Earthly substances and narrative encounters: poetics of making a tourism destination

Abstract

This article deals with the becoming of place in relation to tourism. The agency of non-human actors, such as earthly substances or matters underlying any given destination, has rarely been addressed empirically. Our argument is based on the view that a place is an entanglement of ever-moving substances. Hence, our objective is to trace how materialities of cultural landscape contribute to the continuous production of places through tourist encounters. By approaching destination development from the angle of relational materialism, the article aims at providing insights into the formation of tourism places, describing it as ‘poetics of making’. The article provides an account of the creation of the Strandir region, a sparsely populated coastal area in the north-west of Iceland, as a tourist destination. We will focus on the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, established in 2000, which has played a central role in framing the area as a tourism destination. The Museum brings together, and re-awakens, the period of witchcraft in the 17th century during which Strandir was one of the most notorious regions in Iceland for witch-hunts and burning. We will illustrate how magic, understood as a blank figure narrating human encounters with earthly substances, affects the ordering of Strandir both as a place and as a tourism destination. The power of the blank figure of magic rests in its ability to overturn stable orders or mobilise new or latent connections. Importantly, it also rests on personal narratives with the support of imagination, emotions and play. The Museum has been instrumental in creating and enhancing the image of the region as a place of magic, emphasising how culture and nature, as conventionally defined, mesh through human and non-human practices in the continuous forming of Strandir.