The rural panopticon
本文提出‘乡村全景监狱’概念，基于苏格兰高地精神健康实证研究，探讨乡村中可见性、监视、闲言碎语与自我规训的关联，并联系边沁的乡村愿景与福柯的‘全景监狱主义’，对乡村残障地理研究有参考价值。
As a contribution to both rural theory and a geography of rural disability, this paper tackles the idea of the ‘rural panopticon’. Inspired by empirical research on mental ill-health in the Scottish Highlands, the authors specify certain workings of the rural panopticon, stressing interconnections between visibility, observation, surveillance, chatter and interiorised senses of self-disciplining (particularly for those with fragile mental health). There are suggestions that Bentham regarded his institutional brain-child, the Panopticon, as most logically and properly an urban phenomena, even calling it ‘Panopticon Town’, but there is a supplementary argument that identifies a rural vision – of a virtuous, self-regulating farming community – present in the margins of his Panopticon thinking. Through the figure of the ‘glass palace’ in the countryside, emphasising the pervasive watching, judging and censuring of conduct, a further link is made from Bentham's Panopticon to the rural panopticon. The paper explores this link both textually and though the Highlands case study, concluding by examining Foucault's dual attention to both Bentham's Panopticon and a rural colony for delinquent boys, Mettray, as twin exemplars of ‘panopticism’ in the disciplining of troublesome and troubled populations (those with disabilities included).