COUNTRY BACKWATER TO VIRTUAL VILLAGE - RURAL STUDIES AND THE CULTURALTURN

In recent years, there has been something of a resurgence in rural stu dies, which has become somewhat more mainstream than previously in the academic space of social science. Increasing numbers of people have t aken 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, p articularly with new foci on landscape, otherness and the spatiality o f nature. With a conceptual fascination with difference, and a methodo logical fascination with ethnography, cultural studies have provided a significant palimpsestual overlay onto existing landscapes of knowled ge. 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 unresolve d issues about politics, ethics and morality in rural research. (C) 19 97 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights resrved.