A tour into untouched land

Enacting wilderness through relational engagements

Bibliographic Data

ID2402857
AuthorsEva Kotašková (0000-0002-5652-9398, Masaryk University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Publication date2024-06-10
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1466-1381 • E-ISSN: 1741-2714
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14661381241260879
OpenAlexW4399492382
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited56

Drawing upon an ethnographic study of guided tours in Svalbard, in this article I explore how is the wilderness enacted as a situational and contextual outcome of more-then-human relations, emerging from engagements with the environment. As the engagements during the guided tours contest the often expected 'purity' of wilderness, I further investigate in detail when and how nature-culture dichotomy is both contested and re-produced in the enactment of wilderness. I argue that the nature-culture dichotomy constituting wilderness on Svalbard shifts from the idea of human-less nature to life in harmony with nature in which some human traces are present. This dichotomy then emerges from more-than-human relations. Further, I show that the character of wilderness is also emerging from different situations and contexts, where temporality, knowledge and dependency on self or others influence the engagements and more-than-human relations

CONTEST · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Harmony (color · Non-human · Political science · Situational ethics · Sociology · Temporality · Wilderness · Wilderness area · Anthropology · Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Ecology

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