Social, cultural and spatial imaginaries in rural tourism transitions

Abstract In the social sciences, the topic of imaginaries refers to socially constructed, taken-for-granted meanings about events, places, and people. Imaginaries are created symbolically and rhetorically, through claims about self, others, and places; they help people make sense of individual and shared experiences. This study explores how residents of a rural community discursively construct imaginaries to address tourism-related transitions. Telephone interviews were conducted with three types of residents (leaders, permanent residents, and second homeowners) in Burke, Vermont (USA). Results show that interviewees conceptualized imaginaries in quite different ways. Community leaders discussed imaginaries within discourses of growth, permanent residents discussed imaginaries within discourses of history, and second homeowners discussed imaginaries within discourses of utopia. These results are contextualized within two institutional discourses of local community tourism planning. Three theoretical propositions about imaginaries and tourism-based rural community development are suggested. This research expands traditional empirical approaches to evaluating rural tourism development processes by suggesting that imaginaries are implicit but important aspects of decisions about social change.