Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses sailing tourism in the traditional Polish sailing area, the Masurian Lake District, as a realm, in which late post-socialist transformation processes take place and are negotiated bodily.

Paper long abstract:

With sailing on the Baltic Sea restricted during Socialism, the Masurian Lake District in the Northeast of Poland, became the most popular area of sailing in Poland, which it is still today. Based on my ethnographic field research in Masuria, I propose viewing the sailing body as a central realm of post-socialist transformation processes and their negotiation.

Looking at the experience of learning to sail on a local sailing course, I am exploring how following the 'old school of sailing', modern tourism enterprises cultivate and adapt socialist and pre-socialist bodily practices and techniques to new economic contexts. This transformation and new ordering of a young generation of post-Socialist sailors-to-be, inscribes physical cultural memory into their tourism bodies and links them bodily to an often silenced past.

Secondly, I argue that within the sailing community, body practices and techniques are a form of communicating and negotiating post-socialist identities in transformation. Not only are social distinctions in the non-tourist world between the 'old sailors' and the new 'Warsavians', played out through the use of techniques and different sets of multi-sensory experiences, also is the tourism typology of the 'sailor', shaped under the regime of socialist tourism and scarcity, newly negotiated with regards to changing tourism infrastructures and technologies.

My paper draws attention to the depth of post-socialist transformation processes, inseparable from the human experience and use of the body. Discourses of change and continuity are interwoven with the body, they can be continued, negotiated or newly established in and through it.