Rural space (re)produced - Practices, performances and visions: A case study from an Aegean island

This article explores the critical role of agents - their practices, interests, rationalities and identities - in order to re(focus) the materiality, representations and the imagination of rural space. Based on fieldwork carried out in Mesta, a village of the eastern Aegean island of Chios, it documents different versions of rurality, which emerge in association with actors' spatial practices linked to production or consumption activities. Qualitative data analysis unravels an intensely 'political series of subversions, conflicts and contradictions. The latter emerge in the context of practices centering on tourism and the construction of the agricultural landscape as an 'aestheticized' space through the performance of the rural. I argue that underlying the violation of dominant interpretations of space and normative patterns, often expressed as commodification of 'tradition', are diverse worldviews and concerns about the ways self- and community interests are expressed and realized.