Christmas in the ‘Valley of Praise’: Intersections of the rural idyll, heritage and community in Lobethal, South Australia

The two-ness of rural life and the ends of rural scholarship

“…Mingay's (1989) edited volume, The Rural Idyll, opened wide this line of thought, which had been presaged by Williams's 1973 identification of the ''golden echo'' of rural life. A number of studies subsequently investigated what might be termed the ''idyllology'' of the rural (Bell, 1992(Bell, , 1994Cloke and Little, 1997;Halfacree, 1995;Little and Austin, 1996;Valentine, 1997), and articles in recent issues of Journal of Rural Studies continue to interrogate what it excludes and avoids (Blackstock et al, 2006;Neal and Walters, 2006;Rye, 2006;Winchester and Rofe, 2005).…”

Memory, Management and Marketing: Heritage Tourism as a Catalyst for Urban Transformation

“…The origins of this bias stems from an 'antiurban' romanticism following the Industrial Revolution (Ashworth and Page 2011: 3). This romanticism, typically referred to as the rural idyll (see Winchester and Rofe 2005), privileged the rural as the natural preserve of wholesome values and experiences. Contrasting this, the urban was demonised as an unnatural, corrupting place characterised by declining social values.…”

The politics of place: Official, intermediate and community discourses in depopulated rural areas of Central Spain. The case of the Riaza river valley (Segovia, Spain)

“…The community, management of nature and management of the surrounding space are understood through cultural and social conflicts (Stanley et al, 2005;Marsden, 1999). This perspective has also had considerable influence in the latest developments of rural geography (Cloke et al, 1998;Woods, 1997Woods, , 2003DuPuis and Goodman, 2005;Winchester and Rofe, 2005). In this area, the distinction linked to Foucault's line of thought between micro-power situations and power institutions (Crampton and Elden, 2007) is relevant, related, on the one hand, to a distribution of power in a given situation -changing in time -and to more permanent structures of power -especially institutional ones (Crampton and Elden, 2007).…”