Mobile natures: tourism, symbolic geographies, and environmental protection on the Croatian Adriatic

Abstract

This article analyzes shifts in the imagining of the eastern Adriatic from a backward periphery to a natural paradise, a process of symbolic definition in which mobile tourists have both played a key role. Examining discourses and practices of nature tourism on the island of Lošinj, the analysis focuses on the emergence of the dolphin as a key symbol in the island's contemporary tourist iconography and infrastructure. In what ways does the marketing of dolphins repackage the image of Lošinj as a site of health and nature that helped spread the island's fame as a tourist mecca over a century earlier? How does the interest in dolphins refract the global rise since the 1990s of tourism promising unmediated contact with ‘wild nature’? How to explain the paradoxical embrace of dolphins as an island symbol alongside the failure of recent efforts to establish a marine protected area (MPA) that would conserve the dolphin habitat? In answering these questions, the article inquires into the historical erasures and shifting boundaries of center/periphery required to sustain the vision of Lošinj as an isolated and unspoiled place. Simultaneously, political contests over dolphins encode anxieties about the island's future as a periphery within the European Union.

Keywords:

• center-periphery
• dolphins
• wild nature
• Balkanism
• marine protected areas
• Adriatic

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the staff at the libraries of the Centro di Ricerche Storiche di Rovigno and Fakultet za Turizam I Vanjsku Trgovinu Dubrovnik for facilitating the historical research for this article. I am particularly appreciative to the researchers at Blue World on Lošinj for allowing me to participate in their volunteer program. Especial thanks are owed to Peter Mackelworth, Blue World's Conservation Direction. This article has benefitted from readings by Kristen Ghodsee, Paige Herrlinger, Robert Morrison, and Tanya Richardson.

Notes on contributor

Pamela Ballinger is Fred Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights and Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She holds degrees in Anthropology (BA Stanford University, M.Phil Cambridge University, MA Johns Hopkins University) and Anthropology and History (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University). She is the author of History in Exile (Princeton University Press, 2003; Italian version with Il Veltro Editrice, 2010). Her research focuses on refugees, displacement, repatriation, borders, memory, and seascapes and has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Current Anthropology, History and Memory, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and Past and Present.

Notes

¹ Claudio Magris, Microcosms, trans. Iain Halliday (London: Harvill, 1999), 158.

² Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A 38, no. 2 (2006): 207–26.

³ Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration, and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 301–34; and Barak Kalir, ‘Moving Subjects, Stagnant Paradigms: Can the “Mobilities Paradigm” Transcend Methodological Nationalism?’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 311–27.

⁴ On this, see Pamela Ballinger, ‘Definitional Dilemmas: Southeastern Europe as “Culture Area”?’, Balkanologie 3, no. 2 (1999): 73–91.

⁵ Milica Bakić-Hayden, and Robert Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 1–15; and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For more recent contributions to this debate, go to Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).

⁶ Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London: SAQI, 2004), 36–9.

⁷ Stjepan G. Meštrović, Habits of the Balkan Heart (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), 64.

⁸ Andrew Gilbert et al., ‘Reconsidering Postsocialism from the Margins of Europe’, Anthropology News 49, no. 8 (2008): 10–11.

⁹ On this, see Lauren Rivera, ‘Managing “Spoiled” National Identity: War, Tourism, and Memory in Croatia’, American Sociological Review 73, no. 4 (2008): 613–34.

¹⁰ Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”; and also Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31.

¹¹ D.B. Weaver, ‘Peripheries of the Periphery: Tourism in Tobago and Barbuda’, Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 2 (1998): 292–313.

¹² D.B. Weaver, ‘Peripheries of the Periphery: Tourism in Tobago and Barbuda’, Annals of Tourism Research 25, 298.

¹³ Jeremy Boissevain, ‘Introduction’, in Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism, ed. Jeremy Bossevain (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), 1–26.

¹⁴ Nataša Rogelja, ‘Izola's Fishermen between Yacht Clubs, Beaches, and State Borders: Connections between Fishing and Tourism’, in Contesting the Foreshore, ed. Jeremy Boissevain and Tom Selwyn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 295.

¹⁵ Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

¹⁶ Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 9.

¹⁷ Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ‘In Which Sense Do Cultural Islands Exist?’, Social Anthropology 1, no. 1B (1993), 133.

¹⁸ John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind. How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 85–6.

¹⁹ Jan Morris, The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 151–2.

²⁰ Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6.

²¹ Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 86–7.

²² Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 100–1.

²³ Anna Chiara Gasparotto, Pescatori veneti di Lussino [Venetian Fishermen of Lussino] (Verona: Cierre Edizioni, 2004), 23.

²⁴ For Nantucket, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1995).

²⁵ Antonio Budini, ‘La Società Navale di Lussingrande, 1852–1858 [The Naval Society of Lussingrande, 1852–1858]’, Pagine Istriane II, no. 7–8 (1951): 31–6.

²⁶ T.G. Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria. Volume III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 81–2.

²⁷ T.G. Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria. Volume III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 84.

²⁸ T.G. Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria. Volume III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), 87–8.

²⁹ Cited in Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria, 94.

³⁰ Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria, 93.

³¹ F. Hamilton Jackson, The Shores of the Adriatic: The Austrian Side. The Küstenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia (London: John Murray, 1908), 180.

³² Hermann Bahr, Viaggio in Dalmazia [Dalmatian Travels], trans. Massimo Soranzio (Trieste: MGS Press Editrice, 1996), 7.

³³ Alfred Niel, L'i.r. Riviera: Da Abbazia a Grado [The Habsburg Riviera: From Abbazia to Grado], trans. Lorella Cattaruzza and Gabriella Mack (Trieste: Edizioni LINT, 1991), 80.

³⁴ Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 44.

³⁵ Eric Mueggler, ‘The Lapponicum Sea: Matter, Sense, and Affect in the Botanical Exploration of Southwest China and Tibet’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 3 (2005): 442–79, 443–4.

³⁶ For the Habsburg case, see Tatijana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton, ‘Science, Medicine, and Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 679–86.

³⁷ Niel, L'i.r. Riviera, 82.

³⁸ Niel, L'i.r. Riviera, 86.

³⁹ John Sallnow, ‘Yugoslavia: Tourism in a Socialist Federal State’, Tourism Management 6, no. 2 (1985): 113–114.

⁴⁰ Dusko Keckemet, ‘Arhitektura u primorskom krajoliku – suvremena kriz graditeljstva’ [Architecture in the coastal landscape and contemporary urban construction], Pomorski Zbornik 21 (1983): 319–34; and Eduard Kusen, ‘Izgradena i zagradena morska obala’ [Seashore construction], Pomorksi Zbornik 21 (1983): 335–54.

⁴¹ Sallnow, ‘Yugoslavia’, 120.

⁴² Lošinj Hotels and Villas, http://www.losinj-hotels.com/en/travel-guide/the-island-of-losinj/dolphins-reserve (accessed August 12, 2013).

⁴³ Cited in Marina Petronio, ed. ‘Signor, il marinaio l'aspetta.’ Cronache di viaggio in Istria e Dalmazia [‘Sir, the sailor awaits you!’ Diary of travels in Istria and Dalmatia] (Monfalcone: Edizioni della Laguna, 1996), 101.

⁴⁴ Cited in Wolff, Venice and the Slavs, 102.

⁴⁵ Giovanni Bearzi, Drasko Holcer, and Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, ‘The Role of Historical Dolphin Takes and Habitat Degradation in Shaping the Present Status of Northern Adriatic cetaceans’, Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 14 (2004): 363–79.

⁴⁶ Mark B. Orams, Marine Tourism: Development, Impacts, and Management (London: Routledge, 1999).

⁴⁷ Adrian Peace, ‘Loving Leviathan: The Discourse of Whale-watching in Australian Ecotourism’, in John Knight, ed., Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacy (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 191–210.

⁴⁸ Bearzi et al., ‘The Role of Historical Dolphin Takes’, 368.

⁴⁹ Kester Eddy, ‘Detours with Dolphins’, Financial Times, August 29, 2003.

⁵⁰ Paige West, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington, ‘Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 251–77, 255–6.

⁵¹ Véronique Servais, ‘Enchanting Dolphins: An Analysis of Human-Dolphin Encounters’, in Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacy, ed. John Knight (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 211–29, 215.

⁵² Jane C. Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 186.

⁵³ Kalland locates this within a problematic nexus of ideas attached to what he calls the ‘superwhale.’ Arne Kalland, ‘Superwhale: The Use of Myths and Symbols in Environmentalism’, in Eleven Essays on Whales and Man, Reine i Lofoten, ed. George Blichfeldt (Norway: High North Alliance, 1994), 5–11.

⁵⁴ Branko Suljic, ‘Ne postoji losinjsko-cresko populacija dupina’, Novi List, January 14, 2007.

⁵⁵ See, for example, Kristen Ghodsee, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor, eds., Yugoslavia's Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950–1980) (Budapest: Central European University Press).

⁵⁶ Edward Luttwak, ‘If Bosnians were Dolphins …’, Commentary 96, no. 4 (1993): 27–32.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by multiple grants from the Rusack Coastal Studies Project Initiative Grant and the Fletcher Family Fund at Bowdoin College. In addition, research was supported by a Policy Research Fellowship from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research [817-1F] and a Wenner-Gren Small Grant.