Abstract
The current Earthly crisis demands new imaginings, conceptualisations and practices of tourism. This paper develops a post-anthropocentric approach to envisioning the possibilities of the ‘proximate’ in tourism settings. The existing generic definitions of proximity tourism refer to a form of tourism that emphasises local destinations, short distances and lower-carbon modes of transport, as well as the mundane exceptionality of the ordinary. We conceptualise proximity tourism with feminist new materialist literature, which accords agency to the ongoing common worlding of all matter—including but not limited to humans—rather than to separate individual agents. More specifically, our research explores the idea of proximity by drawing closer to the geo—to the Earth—through geological walks in the Pyhä National Park in Finnish Lapland. We analyse these walks with the notions of rhythmicity, vitality and care—ideas constructed from the theoretical heritage guiding our study. By doing this, we explore the potential of proximity tourism in ways that intertwine non-living and living matter, science stories, history, local communities and tourism. The outcome of this analysis, we propose, composes one possible narrative of tourism after the Anthropocene.
Highlights
A great part of the academic debate surrounding the Anthropocene and tourism has focused on climate change
In the paper at hand, we propose proximity tourism—and one particular form, geotourism [11,12,13]—as a possible source of hope for surviving the earthly crisis
We argue that the need for new, more complex and sensitive conceptualisations of the Anthropocene suggested by feminist scholars, together with imaginaries of what happens after the Anthropocene, are tightly connected to the study and practice of tourism, as well as to explorations of the role of the post-anthropocentric tourist
Summary
A great part of the academic debate surrounding the Anthropocene and tourism has focused on climate change. As argued by other scholars, the current discourse on sustainability does not provide adequate tools for addressing and solving the profound earthly crisis [8,9] or making change within the tourism sector [2,10]. This is because the associated concepts and practices, such as green growth, still rely on business-oriented thinking driven by the imperative of growth, are human-centric in their scope and perpetuate the nature–culture divide. A more radical change in imagining, conceptualising and practising tourism is needed
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