Elsevier

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 13, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 367-375
Journal of Rural Studies

Editorial
Country backwater to virtual village? Rural studies and ‘the cultural turn’

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(97)00053-3Get rights and content

Abstract

In recent years, there has been something of a resurgence in rural studies, which has become somewhat more mainstream than previously in the academic space of social science. Increasing numbers of people have taken on important dualistic questions of society/space, nature/culture structure/agency and self/other from the perspective of rural studies. However, it is the ‘cultural turn’ in wider social science which has lent both respectability and excitement to the nexus with rurality, particularly with new foci on landscape, otherness and the spatiality of nature. With a conceptual fascination with difference, and a methodological fascination with ethnography, cultural studies have provided a significant palimpsestual overlay onto existing landscapes of knowledge. This paper seeks to convey some of the excitements and challenges which have been generated by this resurgence. Cultural studies of the rural have emphasized important new perspectives on real and hyperreal countrysides, but have also served to re-emphasize existing unresolved issues about politics, ethics and morality in rural research.

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    This paper draws on that presented originally at the annual conference of the RGS-IBG at the University of Strathclyde, January 1996.

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