ABSTRACT
This chapter provides rural studies of power and suggests agendas regarding the study of power in rural spaces and places. A more complex but also far more revealing interpretation of an apparent blindness to power is provided by situating studies of the rural community in several wider intellectual landscapes. Rural studies of power have been predominantly directed at the structural and institutional components of power bound up with the ordering and re-ordering of rural society and space. Since the 1990s in particular, rural studies of power have also been characterized by a growing concern with social and political marginalization in rural areas. A consistent theme was the undermining of the morally-structured and 'organic', 'traditional' communities by social, cultural, economic and technological forces that rendered life increasingly sterile, amoral and fragmented. The local state from the perspective does not 'possess' power in its own right, but must achieve it through (re)positioning itself in wider actor-networks.
