This afterword traces certain shared themes across the studies in this special issue and my research on village formation among Korowai of Indonesian Papua. I focus on what Chio describes as the ‘relationality’ of the rural, especially villages’ intense but diverse forms of global connectedness. I suggest our common subject is how rural people think about their place in history by thinking about space. More specifically, I argue that spatial forms are sites through which people engage with difference and hierarchy of normative orders, including not only relations of otherness and inequality between villages and urban centres but also forms of otherness and evaluative hierarchy ‘internal’ to rural spaces and personal subjectivity.