Miles from home in the field of dreams: rurality and the social at the endof history

Considerations of two films set in Iowa frame my attempt in this paper to d iscuss some of the tensions between the meaningfulness of rurality and the evaporation of history in the region's cultural politics of place. A new re gional geography emphasizes the historical formation of places, but how is 'history' to be understood and how meaningful a role can it play? These que stions are particularly important in light of challenges which claim that, in fact, we have reached the 'end of history'. Baudrillard, for example, be lieves that we have entered a 'hyperreal' era which suppresses further expe rimentation with social organization. Instead, collisions of excessively pr oliferated representations of relationships between rurality, history, and social interaction suggest that the very possibility of social organization in an ahistorical hyperreal era increasingly relies for its expression on the carrying out of deliberately (and often violent) antisocial action.