Paper short abstract:

How do the tourism farmers in South-East Estonia (re)construct their identities and how are their ideas of locality, space, place, nature, language and history expressed in their farms?

Paper long abstract:

Often tourism is considered to be travel to the unknown, an opportunity to experience something new, a movement from familiar to the unfamiliar and back. Therefore, traveling at home - domestic tourism - is a simultaneous journey to and between the unknown and known places, spaces and dispositions.

In Estonia, as in many Western countries, one of the alternatives for the traditional production farm has been to become a farm for the tourists. These new, 'tourism farms', are now fairly popular among Estonians. Can a trip taken there be considered a means to reconnect with the nature and/or with the (peasant) past? Should we view them as places of "identity formation" or rather just establishments of recreation where one can "spend time" with family, friends or colleagues? Which particular identities of belonging, out of the potential range of (contesting) associations with place or locale are currently dominant, and supported by the tourism farmers?

My poster will be based on my fieldwork conducted in Võru county since 2008 and map some of these meaningful and meaning-forming, lived spatio-temporal experiences or 'sites of identification' that are constructed as exemplified in the intertwined ideas of locality, space, place, nature, language and history and how these concepts are manifested in everyday lives and work of tourist farmers in Võru county, South-East Estonia.