Erika Andersson Cederholm

Nature is a key component in many kinds of tourism experiences and is commonly perceived as an explicit goal of doing tourism. This is a long-standing feature in the histories of tourism, and presently in many contemporary, service-based economies it coincides with a cultural emphasis on nature in many other commercial representations and manifestations. This can be seen e.g. in how permutations of the prefix “eco-“ travels with all possible kinds of consumer objects, how nature imagery is used in marketing practices, how the consumer is being encouraged to bodily engage with and immerse herself in nature to reach a natural rhythm or a state of maximized natural energy and how tourism is currently using the concept of nature to add value to products in new ways. Although nature is often experienced and talked about as self-evident – implying something basic and unadulterated, the very essence of things, the substance of life – it is a problematic category in several ways. Of special interest to us here are boundaries between nature and society, or rather, the issue of how, when, where, why and by whom nature is either constructed as external or internal to social relations and how these relate to commercial exchanges. We aim to investigate “socionatures” taking shape in a tourist context.