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social, cultural and moral values that have become associated with rurality, rural
spaces and rural life.
(Woods, 2009: 2)
Recent efforts by geographers to understand the cultures of belonging and constraints of place
on livelihood strategies have brought to the fore fl uid and networked dimensions of rural
tourism (Briedenhann and Wickens, 2004; Pavlovich, 2003; Scott
et al.
, 2008). Researchers
emphasise that networking represents a crucial and effective option in terms of mobilising
information and resources and of engaging in cooperative processes defi ned by mutual learning
(Bramwell and Sharman, 1999; Buhalis, 2000; Lemmetyinen and Go, 2009; Saxena, 2005).
Usefully, this research has helped to uncover the spatial stretching of social and business
networks of suppliers, intermediaries, consumers and different systemic identities operating
within the policy arena (Larsen
et al.
, 2007; Pearce, 2008; Watts, 2009). However, some of
these studies have been partial and are often problematic in their treatment of peripheral,
largely non-Western places. Authors have drawn attention to a set of key exclusions in the
globalisation and networks literature which tends to focus on advanced, urban economies and
occasionally their reach (Nagar
et al.
, 2002; Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008) in the non-
West. Even when their scope includes parts of the developing countries, many of these litera-
tures 'continue to construct the South and de-industrialised places in the North as the passive,
victimised, or invisible “Other” to global spaces and processes' (Nagar
et al.
, 2002: 265).
Overall, these paradoxes point to the need for a rethinking of geographical categories
(most particularly of East and West, core and periphery, rural and urban) and challenging the
tendency to collapse differences in universal(ising) accounts of change.
Rural tourism: geographies of difference
Rural spaces are not homogeneous and the different histories, relationships and connections
they have come to embody are defi ned by the substitution of 'traditional' representations of
rurality with new defi nitions of rural space. New spatial concepts and metaphors of mobility -
de-territorialisation, displacement, diaspora, migration, travelling, border crossings and
nomadology - fuelled by unprecedented global processes are central to newly emerging geog-
raphies of difference. For instance, research highlights changing resource values, public policies,
land tenures and property rights in the rangelands of the western United States and Canada, the
High Country of New Zealand's South Island and the Australian Outback as well as the diver-
sity, non-linearity and spatial heterogeneity that can currently be observed in modern agricul-
ture and rural society in the UK and Europe (Holmes, 2002; Gartner, 2004; Wilson, 2001).
Similarly, based on evidence from Africa, China and other parts of Asia where central
agencies often play a decisive role in developing rural tourism, the shift has been in favour of
assessing local people's attitudes towards tourism in the area and soliciting their views on how
the benefi ts to the community could be increased (Gao
et al.
, 2008; Go and Jenkins, 1997;
Mvula, 2001). Within these heterogeneous rural spaces, geographers' contribution to theo-
retical debates is marked by an increasing attention to understanding 'differential exclusion'
(Woolfson, 2009: 952) and the newly emerging socio-economic hierarchies in the country-
side in the wake of a globalising economy. The most signifi cant impact of globalisation on
rural tourism has been that it has ended the isolation of the countryside and made geographers
take note of the marginalised characters, which has resulted, for instance, in the inclusion of
'black histories' to disrupt discussions of 'whiteness' within the historical geographies of the
rural landscapes of England (Bressey, 2009; Neal and Agyeman, 2006).
