Dwelling in the tourist landscape: Embodiment and everyday life among the craft

Non-representational theories have gained popularity in the last decades, encouraging social scientists to study the production of everyday life. Inspired by Ingold’s dwelling perspective, I present my qualitative research on the arts and craft community on Bornholm, Denmark, by exploring some of the bodily movements and mundane practices that shape a taskscape into a tourist landscape. This analysis defines the material and corporeal relations of Bornholm’s craft-artists with their island’s tourist season and aims to contribute to the application of non-representational landscape theory in tourism scholarship. The everyday practices and embodied movements of these craft-artists fashion the emergence of a realm of dwelling, rather than an exotic site. The tourist landscape is the product of the skills and techniques these craft-artists have developed over time to work with their different materials, and of the creative spaces which they have built to pursue their art. The materials, techniques, and creative spaces used by these craft-artists mediate their interactions with tourists, but also, these encounters mediate the craft-artists’ interactions with their materials, techniques, and spaces. I ultimately argue that the taskscape, as a realm of mundane embodied practices, cannot be detached from the landscape the tourists encounter. I propose scholars can use the dwelling perspective in their analysis of tourism to embed local people in their cultural landscape