Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Making modern rurality: the "animalscape" of Estonian tourism farms  
Maarja Kaaristo (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my fieldwork conducted in tourism farms in South-East Estonia, I will look into the question of power and exclusion of the animals in tourism business, and how the phenomenon of rural tourism can be used to analyze the construction and representations of modern heritage of rurality.

Paper long abstract:

Rural tourism can be viewed as phenomena resulting partly from the wish to escape the urban environment and the need to reaffirm local identity and cultural (and natural) heritage in the face of growing globalization, both from the viewpoints of the hosts and the guests. The post-socialist situation has forced many farmers to reconsider their initial (often nostalgic) ideas about small production farms and one of the alternatives has been to establish a farm for the tourists.

In the tourism farms, an environment is (re)created where rural nostalgia can be indulged through friendly family hosting their guests at their home. An important part of this construction of the farm environment are farm animals and pets, and this "animal-scape" is being actively re-designed and re-negotiated by the farmers as they have been forced to give up the attempts to live on small-scale farming due to the current agricultural politics. The tourism farmers are active agents in (re)interpreting the meanings of 'rurality' and 'heritage' and therefore produce new meanings and connotations, exluding some aspects of their "animal-scape" (like traditional animal husbandry) and including others (new species such as ostriches or reindeer). In this way, tradition and heritage can be seen as something that is not so much about the return to our "roots" but coming to terms with our "routes", to paraphrase Stuart Hall.

Panel P46
Critical heritage studies and the circuits of power: inclusion and exclusion in the making of heritage
  Session 1