Migration, place and class: youth in a rural area.

The article presents young people's reasons for leaving or remaining in a rural area in Great Britain, the Scottish Borders. Young people's views about migration and attachment demonstrate a contradictory and more complex pattern than that of detached late-modern migrants and traditional backwater stay-at-homes. These stereotypes have some resonance in local culture, for example in disdain for rootless "incomers" lacking real sympathy with the community and in the common accusation of the parochial narrow mindedness of locals who have never been elsewhere. However, such stereotypes emerge from complex social class antagonisms and cross-cutting ties to locality. Many young people's ties contradict the classifications these stereotypes imply. There are young out-migrants who are the children of rootless in-migrants, but also, nevertheless, have lasting attachments to the locality of their childhood. Then there are young "stayers" who are the children of born and bred locals but yet feel serious disaffection from their locality. These attached migrants and detached stayers may not represent settled orientations to their locality of childhood, but they, nevertheless, contradict both certain local stereotypes and Baumanesque "late modernist" sociological theorizing.