of the village shops, I realised, came with a name and a face (or two) attached; pubs were bound up in my mind with their landlords or sometimes certain bar staff; then there were school-teachers, not all of whom lived in Hathersage, and especially the Headmaster of the village-school, Mr Meehan, who seems to have become conflated in my memory with Captain Mannering from Dad’s Army; there were all of my school friends (and enemies), of course, and the ‘swimming pool gang’, the ‘head bangers’ at the local Disco (Friday nights), and the kids from the Catholic School (who I somehow had come to regard as a bad and dangerous lot); there were the vicars and ministers (mostly pretty shadowy in my recollections except for one who used to set us all off giggling during prayers when school services were held at the church) and the village Doctors; there were the characters who ran the various organisations and events in the village - including the redoubtable ladies who I suppose were members of the WI and did things like judging the cake competitions at the village show; and, one of my favourites, Winnie Roadnight, who ran the wildest girl-guide pack imaginable (we spent most weeks, as I remember it, rampaging round the village on ‘trails’ and I think I only did one badge in all my years of being a guide, and that was ‘first aid’, organised by ‘the district nurse’). Hathersage Reviewed gives recognition to the importance of people by including an appendix entitled ‘Some family self-portraits’. The portraits are, as the introduction to the appendix notes, severely edited for reasons of space and only a few lines from each are published here. Nevertheless, this ex-inhabitant was astonished that so many of the names triggered memories of faces and incidents; and perhaps more than anything this changed my own perception of my standpoint - not so much the outsider as I had always imagined perhaps? Naturally, there were also many I did not recognise, and this was not only among those who have

15 come to the village more recently. Yet this too is a feature of everyday village life for most inhabitants - we know a particular set of people, and know of a further set beyond these. Our local knowledge - even that of those who supposedly ‘know everybody’ - is partial and positioned by our own particular social sheep tracks within what the authors of Hathersage Reviewed aptly call a ‘social network’. My own vantage point was that of somebody who had come into the village, who retained a sense of outsiderness, but who had also grown up in the place. My perspective was also in many respects that of a teenager. Although the ‘Domesday’ project sought to interview all households, the voice of teenagers, not surprisingly, doesn’t seem to be much represented (and, indeed, more generally the study did not especially seek out distinctive or sociologically categorised voices). It may be the case, of course, that things have changed since my teenage years in the village: the Friday night disco in the hall near the pool may be a thing of the past, as may the social-life-threatening frustration of teen-existence in a village with a public transport system that seemed to shut down each night just as any decent partying was about to begin. Hathersage Reviewed is intended mainly for inhabitants of Hathersage itself and much of the information in the booklet is of a straightforward empirical kind, covering the history of the village and its buildings; and presenting information from the household survey undertaken at the Millennium. The latter includes demographic information about age and gender, place of birth, occupation and place of work. It also includes information about pastimes and church membership, and some more unusual data on matters such as rates of mobile-phone ownership - an outrageous forty-six percent of households - and the number of guinea-pigs and hamsters in the village: 27 and 14 respectively (p.14)! Inhabitants were also asked: ‘Where were you at midnight on 31st December 1999, if this doesn’t incriminate you?’. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that about half the population did not reply to this question, suggesting that a very high proportion of the Hathersage population engages in criminal activity. This could clearly make an interesting follow-up study: ‘High levels of crime behind respectable middle-class village exterior’. Many of the data from the survey - though not this last - are

16 helpfully compared in Hathersage Reviewed with national figures, and this serves to make the point that Hathersage is a relatively wealthy and elderly village, though fully in-line with national figures on the pet front. For me, some of the most interesting parts of Hathersage Reviewed were the tiny snippets of direct quotation (as given above) which revealed something about the views of Hathersage inhabitants. I was especially intrigued, as is obvious from this account, with those on ‘belonging’ - an interest stemming from my personal experience in the village as well as from my position as a ‘professional stranger’ (as anthropologists have been dubbed). Such comments also highlight ‘villageness’ as not just an agglomeration of social history, demographics and sites of social interaction, but also as a figment of imagination, desire, ambition and even frustration. ‘Hathersage’ does not mean the same to all of its inhabitants; and in the glimpse we get in Hathersage Reviewed there are hints that some of the different Hathersages might be difficult to reconcile. Those wanting to liven the place up and ‘improve’ it, for example, do so against the grain of perspectives which see such improvements as a kind of ‘urbanisation’ (cf. quote from ‘born-and- bred local on p.20), that is, as an affront to what a ‘village’ is for them. All of this opens up exciting potential vistas for the social researcher - if not necessarily for the local inhabitants! How do inhabitants seek to realise their visions of villageness? And do such visions sometimes collide with, or grate against, one another? Where might one see such collisions or accommodations - rough- or not so rough-edged? And, relatedly, how are attributions of belonging mobilised in village life? Who counts themselves as a ‘local’ and do other locals and non-locals agree, and in which contexts? What eases the journey towards ‘insiderness’ and what throws it off course? These are all matters of which inhabitants of Hathersage will have knowledge - though this knowledge will be only partly shared. Their perspectives will vary according to their particular social vantage points; and what a social researcher can add is neither ‘the correct’ perspective nor (probably) any kind of underlying consensual knowledge. Instead, what a social researcher can aim to do is to map out something of the patchwork of visions, understandings and

17 misunderstandings that also make up village life. This, of course, is not something that just anybody would be either equipped or willing to do, for it necessitates being neither a ‘proper’ insider nor a full outsider. Instead it demands that uncomfortable liminal role of ‘outsider-insider’ - trying to look deeply in while simultaneously standing back. Developing this kind of double-vision - close-up and wide-angle at the same time - is one feature of sociological-anthropological training (or should be). Carried out well, it produces accounts that trigger plenty of flickers of recognition from inhabitants (and ex-inhabitants) but at the same time surprises and new understandings. It is for this reason that inhabitants (and ex-inhabitants) of Hathersage should both welcome Hathersage Reviewed and look forward (though not without trepidation) to seeing the outcome of further sociological- anthropological work on the village.

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