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Intertwined Narratives: Nature Tourism in the Context of forced Settlers’ History in Western Siberia
The paper starts from geographical and socio-economic specificity of nature tourism in sparsely populated and economically marginalized middle reaches of the Ob River, and concludes with a conceptual revision of sustainable development agenda in the context of tourism. The tourism experience here is inevitably complemented by history of political repression, for the landscape that tourists enjoy today was the site of forced resettling schemes. Against this background, river and taiga possess nonhuman agency, not as development factors or as tourism resources, but as agents of ruination and collective historical trauma. Conventional idea of tourism as leisure miss important histories that are constitutive of both region and tourism experience: given case shows how the historical is intertwined with the environmental, inverting established composition depicting nature as mere backdrop for human activity. Thus, in the context of a violent history, natural forces here appear as actors that also shape tourists’ experiences today.