Value of silence: mediating aural environments in Estonian rural tourism

Abstract

This paper concentrates on the creation of value(s) by rural tourism entrepreneurs via intangible and atmospheric natural resources, the aural environment. The creation of value is analysed with regard to how the rural tourism entrepreneurs facilitate and mediate the aural environment of their farms to their guests and how by doing so the notions of rurality and rural environment are constantly (re)created and (re)negotiated. The paper concentrates on the notion of ‘silence’ which the tourism farmers regard as one of the most valuable qualities of their environments and shows how the personal experience of the host is one of the most important aspects when creating and mediating the experience for the visitors. The paper begins with a theoretic discussion of the idea of rural idyll, after which the research background is described with a brief overview of the Estonian rural context and the description of the methodology and empirical data of the article. This is followed by the analysis of the gathered data which is divided into two main topics: the creation of value by the tourism entrepreneurs when constructing the rural sound idyll and the question of competing values in the rural tourism context.

Keywords:

• rurality
• aural environments
• rural tourism
• rural idyll
• sound anthropology

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all the participants of TOCOCU conference ‘Regimes of Value in Tourism’ in Sion, Switzerland, 2012 for their feedback on the first version of this paper presented there and to Dr Aet Annist, Dr Émilie Crossley, and Prof. Art Leete for their comments and suggestions on various drafts of this article.

Manuscript sources

Interviews (recordings and transcripts) and field diaries from Võru County, Estonia (the Haanja, Rõuge, Võru and Vastseliina municipalities), 2008, 2010 and 2013 (in the possession of the author).

Funding

This research was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund [Centre of Excellence, CECT].

Notes

1. This is illustrated on a homepage of one of the visited tourism farms, where old farmhouses from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth century are very visibly arranged and refurnished in such way as to meet the needs and standards of the contemporary tourist, together with the slogan: ‘If old Estonians had had motels, the best of them would have been like this’. Retrieved January 20, 2014, from http://www.haanjamehetalu.ee/est/tut

2. Arcadia is a Greek province in Peloponnese region. Already in early history, it was depicted in poetry as idyllic rural land. The start of the Arcadian tradition in the West starts with the Renaissance when court nobility, clergy and other members of the elite started to idealise rural life. The tradition of appreciating nature, which reflects in the landscape painting and ideas of rural idyll in literature, reached new heights in Romanticism (van Koppen, 2000, p. 304).

3. According to the Estonian Tourism Law (§23(3)), in the name of a guest house, hostel, camp or bread and breakfast located in a rural area, the word ‘tourism farm’ (turismitalu) can be used.

4. I will use Võro as the English equivalent for the endonym võrokõnõ. On Võro linguistic identities, see Brown (2008).

5. Setomaa (Setoland), with its distinctive culture, and heavily promoted in Estonian tourism, covers a part of the studied Võru County, but I have interviewed only the tourism farmers who identify themselves as Võros. On some aspects of Seto identity, see Leete (2010), and for a discussion of the commodification of Seto culture in tourism, see Annist (2013). There is some tension sometimes between the two neighbouring regions when competing for tourists in conditions of economic recession. Those Setos, they have the [folk] clothes and the religion so they're visually very distinguishable’, a research participant once told me with half-joking and half-serious bitterness. ‘We the Võros don't have anything like that; we only have the language [Võro dialect], so we have to try extra hard [to succeed in tourism].

6. From the English version of the homepage of a farm, wording unchanged. Retrieved August 8, 2013, from http://www.kobakutalu.com/index2.html