Changing the Factory Settings of Common Tourism: Encounters That Demand Response (ENG)

Entangled nonfiction and slow writing are fruitful approaches when thinking about tourist bodies – not only as entities stored in hotels and airplanes but also as participants in “encounters that demand response”, to use a phrase by Deborah Bird Rose. An incident took place last summer in a hamlet situated in eastern Finnish Lapland. An old farmhouse built right after war had been assessed as a sound building with solid timber, which unlike most buildings in Lapland remained intact – not surprising given the craftsmanship of the past. The cultural heritage as a building and dwelling technique, “an externalized memory of past generations” (Stiegler), was ready to be restored and learned from. However, a tourism company operating a hundred kilometres away bought the entire property from the local bank, and, without consulting the regional museum, quickly had a large section of its outer wall, beautifully patinated by almost a hundred summers of sunshine, cut up, removed, and transported to decorate a new reception desk. A local restauration apprentice saw the demolition of the house. His angry outcry in social media went viral and “the authentic hotel operation” received national publicity. According to the company’s spokespersons, they had “wanted to give new life” to the farmhouse. 
So, does the tourist’s touch give new life to old life? Is this how history, locality, landscape, and memory travel in tourism planning? The body of the tourist is to be found in the intersection of quantitative and the qualitative epistemologies, as both fugitive and ephemeral, and heavy and corrosive. Embodied encounters that demand response can be written and shared to replace extractive ideologies of consuming places with engaged mobile neighbouring.