Geographic analysis in rural areas has been dominated in recent decades by socio-economic and socio-political perspectives. The new materialism can constitute a way of progress in rural geographical studies that involve the material and the human in the form of hybrid experiences. Materiality can be expressed in three ways: (1) the surface matter that corresponds to the traditional elements of the material rural space, (2) the materiality that would be associated with a joint and undifferentiated vision of human artefacts in a village, mainly the set of rural houses and (3) the experimental materiality that has an individual dimension, the result of the multiple processes of destruction, revival and reconstruction that simultaneously happen in one place. The experimental materiality is of the most interest for geographic analysis since it is where the materiality of the rural house and the individual are hybridized in the process of recovery of the traditional rural house. In the process of recovery of materialities, binary oppositions built in the rigid framework of modernity can be dissolved and established fluid postmodern alternatives co-produced between people and materiality. The new materialism in rural geography can be an alternative path that allows analyzing heterogeneous realities in a hybrid way and contributing in a practical context to the development of new rural policies.

The concept of resistance is multidimensional in political and rural geography. It is mainly used to classify communities’ strategies in response to the actions of extra-local public and private agents. In this approach, the community is usually studied homogeneously. However, some interpretations consider that resistance creates differentiation processes within the rural community. From this perspective, individual resistance strategies can be analysed, which join forces in times of community resistance. In depopulated regions, the purpose of resistance is to remain in a place. This paper studies several cases of resistance in small populations affected by depopulation in a region of Spain.

This article examines the concept of resistance in rural studies. Resistance has usually been associated with community responses to global processes that alter rural space and daily life. Ethnographic interviews with 19 farmers in Spain found different individual resistance strategies within each geographic area, evidencing a plurality of responses, or strategies, regarding specific problems. Each person within a community was able to develop a strategy according to their own interests and each community did not constitute a homogeneous confluence of interests. Few studies on processes have linked the plurality of place and rural communities. This article contributes a comparison of the resistance strategies of farmers in rural areas with socio-geographic characteristics to analyse the value of geographic “place” and the plurality of resistance strategies for permanence. Main characteristics of place reveal general strategies of farmers which contrast with the individual, everyday tactics each farmer has for survival within their place.