Welsh Communities

Welsh Communities is a critical examination of the diverse Welsh experiences of community: rural and urban; traditional and alternative; inward and outward migrations. The essays in the volume - the first collection of ethnographic writing on Wales for a number of decades - advocate a contemporary theoretical approach to the study of communities. Each essay is based on original ethnographic research, using methods that involve a long-term and comparatively intimate relationship between researchers and their research subjects and locales. The contributors analyse the nature of community and explore how different groups symbolically construct and experience 'community' on a day-to-day basis. The groups and topics considered include: a former mining village in south Wales; traditional healing in mid-Wales; farming; incomers and alternative lifestyles in west Wales; two contrasting neighbourhoods in Swansea; and the London Welsh community. In the course of these studies, various questions are also raised concerning how or whether the contributors as 'native ethnographers' belong to those communities they are studying. Welsh Communities represents a major original contribution to the development of anthropological studies of Welsh society and culture.