Destinizing Finnmark: Place making through dogsledding

• Published in: Annals of tourism research 2018-09, Vol.72, p.48-57
• Main Author: Granås, Brynhild
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Destinization; Dogs; Dogsledding; Embeddedness; Ethnography; Finnmark; Human – non-human; Space and place; Tourism; Tourism emergences
• ISSN: 0160-7383; 1873-7722
• DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2018.05.005

•Analysis of non-touristic interactions can illuminate tourism development.•Place-theory enables analysis of complexities and power in tourism development.•Dogsledding destinizes Finnmark in politically conjoined processes.•Dogsledding tell of non-humans as co-producers in touristic world-making processes. This paper illuminates an emerging dogsledding-tourism nexus in Finnmark through a place perspective and asks how sled dogs and mushers change the place in touristically relevant ways and what is at stake in such processes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, encounters and interactions that sled dogs and mushers become part of through their performances in place, are analysed. The paper brings tourism and relational geographies together while describing the ecologically, geographically, and historically embeddedness of dogsledding. Contingent touristic creativities and becomings are analysed through a more-than-representational place theoretical perspective that conceptualizes tourism emergences as ‘destinization of place’. The perspective encompasses non-human as well as human accomplices in touristic transformations and illuminates the complex political and ecological entanglements that touristic changes imply.