The Dragon Has Many Faces - Conceptualizations of Rural Communities in North Wales and the Development of "Anthropology at Home" in Britain (Paperback)

Many urban-based anthropologists who study rural communities are also searching for "political" alternatives to a society they conceive as alienating, bureaucratic, unjust and exploitative. Such a search for other life-styles in order to learn something that could change one's own society bears the risk of idealization of the "other". The native anthropologist is subject to a different phenomenon of idealization, especially when his culture is threatened by powerful forces emanating from an alien centre. Such an idealization is evident in the ethnographic studies of rural Welsh communities by the Welsh geographers of the Aberystwyth school. Their analyses were heavily coloured by the dominant theme of the nationalist discourse, in which they played an important role. This book places their ethnographies, and the studies of Welsh communities by English social anthropologists, in the context of the theoretical development of an "anthropology at home" in Britain. It examines how new approaches to the study of local distinctiveness and its symbolic expressions could change perceptions of local cultures in Wales.