ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book have covered a wide range of topics, from a variety of perspectives and involving many different disciplines. This chimes well with contemporary rural scholarship, whereby many different approaches to the rural have been identified (see Woods, 2011). In this book, however, rurality has been interpreted variously as: material — a territory constituted largely by economic activity; represented — a mainly cultural artefact, in particular the rural idyll, but also culturally prescribed or sanctioned practices such as those associated with animals, music and ‘nature’; contested - a distinct realm of collective action and political conflict, e.g. around ‘development’, social class, ethnicity and biodiversity; and consumed—a specific type of attractor for human beings such as tourists, pleasure-seekers, older people and those seeking greater closeness to ‘nature’ and improved well-being. In short, rurality comes across overall as relational; that is, its existence always relates to a specific domain. This chapter assesses the apparent relativity expressed by these different interpretations, partly in the context of the rural studies literature. Its aim is to establish the extent to which we can ultimately conclude that rurality can have any generally accepted meaning across the different domains. Or, perhaps this relationality of the rural — and we may also note here the presence of numerous quasi-synonymous expressions: country, arcadian, rustic, bucolic, pastoral, and so on — is instead indicative of what Laclau called an empty signifier (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), that is, a privileged element that gathers up a range of distinct elements and binds them together into a discursive formation, but only by emptying it of its content.
