Presence in affective heritagescapes: connecting theory to practice

Abstract

A recent shift in tourism studies has focused on the emotional, affective, embodied, and performative dimensions of heritage landscape experience. However, such research often struggles to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions into practical and applicable terms that can be effectively implemented by site managers. The concept of presence is therefore proposed to identify emotional and affective dimensions of heritage landscapes through an embodied, observational, and collaborative approach. Inspired by landscape phenomenology, I share how my own embodied encounter in the Viking Age site of Birka in Sweden prompted further observations and reflections on the existing site experience to confirm that certain areas of the landscape have been largely unexplored for their affective and emotional potential. Practical strategies to utilize these new dimensions emerge from focus groups and interviews with site managers, re-enactors, and tour guides. I conclude that a more collaborative study of presence grounded in embodied and observational encounters provides a useful stepping stone to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions of emotion and affect into more practical heritage management strategies.

摘要

最近,旅游研究的一个转变集中在遗产景观体验的情感、情绪、亲身体验和展演方面。然而,这类研究往往致力于将理论和概念讨论转化为现场管理人员有效执行的实用而适用的术语。因此,本研究提出了在场的概念,并通过一个亲身观察和合作的方法来识别遗产景观的情感和情绪方面。受景观现象学的启发,我分享了我自己在瑞典比尔卡维京时代遗址的亲身经历,这促使我进一步观察和反思现有的当场体验,以证实该景观的某些区域在情感和情绪潜力上很大程度上未被挖掘。利用这些新维度的实用策略来自于我对焦点小组和现场管理人员、演员和导游的访谈。我的结论是,一个基于亲身实察经历的在场的更为协作性的研究,为将情感和情绪的理论和概念讨论转化为更实用的遗产管理策略提供了一个有用的跳板。

Keywords:

• Heritagescapes
• landscape phenomenology
• emotion
• affect
• presence
• visitor experience
• heritage management
• Birka
• Vikings

关键词:

• 遗产景观
• 景观现象学
• 情绪
• 情感
• 在场
• 游客体验
• 遗产管理
• 比尔卡维京人

Introduction

And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment (Maitland, 2008, p. 63).

In A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland shares the story of her rather unexpected embodied encounter in the Isle of Skye’s vast moorlands. Sitting on a rock gazing out at the landscape in front of her, she experiences a brief moment of oneness with the sky above and the ground below. Instead of thinking, sensing, or perceiving, she is merely being. Sam Harris describes a similar sensation challenging the ‘illusion of the self’ (2014, p. 82) in his book Waking Up while standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He writes:

As I gazed out at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thought. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self – an ‘I’ or ‘me’ – vanished. Everything was as it had been – the cloudless sky, sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water – but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained (2014, p. 81).

In these moments, the power of presence is often enough to banish our inner dialogue and to connect us to something greater than ourselves, which is why tourists often deliberately seek out such emotionally powerful places. As Laurajane Smith argues, they not only go to ‘learn and/or to recreate’ (2014, p. 125), but also to feel and experience something outside of the routine of daily life as demonstrated in the examples above.

An increasing body of research in tourism studies following geography’s emotional turn (Birenboim, 2016; Buda, D’Hauteserre, & Johnston, 2014; Curtin & Kragh, 2014; Pearce, Strickland-Munro, & Moore, 2017; Pocock, 2015; Weaver & Jin, 2016) reveals the complexity of tourist encounters and thereby the importance of considering ‘multivocal heritage processes’ (Shea, 2018, p. 42). Such approaches challenge the traditional visitor experience structures dictated by what Laurajane Smith has called an ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (hereafter, AHD) (2006) through which ‘experts’ decide how visitors should engage and interact with certain sites based on different valued elements and the most common emotional responses they evoke. For example, while most visitors may encounter an overwhelming feeling of bliss in a certain landscape, others might experience fear, sadness, excitement, or any other range of emotions that stray far from the dominant narrative. This has been demonstrated by numerous authors including, for example, Tolia-Kelly’s artistic work with post-migration communities in the English Lake District (2007, 2008), Buda’s investigation of the ‘death drive’ in various tourist sites around Jordan (2015), or Shea’s study of visitors’ differing attachments and reactions to the past at an art installation in Derry/Londonderry (2018). As these works demonstrate, more attention must be given to heritage ‘as a process understood, practiced and experienced on the ground by the people themselves’ (Muzaini & Minca, 2018, p. 1, original emphasis) or what Robertson calls ‘Heritage from Below’ (2008) that highlights counter-hegemonic views and experiences in heritage landscapes. Similarly, others have called for a renewed focus not only on multivocal perspectives, but also multisensory dimensions through which senses are seen as ‘affect-in-action’ (Sather-Wagstaff, 2017, p. 13) and our bodies constantly navigate through physical, discursive, and affective spaces (Knudsen, 2011; Waterton & Watson, 2013).

Despite the increase in research that argues for more in-depth studies of emotional and affective dimensions of heritage landscapes, scholars often struggle to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions into practical and applicable terms that can be effectively implemented by site managers. I therefore propose the concept of presence as a useful stepping stone between academic and practical investigations of heritage landscape experience. As Eelco Runia argues, ‘… most makers of “experience museums” grope in the dark as to the nature of presence’ (2006b, p. 309). This means that the visitor experience remains tethered to traditional components of the site (its historical significance and tangible remains), and there is little consideration for other affective and emotional dimensions. Therefore, I offer a new methodology for studying presence that combines embodied, observational, and collaborative research elements to explore these potentially overlooked affective and emotional landscape qualities.

Based on the creative writing and narrative styles increasingly employed within landscape phenomenology (Edensor, 2017; Wylie, 2005), I begin with my own embodied encounter with presence while exploring burial mounds in the Viking Age landscape of Birka. Observations of guided tours, paths, maps, and signs revealed that this area of the landscape is not included in the visitor experience despite its emotional and affective qualities. Reflective discussions on presence with site employees and volunteers (site managers, tour guides, and re-enactors) then resulted in new ideas and strategies to incorporate new affective and emotional dimensions of the landscape into the visitor experience. I conclude that more embodied, observational, and collaborative work on presence serves as an effective bridge between affective and emotional research and practical heritage management.

Defining presence

There are numerous theoretical and conceptual frameworks that might be used to study presence in heritage landscapes. Non-representational approaches (and those that are more-than-representational (Lorimer, 2005; see also Waterton, 2019)), for example, attempt to ‘access, understand and communicate the ways in which people perform and embody the landscapes that surround them’ (Waterton, 2013, p. 69) as well as how landscapes carry their own performativity in being able to answer back (Thrift, 2008; Thrift & Dewsbury, 2000). At the same time, there has also been a reemergence of ‘Landscape Phenomenology’ (Wylie, 2007), which focuses on the immediate, bodily experience of being in a lived world and ‘the quality and intensity’ of emotions that arise from embodied encounters (see Tuan, 1976, pp. 274–275). While all of these theoretical approaches may suffice in guiding us toward an understanding of presence, I first wish to discuss how different discussions of presence have emerged and how they have laid the groundwork for utilizing it as a conceptual tool for affective landscape analysis.

Inspired by early phenomenological ideas such as Heidegger’s Dasein, Gumbrecht defines presence as something that is not temporal, but rather involves a ‘spatial relationship to the world and its objects’ (2004, p. xiii). The production of presence, he argues, involves the conditions under which objects affect human bodies. This understanding of presence resonates with Bennett’s understanding of ‘thing-power’ and different objects having a ‘live presence’ or a certain vibrancy through which they have a capacity to affect us. For example, she describes encountering objects in a storm drain and says the ‘stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects in me’ (2010, p. 4). Eelco Runia has also extensively discussed presence in the philosophy of history where he defines presence as the ‘living on of the past in the here and now’ (2006b, p. 310). He argues presence is an active force that we pursue through the recognition of fleeting moments and the fascination of memory (2006a). More recently, Bjerregaard (2015) used presence in his work exploring the enduring fascination with objects in museums. He argues this neglects the role of space and the possibility of evoking a sense of presence that occurs before the meaning-making processes of traditional museum exhibitions.

Others have less explicitly discussed presence, but have used different words such as ‘life awake’ (Tuan, 1986), ‘mindfulness’ (Moscardo, 1996) or ‘atmosphere’ (Bille, Bjerregaard, & Sørensen, 2015; Bjerregaard, 2015; McCormack, 2013) to describe a certain level of awareness in the present moment and all the forces at play. Further work also discusses presence in terms of the absence of something – where there is a paradox between the absence of presence and the presence of absence (Degen & Hetherington, 2001; Goulding, Saren, & Pressey, 2018; Wylie, 2009). Research using the concept of haunting, for example, explores ‘the dialogical experiences found between subject and object, presence and absence, past and future’ (Degen & Hetherington, 2001, p. 2). Such research challenges spatial and temporal conceptions of landscapes by describing the atmosphere of a place as ‘gestures in time and space reaching forwards and backwards and coming together in the fleeting moments in ways that unsettle a certainty in the linear flow of time’ (Degen & Hetherington, 2001, p. 2).

As all of these different theoretical approaches and understandings reveal, the study of presence recognizes the unique way in which different people interact with and are affected by the spaces and objects around them. There is no one distinct way that emerges in how to use presence, but rather the recognition that it is inherently tethered to our active engagement with the seen and unseen world around us. It is therefore important to look into the literature that explores heritage landscape experience to identify the areas where a more critical application of presence might contribute.

Finding presence in research on affect and emotion

In tourism studies, presence has not been specifically researched as such, but rather first in the context of existential authenticity (also understood as something similar to Heidegger’s Dasein – a connection discussed extensively in works by Pearce and Moscardo (1986) and Steiner and Reisinger (2006)). Existential authenticity first emerged out of a discussion regarding the many different layers of authenticity (and inauthenticity) in tourism identified primarily by MacCannell (1976). According to Wang (1999), similar to Runia’s definition of presence, existential authenticity occurs in tourism because people want to get away from their everyday lives, and when the routine is broken they feel closer to their authentic selves. This aligns with Runia’s stance that ‘we want to be affected. We go to great lengths, and are willing to spend huge amounts of money, to have ourselves affected by the past’ (2006b, p. 309, original emphasis). The ‘presence of the past’, he writes, ‘makes me feel things, think things, and do things that are at odds with who I think I am – and so forces me to rewrite the story about myself’ (2006b, p. 316, original emphasis). Therefore, a renewed focus on presence allows for the study of different modes of meaning-making outside of contested understandings of the authenticity of different tourist experiences.

Presence has also emerged in research that highlights the variability of visitors and their different interests and capacities to be affected or to be ‘present’. Some have taken a more direct approach in categorizing visitors or offering strategies to engage them. For example, Moscardo developed a ‘Mindfulness Model’ to assess different factors that affected the visitor experience (1996), McKercher developed a typology of cultural tourists (2002) based on different visitor motives and the depths of their experiences, and Kantanen and Tikkanen (2006) looked at different persuasive strategies sites might use to engage different types of visitors from McKercher’s typology. Their focus is on informative strategies, but they note that future work should also focus on possible affective strategies. McIntosh and Prentice also highlight the importance in studying ‘experiential and emotive processes’ (1999, p. 589) in tourists’ interactions. Their study in British period theme parks revealed that tourists cared less about historical accuracy and more about a site’s affective and personal dimensions.

Others have focused on the performative turn through which visitors gain more control over their experiences and the past is brought to life through hands-on encounters. For example, Moscardo notes it is important for visitors to have variety and control over their experiences, and she argues ‘interpretation … needs to challenge visitors, to question and encourage them to question’ (1996, p. 392, my emphasis). Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl (2004) came to a similar conclusion, demonstrating how school classes were more interested in Viking theme parks than traditional static museum exhibitions because they craved direct engagement rather than distanced observation.

Active engagement has also been discussed regarding the role of re-enactment events in fostering a sense of presence. For example, at an artillery re-enactment at the Dybbøl Battlefield Centre in Southern Denmark, four historical cannons were fired for ten minutes at maximum frequency. Mads Daugbjerg describes how one interview subject experienced a ‘period rush’ from physically feeling the ‘thumps of the big guns … and the confusion and lack of orientation brought about by the thick cover of the resulting smoke’ (2017, p. 166). Other spectators, he notes, were completely captivated ‘as they stared into something horrible, some of the horrible realities that are hard to communicate conventionally’ (2017, p. 166). There was no other way to share the multisensory depth of such an experience without actually giving spectators a corporeal idea of what it felt like, sounded like, and smelled like. Through multisensory activities, the presence of the past ‘can move you, [and] you can only tell from its wake that it has been there’ (Runia, 2006a, p. 310). The power of evoking the past in the present through multisensory means has also emerged in similar literature on time travel, which involves a much deeper immersion of role-playing in a specific event or period in the past (Goodwin, 2017; Holtorf, 2017; Samida, 2017).

As these examples reveal, spaces are affective because we become involved. However, it is important to remember that every individual perceives and experiences meanings, symbols, and other elements in the landscape differently based on who they are, where they have been, and what they have experienced (Tuan, 1986). Given this variability and unpredictability in visitors’ interests and backgrounds, it is often difficult to emotionally engage visitors who do not have an inherent cultural link or sense of belonging or identity with the place or its history (Poria, Butler, & Airey, 2003). Furthermore, the dominant and standardized way to experience a landscape might even exclude certain visitors from ever visiting in the first place, so it is vital to think of how to attract a wider spectrum of visitors who have the possibility to pursue their own interests while ensuring their unique, emotional encounters are also respected. As demonstrated in a study of Lake District tourism by Edmonds, one of the challenges in historic landscape management is giving the space for visitors ‘to find their own connections and their own ways in’ despite the fact that we continue to value landscapes with outdated perceptions of origin myths and a ‘nostalgia for a past that never really existed’ (2006, p. 185).

While all of these studies and others within the emotional turn effectively argue that visitors now use sites in many different ways for different purposes (Smith, 2014), perhaps what is broadly missed in the conclusion of these discussions is that it is good that visitors feel something regardless of the level of their engagement or capacity to be affected. Furthermore, given that emotional and affective encounters are based on active involvement within the landscape, there should be a renewed focus on the affective and emotional qualities of the landscapes themselves and the different strategies that might be employed to make different landscape elements more present within these performative engagements.

As I will discuss, studying presence first involves a landscape-based approach in which the landscape and its many ineffable qualities become the starting point of investigation. In this sense, the initial question posed is not how the landscape makes people feel, but rather, how can it make people feel (something). This also opens the door for a new methodology for studying presence in heritagescapes.

A methodology for presence

While Christopher Tilley once argued ‘there is and can be no clear-cut methodology arising from [emotions and affect] to provide a concise guide to empirical research’ (1994, p. 11), there are several worth mentioning. Barbara Bender, for example, analyzed landscapes in three different ways in order to capture different affective dimensions of how people relate to the world (‘landscape as palimpsest; landscape as structure of feeling; and landscape as embodied’ (1998, p. 32)). Mary-Catherine Garden also proposed a landscape-based approach called the ‘heritagescape’ method (2006). Moving away from the traditional approach of comparing sites using a template through which ‘we impose a veneer of “sameness”’ (Garden, 2009, p. 272), Garden’s methodology analyzes three components that make up heritagescapes: boundaries, cohesion, and visibility. Though she criticizes the divide in research that separates material components and visitor experience, her focus remains on the site itself and identifying elements that distinguish different heritagescapes. Highlighting these qualities, she argues, identifies the site’s unique ‘personality’ (2009, p. 272), and she emphasizes the need to study how individuals react to them. While Garden defines heritagescapes as social and interactive spaces, she still predominantly studies them as visual spaces. Therefore, more work must be done to understand the experiential, multisensory dimensions of heritagescapes beyond their boundaries and built features and in areas that Garden refers to as the landscape’s ‘empty spaces’ (2009, p. 272). Though I will not employ the heritagescape as a method to explore presence, I will use it as a guiding concept following Garden’s advice to ‘describ[e] and think[] about those specific landscapes that make up a heritage site’ (2006, p. 398).

Despite Garden’s and others’ efforts to develop these methodologies, however, there is still little effort in communicating these approaches to the site managers themselves. Traditional heritage management continues to focus on a site’s geographical and historical dimensions and rarely engages with new strategies to explore emotional and affective possibilities. As demonstrated in Ankre, Fredman, and Lindhagen’s study on visitor monitoring (2016), managers continue to resort to traditional methods because there is a lack of proper training and outreach with academic institutions or competent skilled workers who can help them learn more creative methods and techniques to study the visitor experience.

The concept of presence is therefore used to challenge both the traditional way of thinking about the visitor experience as well as the practice of heritage landscape management to make room for more affective and emotional possibilities. Studying presence, however, also poses a methodological challenge. Many have noted the difficulty in researching ephemeral qualities such as a site’s atmosphere or powerful moments of presence (Bille et al., 2015). However, while existing methodologies tend to be vague, Bille et al. (2015) argue that this does not mean the research is weak. Rather, they argue that it has not yet been determined how to best study and write about fleeting moments. This was also discussed by Sarah Elwood who argued that ‘affect, as a non-cognitive way of knowing, is … difficult to engage methodologically,’ but this does not mean that it should not be studied. Instead, she argues we must ‘extend qualitative methods beyond traditionally text-focused forms of evidence, modes of analysis, and ways of knowing’ (2010, p. 110).

Existing research on presence involves a multisensory involvement and engagement with the world – whether in moments of intensity like those described at the beginning of this paper or in a simple awareness of the present moment. This was exemplified in Tilley’s phenomenological work with ruins (1994) where he focuses as much on the whistling of the wind and the sound of a nearby waterfall as he does on the cultural elements. Since affective and emotional dimensions are often qualities of the site that cannot easily be grasped through representational modes of thinking, a study of presence fills the gap to consider the more, the other, and the vibrancy of the empty spaces – or the spaces in-between.

As noted previously, the field of tourism studies is increasingly rich with research revealing the complexity of visitor encounters and the different capacities for visitors to be affected in different ways, yet there is a lack of research that examines the affective capacity of the landscape itself. This is perhaps why such studies often lack a concrete engagement as to how the research outcomes might be implemented within the sites and landscapes studied. Similarly, despite the proven significance of such studies in bringing forth the emotional turn from geography to tourism studies and critical heritage studies (among others), there is still no concise methodology for emotional and affective research in heritage landscapes that can also be employed by site managers.

From existing literature on affect and emotion, there are two clear ways of approaching research on visitor and heritage landscape interactions: embodied or observational. Research on embodied encounters (Buda et al., 2014; Macpherson, 2016; Pocock, 2015; Tolia-Kelly, 2007; Vannini, 2015) explores the complexity of feelings in these interactions and the researcher’s own reflexive role in untangling and deciphering them. This has been increasingly demonstrated using different narrative styles to explore the complexity in encounters between the self and landscape. John Wylie, for example, employs this approach during a coastal landscape walk (2005) while Tim Edensor explored the eerie presence of mundane urban spaces (2008) and the impact of light on the landscape experience (2017). Seeing his shadow, Edensor writes, ‘affirms that my body impacts upon the landscape through which I move. I cannot be an abstracted, dispassionate entity who views and evaluates; rather, I am a body that even for a short time, is part of this landscape…’ (2017, p. 631). However, such subjective approaches relying solely on the researcher’s own feelings and encounters have been criticized for their limited scope especially with respect to neglecting others’ voices (Edmonds, 2006; Harvey, 2015; Hill, 2013) and their ‘excessive self-referentiality’ (Butz, 2010, p. 142) that provides little meaningful insight to readers. Therefore, while they may provide the basis for affective investigations into the landscape, the question to be asked is: What can we do with this?

Other work is more observational in identifying tourist behaviors and perceptions, which are often explored through methods such as surveys (Wall-Reinius, 2012) and/or interviews (Poria et al., 2003; Smith, 2014). In these studies, while visitors might reflect on what they think is missing, it is difficult to derive from their answers what else could affect the visitor experience within the landscape. In this sense, it is difficult for a tourist to reflect on something they didn’t know was there. As noted, this has created a lapse in identifying the emotional and affective potential of areas in the heritagescape not yet included in the visitor experience.

Therefore, guided by the different trajectories of research on emotion and affect with the goal of creating a more practical, landscape-based approach, I propose a new methodology to study presence through three stages: (1) embodied, (2) observational, and (3) collaborative. More specifically, the three stages involve an embodied evaluation of the landscape, an assessment of how it is currently being used by and presented to visitors, and collaborative work exploring new forms of engagement and how these might be implemented.

Embodied. Starting off with an embodied encounter in the landscape aligns with what Tilley refers to as a ‘phenomenology of the landscape’ (1994). This requires all the senses; it’s ‘a visionscape but also a soundscape, a touchscape, even a smellscape, a multi-sensory experience’ (in Bender, 1998, p. 81). Consider, for example, the feeling of awe when you climb to the top of a mountain with a conquering view of the landscape below. You pause. You gaze. You no longer feel detached from the space around you, and you become one with the landscape. After the initial euphoria, you close your eyes and hear the howling wind moving across the rutted crevasses of the mountain. You feel the heat of the sun on your face. You hear distant echoes of a landscape alive.

Through our active participation we are able to ‘better understand lived, sensed, experienced, and emotional worlds’ (Watson & Till, 2010, p. 126). This stage involves an initial walk through the landscape to become familiar with the different sense impressions it might offer followed by writing detailed reflective field notes about emotional and/or affective dimensions encountered (see Ateljevic, Harris, Wilson, & Collins, 2005; Feighery, 2006). After the initial walk through the landscape, there should then be a more embodied engagement in which a deeper immersion is employed. Rather than simple observational notes of what the body encounters, it is necessary to consider other sense impressions that affect the present moment including a consideration of past landscapes and people. Consider, for example, Anders Lund Hansen’s walking encounters in the urban environment. He writes, ‘Through the rhythms of walking … one can observe and study myriad rhythms of modern society and the multiplicity of “footprints” that provide convergent and divergent spatiotemporal histories’ (2008, p. 2).

For site managers, the difficult task is being open to new encounters and interactions with the landscape because they are already experts. This is also an opportunity to employ other methods to represent or reflect on affective places or moments such as taking pictures or drawing (see Mitchell, Theron, Stuart, Smith, & Campbell, 2011). Visits should take several hours over several days or longer in order to experience the landscape under different times of the day or even seasonal changes.

Observational. After exploring the researcher’s own encounters, it is then important to study the visitor experience through observations of how and more importantly where visitors move within the landscape. While more creative participatory approaches such as map-making, drawing, and accompanied walks (Anderson, 2004; Macpherson, 2016) have allowed researchers to study how visitors react and respond to different areas of the site, these responses are often difficult to elicit due to the time constraints placed on visitors to certain sites. Furthermore, it is difficult to use this material to help guide practical changes due to the difficulty in generalizing visitors’ unique, subjective encounters. As has been noted previously, short-term visitors also cannot be expected to point out elements they didn’t know were there. Therefore, observing guided tours, different paths, maps, and visitor movements within the landscape helps to identify the areas of the site that are most valued, and more importantly, may confirm that certain affective areas of the landscape are not yet being utilized.

Collaborative. Finally, perhaps the most important stage in studying presence is the third, collaborative component through which the embodied and observational research is communicated and critically discussed with those responsible or involved with the visitor experience. Those responsible may also have completed the first two stages independently, and researchers and practitioners can then work together to develop new strategies. Collaboration is a vital piece of the presence puzzle because, as mentioned at the beginning of this paper, those responsible for the site experience grapple with how to actually approach presence and its multi-layered meanings. This is therefore the final stage of studying presence because it provides a platform to discuss how to deal with the affective and emotional dimensions uncovered in the first two stages. This can also be the point where different areas of the first two stages are re-visited for more in-depth studies or where practical strategies to employ within the landscape are developed. However, as I will discuss from my own fieldwork, collaborative work should start right from the beginning and continue throughout each stage so that different research techniques can be employed along the way and site managers can play an active role in the process.

Method

The fieldwork presented takes place in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Birka located on the island of Björkö outside of Stockholm, Sweden. Due to the narrow tourism season, the difficulty in getting to and from the island, and the limited options to stay on the island (there are a total of six residents living on the island and no formal lodging available), only two study visits were made – during the high tourism season in July 2018 and in the low season in early June 2019 for a total of one week.

There are less than 20 people working at the site during the high season and even fewer in the low season (re-enactors are only present during July). Tourist numbers are also limited due to the small island only being accessible by boat. There is one main tourist boat that runs daily from Stockholm, and several others depart from nearby ports – running intermittently for just over a month during the high season. Visitors may also come on their own boats and stay at the guest harbor. The ticket to travel roundtrip with the tourist boats includes the guided tour through the main archaeological field and access to the museum and reconstructed village. These visitors spend a total of three hours on the island. The guided tour takes approximately one hour, and the rest of the time is most often spent in the museum, the reconstructed village, and the restaurant. During both of my visits, the weather played an integral role in shaping how visitors engaged with the site, which should be considered a limitation for the reliability of my observations. However, I made sure to bring this up in subsequent discussions with site employees who confirmed that regardless of the weather the visitor experience remained largely unchanged with respect to the areas of the site most visited. During my first visit, the weather was unseasonably hot, and visitors mainly remained in the shade of the museum’s pavilion after the guided tour to enjoy some ice-cream. During my second visit (already in the low season) there were less than 10 visitors on the island the first day due to torrential rain and cold temperatures, and the weather did not really improve for the remainder of my stay.

My first visit included walking through different areas of the site independently for several hours each day to explore different embodied encounters interspersed with participant and non-participant observations due to the high volume of tourists. Observations were made on the tourist boat, at the museum and reconstructed village, in the restaurant, throughout the historical landscape based on what was included on the site map, during guided tours, and in the wider landscape of the island beyond the main tourist paths. There were around 15 people working on the island (not including restaurant and other maintenance staff) during my first visit including site managers, tour guides, and re-enactors. They were all very occupied throughout the day, but once the tourist boats left, I moderated smaller group discussions in the reconstructed village and larger group discussions over dinner each afternoon and evening. During my second visit, there were only three tour guides (two were new that season) and the site manager and her family present on the island (besides restaurant/maintenance staff). Due to low tourist numbers, I often had the site completely to myself allowing for further multisensory interactions with different areas of the landscape in a more undisturbed state. While the first visit included group discussions about presence and shared experiences in different areas of the landscape, the second visit was the most collaborative. There was more time to sit together (in the Scandinavian way – usually over a very strong coffee) with the site manager and one of the more experienced tour guides to discuss how to implement ideas and strategies suggested during previous group discussions. A total of 234 photographs were also taken to supplement my observations and notes collected during group discussions and meetings.

Encountering presence in a viking cemetery

July 2018. It was a warm morning – no reprieve from the unseasonably hot weather that set the greater part of Scandinavia on fire in the summer of 2018. I had been on the island for several days observing tourists and following different visitor paths to understand the typical ways of experiencing the site. However, on that morning I set out to explore an area called Hemlanden (the largest Viking Age cemetery in Scandinavia (Magnus & Gustin, 2012)) adjacent to the open field where the city of Birka once stood. Tour groups only ever view Hemlanden from a distance because they remain on the opposite side of the field by the hillfort. Therefore, there are no signs, paths, or other informative elements typically present in a historical landscape (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Unmarked entrance to Hemlanden.

Source: Author.

After cautiously entering through one of the unmarked rickety metal gates aimed at keeping local grazers in their designated eateries for the day, I weaved my way up the hill around burial mounds of varying sizes worn down with age. The landscape levelled off and I had a panoramic view of the archaeological field, the hillfort, the sea, the harbor, and a few of the dwindling old houses and farms still in operation on the island. Behind me the forest grew more dense and the mounds more unkempt – covered with overgrown foliage beneath tall trees that swayed in the wind. Rays of sunshine danced on the ground, birds chirped overhead, and I could hear the distant sound of soft waves breaking on the island’s rocky shores. I was content with the feeling of being surrounded by nature, and I understood why the people of Birka chose to bury their dead here. It was calm, and I embraced the silence (Figure 2).

Figure 2. From Hemlanden overlooking the main archaeological field with the hillfort in the distance.

Source: Author.

Moving further into the seemingly endless collection of mounds, however, I realized it was really quiet – too quiet, and I was alone. My imagination began to take over and it occurred to me that this is the kind of silence that results from being surrounded by the dead. ‘Don’t be silly,’ the historian-archaeologist in me chided. I walked on trying to get back to the calm serenity I had experienced before, but my subconscious apparently found it difficult to ignore the eerie feeling that I was being watched as I determinedly continued deeper into the woods. Suddenly every footstep crunching on the parched ground below sounded like a cascading waterfall that enveloped the space around me. ‘Stop it, you loon,’ I pleaded in my own mind, and my rational side tried to remain focused at the task at hand. I intended to experience the site like a tourist and to offer some recommendations for how to get visitors to venture off and explore this area after the guided tour instead of immediately returning to the harbor with the museum, restaurant, and reconstructed village. I repeated the facts I knew: 1,600 burial mounds in such a small area, very little excavated, important Viking Age site, Vikings, … dead Vikings.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of knowing I was alone, but somehow not alone. I thought if I listened closely enough I could faintly hear whispers of the past – of the people inside the mounds. Who were they? What was their life like in Birka? How did they die? How many were buried here? I looked around in vain for an informational sign or something to give me some answers, and I was reminded of a quote from Crang: ‘The tourists seek to travel to be present at a place, but as we examine those places we find they are shot through by absences where distant others, removed in space and time, haunt the sites’ (2006, p. 49). At a very visceral level, I now understood what he meant. A cracking sound from the forest sent a chill down my spine. Suddenly I was overcome with the feeling of being swallowed in this landscape of the dead, and with the open page of my field notebook still blank I quickly scurried back down the hill away from the clutches of the primordial tomb.

Close to the archaeological field I was compelled to sit on a rock under an old tree to reflect on what had just happened. I was rather dumbstruck because this encounter was unexpected. For several years I had talked to re-enactors who told me their favorite Viking sites were in Norway or other locations where the beautiful landscape plays a large role in their feeling a deeper connection with the past and a sense of belonging. Just as in monumental heritage sites, it is easy to feel something in those landscapes because there is less left to the imagination. Birka, however, is not a place where people seek out an awe-inspiring emotional connection with the landscape; yet in my encounter, somehow the landscape not only talked back, it woke up! The ethereal atmosphere enveloped me just by being there. True to Tilley’s advice, still perched on my unexpectedly comfortable rock under the welcome shade of the tree, I started to record my experience in as much detail as I could. I returned to Hemlanden in June 2019 when the cows were in a nearby pasture and the sheep were lazily grazing throughout the cemetery. I was reassured. In case the dead awakened, I had company.

Awakening presence in Birka

Altogether I spent roughly three hours in Hemlanden, and during both visits I was completely alone. Hemlanden sits on the outer edge of the site with no signs, paths, or instructions as to how to experience the site, but it is capable of affecting visitors in a very powerful way. Yet most visitors never manage to go there because the tour boats only allot a certain amount of time for a guided tour, visit to the museum, and a Viking Age-inspired meal from the restaurant before departing. Perhaps the lack of tourists in Hemlanden is part of the reason why the site has such an enormous presence; the silence is at first deafening and then blaring with the voices of the past. While not every tourist needs to experience Hemlanden (since that would likely ruin the ethereal appeal) there should be at least some way to communicate this area more clearly to visitors who want to go beyond the allotted tourist route.

My discussions with site managers, re-enactors, and tour guides confirmed that Hemlanden is a significant area of Birka that must be considered for its emotional and affective dimensions, but those working at the site grapple with how to include it more seriously in the already time-constrained visitor experience. When I first (rather hesitantly) shared my early-morning encounter during a group discussion, several people were quick to tell their own stories of similarly eerie moments walking in Hemlanden. One re-enactor, a leather craftsman, told me that he believes the ‘grave woods’ are the most authentic part of the site because they have an ‘ancient knowledge – a forgotten knowledge,’ and being there is like having ‘history sleeping underneath [your] feet’ (personal communication, July 17, 2018). The woman working in the reconstructed village’s garden told me her favorite time to go there is late in the evening when the light begins to slip away because that’s when you really start to feel and hear things that you can’t explain. Others shared similar stories of how Hemlanden was a unique place within the landscape where they would go to connect with the past, but also to feel something. One re-enactor who sometimes serves as a tour guide for private groups says he loves to take visitors there because it feels like going on a ghost walk. It was clear from our initial discussion that Hemlanden played an integral part in the experience of the landscape and its past, and I needed to investigate why it wasn’t yet included in the main visitor experience and if it would be possible to do so.

During my observational research, I found that the museum does include some basic information about Hemlanden regarding previous excavations and some aerial photographs revealing the extent of the burial mounds across the island. This reveals its importance for the history of the island, but the area isn’t labelled as a ‘highlight’ on the main site map. The only map that labels Hemlanden and includes a description is the smaller ‘guide to Birka for the independent visitor’. Beyond a more prominent position on the main site map, it was discussed that a good start to encourage visitors to visit Hemlanden might simply be a few basic signs – both directional and informational – that point visitors in the right direction and give them a general idea of the significance and meaning of Hemlanden. While it does not need to be included in the guided tour (and likely should not be), the tour guides also mentioned that they frequently recommend a visit to Hemlanden to those who are more keen to explore a bit after the tour. Similarly, because there is a gravel road running alongside Hemlanden, this could also be communicated as a more accessible (and more interesting) route for visitors who are unable to follow the more rocky and uneven path of the guided tour.

The need for better orientation was brought up by several tourists I spoke to expressing feeling a bit lost within the landscape. The site itself occupies a large area with different points of interest, but several noted it is unclear if there is more to see once the guided tour ends. One visitor from South Africa, for example, felt like she missed out on different aspects of the site because there was a lack of signs, and she particularly wished that her senses had been engaged more since there aren’t a lot of built elements throughout the site. For tourists with an untrained eye, it is difficult to independently engage with an empty landscape when it’s not exactly clear what they should be looking for.

Since Birka is advertised online as a Viking City, visitors arrive with certain expectations of what they will encounter, and they can be disappointed if those are not met. In my discussions with tour guides, for example, they were quick to mention the underwhelmed reaction of visitors to Birka’s archaeological field. I joined several of their tours each day to listen to how they describe the different areas of the site and to observe how the tourists respond to a landscape stripped bare of its original great Viking city splendor. Particularly with non-monumental sites, it is difficult to bring the landscape to life, which means visitors often struggle to imagine a thriving city in front of their eyes. When the guided tour finally arrives above the main field, tour guides scramble to keep the attention of the group by painting a picture of how it might have looked, how many occupants the city had at the height of the Viking Age, and what their daily lives might have been like. One guide tells visitors to close their eyes and imagine the clanging of metal from the smithy, to smell the smoke from the open fires, and to listen to the hum of daily life. Birka, he noted, is unique because ‘you really feel something when you try’ (personal communication, July 17, 2018). In those moments, the tour guides play an important role in bringing the landscape to life – especially in making the past more present.

Based on the affective possibilities Birka offers (such as Hemlanden’s ghostly presence), further discussions with site managers, tour guides, and re-enactors were centered around developing ways of better communicating different dimensions of the site to appeal to a wider range of visitors. That is of course not to say that new strategies have not already been considered. For example, they hope to soon include audio guides so visitors can be more independent listening to the history of the site as they walk through the landscape themselves, which may give them more freedom if there is no longer a guided tour focused on one specific area. Yet this again poses the question of how visitors should experience the site and whether an audio guide somehow limits multisensory engagement and the possibility of experiencing a powerful moment of presence.

Crucially, one site manager noted that there are two different directions one can take in a non-monumental landscape: either high-tech or high-touch. While Birka and likely many other similar sites currently focus primarily on the archaeological and historical significance, she notes that in the future people will come to these sites because they want to ‘put their cell phone away and listen to music or just silence’ because the rest of the world will be too high-tech (interview, June 13, 2019). As similar research has shown, visitors want to feel something and have more control over their experiences that are more multisensory and hands-on. Therefore, identifying new affective and emotional dimensions of the site will be the only way to keep up with new generations of curious visitors seeking out these encounters.

When I asked what kind of ideas she has for the future, the site manager said she hopes to include more activities that bring people back to nature and provide the possibility to work and engage more with their hands. She imagines having burial mound meditations in Hemlanden, fishing groups, courses about the different flowers and other flora and fauna on the island, mushroom picking, bird watching, and historical craft workshops. Soon they will also begin creating a new exhibition in the museum showing replicas of some of the most important excavations from the main archaeological field and grave mounds that can help visitors more easily visualize what was once there and what continues to lie below the surface while they walk through the still predominantly unexcavated landscape.

Despite many different ideas, Hemlanden’s fate remains questionable due to the limited time tourists can spend within an already very large archaeological landscape. Some guides are able to take private groups to Hemlanden, but they can only encourage other visitors who are able to walk over and explore a bit after the regular guided tour. There are ongoing discussions to include more areas of the landscape within the visitor experience including the possibility to visit the associated site of Hovgården on a nearby island called Adelsö; yet, time and funding continue to hinder progress. Nevertheless, this reveals that the site managers are constantly looking for more creative ways to utilize the resources they already have in the present while looking toward new possibilities in the future.

Similar to other findings from research on affect and emotion, visitors in Birka develop a sense of presence through active engagement and involvement within the fabric of the landscape. However, this research does not often have a direct impact in creating changes within the heritagescapes studied. This is often due to the more prominent focus on visitors’ reflections, which may overlook certain areas of the landscape not included in the visitor experience. Similarly, the more abstract and theoretical conclusions that often emerge from this area of research are difficult to put into practice or communicate to site managers. As Mark Edmonds notes, research on affect and emotion needs to open itself up more to others’ voices and must ultimately recognize that visitors need to find their own ways in to experiencing the landscape. Otherwise, he argues, ‘the path simply takes us back to ourselves’ (2006, p. 185).

By conducting an analysis of presence in three different yet intertwining stages in Birka, I have demonstrated how one powerful embodied encounter within the landscape guided observations and reflections on the existing site experience, and collaborative discussions fostered a diverse range of ideas and practical strategies to include a greater variety of activities and ways of interacting with the site. While previous research has stressed the importance of affective and emotional encounters in heritagescapes, I have suggested a more collaborative study of presence provides a stepping stone for these dimensions to be more effectively identified and implemented by site managers.

Presence in practice

The rise in adventure tourism, nature-based tourism, eco-tourism, and other new waves of tourism aimed at avoiding the standardized tourism experience all attest to an increasing desire in tourists to get off the beaten track, pursue places based on their own interests, experience different emotions, and encounter sites with more participatory and multisensory options. Particularly in non-monumental landscapes like Birka, visitors should be encouraged to explore the landscape beyond what has been designated as part of the tourist path and should be given different options to follow their own interests.

My encounter in Hemlanden evoked a similar sensation to that experienced by Sara Maitland and Sam Harris quoted at the beginning. It snapped me awake to an acute awareness of my senses, and I became entangled with the landscape around me. Yi-Fu Tuan once argued that the ‘good life’ is ‘life awake’ (1986, p. 24), and this comes in many forms – whether it’s sitting on a rock eating a cheese sandwich in the Isle of Skye, pausing to take in the scene at the Sea of Galilee, walking through ‘grave woods’ with history sleeping below, or even standing in a group guided by someone trying to bring an archaeological landscape to life. At its core, tourism has always involved the pursuit of an experience that makes visitors feel something. It involves engaging with the world predominantly from an emotional curiosity through different levels of play, performativity, and meaning-making, and it challenges people to think about their own position in the world – what it means to play an active role in it, who they are, what shapes their identity, and where they belong.

While studying presence with a more concise methodology does not provide all the answers for developing and managing heritagescapes based on research on affect and emotion, I have argued that it serves as a useful concept for a more collaborative, landscape-based approach that can be implemented by site managers. Rather than developing sites strictly based on the traditional template and AHD, more affective and emotional elements can be identified that align with visitors’ different motivations and interests to create more immersive, dynamic, varied, multivocal, and multisensory encounters where past and presence come together.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Veronica Björkman from Strömma for the research support on Birka as well as to Lena Flodin from SFV for the accommodation. I also owe thanks to all of the Viking re-enactors and guides based on Birka for their kindness and willingness to be shadowed by me and my notebook – particularly Per, Johan, and Anton for the many rich stories and insights that inspired this article. Special thanks also to Tomas Germundsson for support on several drafts, and thanks to the anonymous referees for their challenging, yet insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Katherine Burlingame

Katherine Burlingame is a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. Her current research focuses on using phenomenology to study site experience in heritage landscapes. More broadly, Katherine has research interests in intangible heritage, affect, sense of place, landscape geography, storytelling, and creative methods.