Intertwined narratives: nature tourism in the context of forced settlers’ history in Western Siberia

Starting from the geographical and socio-economic specificity of tourism in the sparsely populated and economically marginalised middle reaches of the Ob River, the paper proposes a conceptual revision of the sustainable development agenda in the context of tourism and more-than-human anthropology. The tourism experience here is inevitably complemented by a history of political repression, for the landscape that tourists enjoy today was the site of forced resettling schemes. Against this background, river and taiga possess non-human agency, not as development factors or tourism resources, but as agents of ruination and collective historical trauma. Conventional ideas of tourism as leisure miss important histories that are constitutive of both the region and tourism experience: this case shows the historical intertwining with the environmental, inverting established depictions of nature as mere backdrop for human activity. Thus, in the context of violent history, natural forces appear as actors that shape tourists’ experiences today.