Rural Life, Physical Activity, and Health

It is often the case that sport and sporting activities are presented as preventing various health risks due to inactive lifestyles.  This type of lifestyle is perhaps most readily seen in urban settings where both work and leisure can encourage a sedentary routine and an unhealthy life.  This presentation examines the possible connections between sport, health and risk from the alternative perspective seen within rural communities.  It focuses on the case of rural female workers living outside of the more mainstream conceptions of health and physical activity. Very little is known about these rural communities and the kind of contributions that women make in these environments.  My aim will to be show how sport is largely absent from these females lives but that physical activity is central for how they conceive of their work and health.

A key resource for this research is the conception of ‘work’ found in institutional ethnography (IE).  In IE ‘work’ points to anything that requires time and effort, is conducted under specific conditions with specific resources and which may need to be thought about.   This view of work helps researchers to stay focused on what people are actually doing and what it is that they need to carry out their work.  I show how it is especially suited to examining how women in rural communities think, plan and feel about the physical activity and work that they engage in.  I further demonstrate how in such rural settings work, health and physical activity are interconnected and not isolated as in their urban counterparts.  The importance of a healthy lifestyle is then a product of the physical activity that is part of their overall work life and is not derived from sporting activities or government policies and recommendations.