Boundaries as barriers and promoters: constructing the tourist landscapes of Finnish Karelia.

Abstract

Boundaries have become significant foci of interdisciplinary research during the last decade, but their roles have not been discussed very often in the context of tourism which, in fact, is crucially linked with many contemporary tendencies such as the opening of borders between formerly closed realms of the world or flows of capital and people. This paper analyses the historical and geographical roles of the FinnishRussian border in relation to tourism. The border was strictly guarded and almost entirely closed in Soviet times. It was a taboo that interested many foreign visitors to Finland. It interested the Finns as well, because on the other side was the ceded area of Karelia that had been part of Finland before the war but which was now totally inaccessible to foreign visitors or former residents. It was also the transformation zone of imagined cultural landscapes. When the physical border shifted westward after the war, so did the Karelian cultural landscape and its representations. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the border has become much more open and tourism has increased enormously.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.