Reimagining Rural Futures

The ‘rural’ is sometimes perceived as homogeneous and monolithic through such images as marginalization, poverty, and exclusion, but recent studies have called for the fragmentation of monolithic, unsophisticated, and naive understandings of cultures and traditions associated with rurality (Hungerford et al. 2022). That such attempts have mostly concentrated on conventional approaches that focus on either socio-cultural or even merely descriptive features is not in itself surprising; these attempts have for decades been mostly made in Europe and North America (Crumb et al. 2022), often synonymous with never-ending debates on how to define the ‘rural’ and ‘rurality’. While it may seem quite simple to describe what is and what is not rural in everyday life, suggesting a precise and meaningful conceptual definition proves much more difficult (De Gennaro and Fantini 2002: 254). Different social groups in different social environments and with different experiences will probably have different perceptions and conceptions of ‘the rural’.

More generally, it is important to reject perspectives that demarcate the term ‘rural’ by defining it as territory or society, where rurality is normatively conceived as more ‘natural’ and traditional than the urban (Rye 2004: 4, Walsh 2010). Often imageries are used to portray a single, all-embracing place and space, yet rural society, communities, and life are not necessarily homogeneous, nor are they monolithic. A disapproval of such imageries has been reiterated by Heijman et al. (2008: 3), who reject references of rurality as synonymous with the ‘analogy to urban resilience’, where despite its colloquial use, there is hardly a particular consensus among scholars about what such a definition entails or how the rural is measured.

Equally, it is important to reject tendencies that describe rural areas only in comparison with urban areas; the former are likely to be portrayed as boring rather than exciting, and the latter as more exciting than boring. In such tendencies, the rural is likely to come off as a rather more traditional than a modern territory, one that is backward- rather than forward-looking. Such images often subjectively and uncritically ascribe to ‘rurality’ and ‘the rural’ such notions as low population density, abundance of farmland, and remoteness from urban centres and cities. These images are not any different from media portrayals of a less hurried and rather dormant lifestyle where people blindly follow seasons rather than the stock market, and where they have plenty of time for gossip and petty things. Comparing the rural to what it is not can perpetuate constrained conceptions of rurality as regressive in contradistinction to urban progressiveness, and particularly views of rural places as monolithic and conservative rather than fluid, dynamic, and diverse (Crumb et al. 2022). This may be comparable to a conundrum synonymous with orientalism, as discussed by Edward Said (1978: 97) in which ‘the rural becomes an “object” of study, stamped with an otherness – as all that is different, whether it be “subject” or “object” – but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character….’ (ibid., Araki 2001: 177). In the end, it is important to view and to discern the rural and rurality as ever changing and transforming both in terms of lifestyles as well as spatial aspects of population density and built-up structures.

In Africa, research is experiencing a ‘turn’ toward the rural and rurality, as socially and culturally constructed categories are gaining considerable terrain in scholarship (Chigbu 2013). For example, fluidity is pre-eminently imperative for areas where cultural, ecological, and economic dimensions are closely intertwined. It is my view that, in a rural area that is primarily influenced by ubiquitous mobile-phone-based products and services like mobile money systems and applications, the socio-economy and ecological culture of the rural area is by and large likely to manifest and transform in ways that are fluid and dynamic. And yet, not much scholarly work exists about this reality: while contemporary researchers have tried to get away from perspectives that treat rural residents as if they were ‘objects’ (Matsinhe 2011), the rural is sometimes portrayed as a passive space as if residents within such space were merely passive recipients of development, and ultimately, as if their livelihoods were solely dependent on the agency of ‘external others’. Thus, it becomes important to move beyond the predisposition in which concepts of rural and rurality are viewed as constant, static, and never changing – especially in contemporary times when modernization has brought about a technological, economic, and sociocultural revolution associated with massive transformation in rural lifestyles (Bunei and Akinlabi 2022).

This chapter relates with the notion of rurality as a territory and social space that, while belonging to fixed border areas, is being redesigned and reconstructed through dynamic ‘mobile’ spaces. I move rurality beyond its marginal relevance, questioning predetermined beliefs about rural people and communities, but also revisiting the social dynamics, networks, and lifestyles of rural people. Conceptually, I contribute mainly to discourses dealing with the relationship between mobile technologies and rural life in Africa, recognizing that these have been much more comfortable with relying on statistics, hard numerical facts, and ‘policy-relevant’ information (on farm size or farm outputs for example) than on heightening awareness of the social and cultural marginalization and experiences of rural lifestyles (McInerney 1995). As Duncombe and Boateng (2009: 1254) have noted, ‘m-finance research could be more strongly linked to multidisciplinary approaches combining social, cultural and economic perspectives, based on a more detailed understanding of the financial service behaviors and preferences of marginalized clients and users’.

Additionally, I contribute to the body of work of the sociology of money in suburban and rural areas (see e.g. Carruthers 2005) that demonstrates how money shapes and is shaped by cultural values and social relations. In its analysis, this body of work examines money, by and large, as a medium of relationship that only holds value when embedded in networks of trust (Dodd 1994). However, it does not necessarily define ways in which such mobile systems and applications are able to change everyday life for men and women in the rural or suburban areas (Donner and Telez 2008). Recognizing that their approaches have been inadequate, sometimes misrepresenting rural life and rurality with regard to mobile money usage and adoption in their theoretical, conceptual, and methodological analyses, this chapter contributes a perspective that examines the role and impact of mobile-phone-based products and services like mobile money in not only overcoming structural conditions in the global South but also achieving better urban and rural futures.