Sehnsuchtsorte/ Places of Longing
Hoenig, Bianca & Hannah Wadle (eds.) (2019). Touristische Sehnsuchtsorte in Mittel- und Osteuropa von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Tourist Places of Longing in Eastern Europe from 1945 until the present). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag: Wiesbaden.
This volume portrays tourist places of longing in Eastern Europe and makes the transnational and social-political importance of desires visible. It focuses on official and unofficial concepts of a good life, emotional ties to places, the creation of tourist infrastructures as well as the circulation of discourses and people between East and West. The political, social and economic upheavals, which have marked the region historically up to now are cast into a new light. In this way, the potential of this massive transformation processes can be highlighted, instead of repeating the still current story of a torn and retarded grey Eastern Bloc. The volume contributes to the recent study field of Tourism Studies in Eastern Europe and gives a new impetus for research debates.
Wadle, Hannah (2019). Longings from the Bottom of the Boat. Re-assessing Transformation in a Polish Sailing Resort, in „Prace Etnograficzne“ (Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego), 47(3), pp. 143-172.
This article introduces an ethnographic discussion of the afterlife of a legendary sailing tavern, the Zęza (The Bilge), in a small sailing resort in the Masurian Lake District, Northeast Poland. The existence of the tavern falls within the high times of post-socialist “transformation”: it worked from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when it was re-located as part of re-designing the marina. The author suggests that the discourse of longing for the community and atmosphere in the old tavern has mobilised members of the sailing community, local entrepreneurs, and, most recently, new investors to revisit and subvert the locally realized version of touristic “transformation”. The article analyses the debate of longing, loss and exclusion among the sailing community, then moves to introduce the owner of an emerging local enterprise that re-appropriates the values of the old tavern community for creating a new touristic alternative and self-gentrify. A closer look at the evolving local gastronomy provides insights into the compatibility of diverse sets of values in a shared place of longing in contemporary Poland.
Verschaeve, Mathilde and Hannah Wadle (2014). Tourism and Post-Socialist Heterotopias: Eastern Europe as an Imagined Rural Past, in: Tourism and the Power of Otherness. Seductions of Difference, ed. David Picard, Michael Di Giovine, Bristol: Channel View Publications, pp. 74-94.
In this chapter, we will use the results of two ethnographic field studies on tourism development in Maramures in Romania (Mathilde) and Masuria in Poland (Hannah) to explore the transformations of Eastern Europe as a Western European tourist destination. We will focus in particular on rural areas, which seem to constitute a tourism reality different from that of urban centres, whose socialist heritage sites have become a major attraction for a younger generation of Western tourists (Light & Young, 2006). By comparing the results of these studies, we are able to discuss the wider cultural frameworks in which tourism imaginaries are produced, performed and institutionalised, and how they challenge identity processes among stakeholders and populations involved in the tourism sector in destinations.