Heartlands or neglected geographies? Liminality, power, and the hyperreal rural

This paper attempts to question what is meant by power in recent calls for the study of 'neglected' voices in rural studies. As such, there are two principal thoughts being developed here. First, the whole concept of the 'neglected' needs to be looked at much more closely. Many are willing to give in to modernist impulses to unearth and discover these other perspectives on life in rural areas without giving adequate consideration to the power relations which not merely repress these voices but indeed encourage them to speak as the neglected. Second, insofar as power can used in this way, to produce populations identifiable as much on the basis of what they lack as on the basis of what they have, scholarship which seeks to contribute to the opportunities people might have to improve their quality of life needs to avoid fixing definitions of who those people are or are not. The roles played by ambivalence and hybridity in everyday life (and particularly our spatial representations of it) need to be valorized and further explored. These thoughts are tracked along four trajectories involving themes of liminality and alienation, simulation and the temporality of communication, the bias of investigation, and the danger of recuperation. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.