I watch a lot of British tv. Midsomer Mysteries was one of my favorites, mainly because of how it portrays British culture. I was fascinated with the idea of the British Village. In America, we don’t really have villages.
Technically, maybe we do have villages, but they’re nothing like the romance of British villages. We have small cities and rural townships. Ours are looser in some ways. We live far away from one another. Cars and roads have really made the structures of our villages. Britain was structured around horse and foot travel. That’s just the beginning of the differences I see.
What really fascinates me is the intangible elements that create a village. I stretch the definition sometimes – is a village really just “a small settlement usually found in a rural setting” (National Geographic)?
No. For me, it’s everything from a tiny unincorporated hamlet to a small city. It’s about the character of how we create community and how we relate to each other and to nature. It’s the magical elements that bring beings together into a tangible, working whole.
That’s what the American Village series is all about.
