Domestic tourism encounters in the Masurian lake district: multiple tourism moralities, reversible relationships, and social well-being in contemporary Poland

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on different moral economies of domestic tourism encounters in late-post-socialist Masuria, in the rural Northeast of Poland. An ethnographic study of three different tourism entrepreneurs brings to light different, concurring legacies of the ‘good’ tourism encounter in the area and indicates a shift of tourism discourses and social aspirations of living well together in contemporary Poland. In a climate of mutual stigmatisation and boundary drawing, rural tourism entrepreneurs mobilise the encounter with domestic tourists to subvert evolving power asymmetries in Poland and to offer alternative readings to dominant narratives of inequality in the transforming country. However, their proposed alternative tourism socialities with the national ‘other’ do not arrive naturally: relationships in tourism are shown to be ambivalent and reversible to their participants; their performance demands much moral work and requires a degree of cultural complicity or compatibility with the other. The article contributes to current debates on the moral economy of encountering in anthropological literature of tourism, post-socialism, and morality.