Moving back to modernity: Urban-to-rural migration and the cultural dialectic of authenticity and progress

Drawing on year-long ethnographic research among newcomers to a rural community in south-central Montana, I demonstrate how through their migration these exurbanites are expressing their internalized cultural compulsion to progress as well as their desire to reclaim a sense of authenticity in their lives. In this respect, contemporary urban-to-rural migration is best understood as the result of the on-going forces of Modernity, instead of an expression of anti-Modernism, post-Modernism, or any exclusively economic rationale. By providing a cultural reinterpretation of this social process I offer an empirical analysis of a number of major works of theoretical abstraction (e.g. Giddens 1990; Harvey 1990; Jameson 1990) that have sought to explain the ongoing changes facing the contemporary Western world. The group of inmigrants upon I focus is part of the expanding postindustrial middle---a particularly privileged and deeply entrenched segment of Modern-American society. The experience of their migration is channeled rhetorically and practically into specific discursive domains centered on larger constellations of American value for the: (1) natural environment (i.e. wilderness); (2) agricultural environment; and (3) social environment (i.e. a "sense of community"). These environments, as part of the rural US are seen by newcomers as offering "emplotment" in cultural narratives (Handler & Saxton 1988) which simultaneously offer the progress that Modern subjects seek to satisfy their search for authenticity.