Making the relational village -Revaluing, resituating and reviewing the Asian rural world

How do we come to understand the objects of our attention, as educators and researchers of rural places and their inhabitants? These objects sometimes seem so natural and obvious — crops, drought, farmers, livestock, yield, rainfall, irrigation, productivity, and villages — that we treat them as things and matters in plain sight, there for all to see, record, measure and assess. Our task is merely to be present, and to seek to understand the objects before us. What, though, if our tools and frameworks are inadequate to the task at hand? What happens when we widen the scope of our analysis, change our approach to valuation, even research differently?

This lecture will draw out the tendrils of association and dependency that make the village more than its settlement, consider how we might revalue the labour that sustains the village, and draw into view those villagers who are all-too-present even when they are absent.

PROF. JONATHAN RIGG School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, has been engaging for the past three years with the Division of Rural Development, SLU, as an August T Larsson Guest Researcher. He has been researching rural Asia since the early 1980s, working in rural areas of Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, and writing multiple articles and books. In this public lecture he will reflect on his forty years of research in rural Asia as well as his engagements at SLU and present ideas currently being written up in a new book entitled The relational village.