'A little place getting smaller': The depopulation and social spatialization of Gove County, Kansas.

摘要

This study seeks to analyze the way that the inhabitants of a severely depopulated rural Great Plains community, Gove County, Kansas, construct and adjust their sense of place and place-myths in light of their county's continued demographic and economic decline. It tests geographer Rob Shields' theory of social spatialization, which argues that the images and myths associated with a specific place can limit what society as a whole or a given community's members imagine as possible for that place. Marginalized places may be marginalized because either society or their own inhabitants have been unable to break away from the hegemonic hold of their own place-myths. I present the challenges that Gove County faces as a result of its continuing depopulation, and then analyze how the county's internally held place-myth of Jeffersonian agrarianism has contributed to that decline.