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Paper short abstract:

The case study of tourism in the Bohemian Forest between 1870 and 1914 will explore nature-based tourism as one of the possible ways of human adaptation to the partially unreckonable changes of landscapes and uncertainties of living in a more-than-human world.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of the paper is to explore an expansion of “nature-based tourism” (Coghlan and Buckley 2013) as means of facing economic and social uncertainties brought by the transformation of the landscape. The case study will focus on the development of both organized and individual tourism in the Bohemian Forest between 1870 and 1914, following a series of storms, bark beetle outbreaks, and subsequent short-term forestry expansion in the 1860s and 1870s.

While other studies on Central European mountain tourism of that period (Holubec 2021, Pelc 2009, Judson 2006, Haller 1995) deal predominantly with the nationalist aspects of tourism as a social movement, the paper should focus on entanglements between the human (tourists, their clubs, local entrepreneurs and inhabitants) and more-than-human (mountains, bark beetles, forest) actors. Nature-based tourism will be therefore perceived as one of the possible ways of human adaptation to the partially unreckonable transformations of landscapes and uncertainties of living in a more-than-human world. This, however, brings political, social, and economic implications as well.

The paper will use textual (guidebooks, tourist clubs’ records…) as well as non-textual (postcards, maps) archival sources. The usual approaches of historical research should be broadened by a more-than-human perspective (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2021, LeCain 2015), as well as reflections on contemporary ethnographic research (Blavascunas 2020).