OUT OF PLACE IN THE COUNTRY: TRAVELLERS AND THE “RURAL IDYLL”
- 1 January 1996
- Vol. 28 (1) , 42-72
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1996.tb00671.x
Abstract
A controversial new Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in Great Britain contains measures to curb the lifestyles of a group known collectively as “New Age Travellers”. This paper examines these travellers as “folk devils” of the Conservative “New Right” on a number of levels: their lifestyle does not conform to that espoused by authoritarian or libertarian Conservatism; moreover, they violate the spatial order of contemporary British society by trespassing against the dominant social representation of the countryside — the “rural idyll”. In Parliamentary debates speakers drew on the rural idyll to defend the exclusivity of access to the countryside. Notably, whilst Gypsies were seen as having a legitimate if highly marginalized position in the rural representation, few saw any place for New Age travellers.This publication has 23 references indexed in Scilit:
- PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*Antipode, 1994
- Proposed reform of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act: producing a problem to suit a solution?Critical Social Policy, 1993
- Justice or injustice? A survey of government policy towards gypsies and caravan dwellers in Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesImmigrants & Minorities, 1992
- Survey 13: Purification of SpaceEnvironment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1988
- FLEXIBLE ACCUMULATION THROUGH URBANIZATION: REFLECTIONS ON ‘POST‐MODERNISM’ IN THE AMERICAN CITYAntipode, 1987
- Protest and public order: The public order act 1986The Journal of Social Welfare Law, 1987
- Protest and disorder: the Public Order Act 1986Critical Social Policy, 1987
- RURAL NATURE AND URBAN NATURESSociologia Ruralis, 1987
- GYPSY Site Policy: a failure of both carrot and stickPolicy & Politics, 1987
- Persistence or Change? Conflicting Interpretations of Peripheral MinoritiesEnvironment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1986