Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Rural—Urban Relations in a Global Age
- Chapter 3 Every Village, a Different Story: Tracking Rural Diversity in Bulgaria
- Chapter 4 Smugglers into Millionaires: Marginality and Shifting Cultural Hierarchies in a Bulgarian Border Town
- Chapter 5 Rural Decline as the Epilogue to Communist Modernization: The Case of a Socialist ‘Model’ Village
- Chapter 6 No Wealth without Networks and Personal Trust: New Capitalist Agrarian Entrepreneurs in the Dobrudzha
- Chapter 7 Inheritance after Restitution: Modern Legislative Norms and Customary Practices in Rural Bulgaria
- Chapter 8 Rural, Urban and Rurban: Everyday Perceptions and Practices
- Chapter 9 The Koprivshtitsa Festival: From National Icon to Globalized Village Event
- Chapter 10 Fashioning Markets: Brand Geographies in Bulgaria
- Chapter 11 Greek (Ad)ventures in Sofia: Economic Elite Mobility and New Cultural Hierarchies at the Margins of Europe
- List of Contributors
Chapter 8 - Rural, Urban and Rurban: Everyday Perceptions and Practices
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Rural—Urban Relations in a Global Age
- Chapter 3 Every Village, a Different Story: Tracking Rural Diversity in Bulgaria
- Chapter 4 Smugglers into Millionaires: Marginality and Shifting Cultural Hierarchies in a Bulgarian Border Town
- Chapter 5 Rural Decline as the Epilogue to Communist Modernization: The Case of a Socialist ‘Model’ Village
- Chapter 6 No Wealth without Networks and Personal Trust: New Capitalist Agrarian Entrepreneurs in the Dobrudzha
- Chapter 7 Inheritance after Restitution: Modern Legislative Norms and Customary Practices in Rural Bulgaria
- Chapter 8 Rural, Urban and Rurban: Everyday Perceptions and Practices
- Chapter 9 The Koprivshtitsa Festival: From National Icon to Globalized Village Event
- Chapter 10 Fashioning Markets: Brand Geographies in Bulgaria
- Chapter 11 Greek (Ad)ventures in Sofia: Economic Elite Mobility and New Cultural Hierarchies at the Margins of Europe
- List of Contributors
Summary
In this chapter, I will address the main question of the volume — how rurality is being remade under globalization — applying to social imaginaries a conceptual tool that has already been introduced in the initial chapters. Following Kaneff I will engage with the concept of ‘positionality’ (position in relational space/time within the global economy) suggested by geographer Eric Sheppard to capture ‘the shifting, asymmetric, and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places’ (2002, 308). The advantages of this concept are that it is relational and thus captures the aspects of connectivity, that it involves power relations and thus can account for inequalities, and that it is dialectic and thus helps to understand the agency that both reproduces and changes its earlier configurations. While Sheppard has developed the idea of positionality in the context of economic geography, he has noted its applicability to the ‘space of discourse’ as well (321—2) and it is this relevance that I would like to explore further. I expect that the interdependence (albeit asymmetric) and optionality implied in the idea of positionality might also be fruitful for our understanding of the ‘micro’ level of everyday experiences and social imaginaries.
As Duijzings has argued in the introduction, postsocialist transitions have led to the exposure of the countryside to global flows and hence to the blurring and partial collapse of spatial categories such as ‘centre—periphery’ and ‘urban—rural’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Global VillagesRural and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Bulgaria, pp. 137 - 152Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013