Contested rural development through tourism: spatial and social relations in a post-socialist Czech village

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine social change of a post-socialist Czech rural locality and community with regard to the large scale tourism development that has been taking place in this area since the late 1990s. The aim is to understand how the post-socialist transformation through tourism affected local community. Design – Tourism has become the primary economic endeavour which dominates community life and upon which the local area is dependent. The area serves as a prime example of a rapidly and extensively evolving, and largely exogenous tourism enterprise situated in a rural host community. The attempt is to present and explain the ways in which local rural people experience, create, interpret, and act upon transformation of the locality through tourism. Methodology - The paper is methodologically grounded in anthropological fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2013. It is based on the data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Approach – The paper is focused on diverse identities, forms of agency and ambiguous interactions emerging within the rural community. It is argued that multiple views and representations of rurality are contingent on diverse memories of socialist past and post-socialist present. Findings – Data confirm the emergence of hybrid rural place filled up with changing spatial, social and power relations, and the processes of the internal ‘othering’ and marginalisation of the post-socialist rural place and people. Originality – The paper presents the outcomes of primary research that is both empirically-driven and conceptually embedded in the concepts of postsocialism, tourism as development, and social change.