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 Derbyshire Peak District to the south of Sheffield. 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 England 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.