Where is the global countryside? An (auto)ethnography of bodies in motion

This paper is an autoethnography of the global countryside that treats rurality as a relational and embodied condition produced through movement between rural worlds. Drawing on ethnographic experience in rural southern Italy and rural Tanzania, I argue that mobility between rural worlds generates forms of knowledge that cannot be captured through single-site methodologies. I advance three main claims: first, the global countryside is not a place but a condition emerging through circulation, comparison and uneven temporalities across rural worlds; second, the researcher’s body functions as both an affective and interpretive epistemic device through which memory, encounter and embodied comparison produce insight; third, autoethnography generates situated knowledge by making visible the embodied and positional conditions through which rural life becomes knowable. The analysis unfolds through four shifting embodied positions – the present body, the absent body, the returning body and the nostalgic body – each revealing different dimensions of rural life structured by migration, memory and moral evaluation.