Foxes, green fields and Britishness: on the rhetorical construction of place and national identity

This paper explores an accepted but under researched feature of national categories: their complex relationship with social constructions of place. We argue that social psychological work on national identification and mobilization would benefit from closer attention to this relationship. In order to develop this argument, we analyse a series of newspaper accounts published on behalf of the Countryside Alliance, a coalition formed to preserve rural 'ways of life' in the UK and, more specifically, to defend extant practices of hunting. Applying a discourse analytic method, we show how the Alliance has exploited the rhetoric of place in order to portray the preservation of hunting as an issue of national significance. By associating British identity with the 'rural idyll' of the English countryside, the organization has appealed to a place construction in which hunting and its associated activities become cast as essential expressions of the national character. Building on relevant work in geography and discursive psychology, we trace some wider implications of this process for social psychological research on category construction, reification and collective mobilization.