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Paper short abstract

I explore different narratives and discourses to analyze the multi-semantic descriptions of nature in a small fishing community and place of sustainable tourism, in the Danube Delta: identity, source of food and livelihood, a place of relaxation, a resource to be saved and protected, or just home.

Paper long abstract

My research is based on extended anthropological fieldwork in the Romanian Danube Delta (since 2005), and a recent series of narrative interviews and participant observation conducted in the small village of Sfântu Gheorghe (2025); located on the southern ramification of Danube, the place is isolated between the river and the coast of the Black Sea. The village, with a Ukrainian (hahol) heritage, had a long tradition of sturgeon fishing (interrupted abruptly in 2006 by conservationist measures, with deep consequences on the livelihood and identity of the local community). While tourism has been (since late ‘60s), an additional source of income for many families, it becomes more and more important as an alternative to fishing. In Sfântu Gheorghe, tourism can be both a push for modernization (connecting a closed, traditional community to the rest of the world, in a meaningful cultural encounter) and a reminder of the good old times when everything was “natural’ and modest (originally, the village was attractive, mostly for urban intellectuals, for its simplicity and natural settings). While in elder’s narratives, nature is wild and rough and, in ecological discourses, nature is something pristine, to be protected, “nature”- as an asset to present to tourists - is domesticated, neat, beautiful, Instagram-able. I look diachronically at different narratives (discourses of various actors: local community, tourism operators, guides, researchers, tourists etc.) to explore the flexible and multi-semantic descriptions of nature, in a typical coastal environment, i. e. fluid, liminal and fluctuating.