Browsing by Subject "Turismi"

Originally founded as a Finnish utopian colony in 1929, Penedo in Brazil has developed over the decades from full-board guest housing activity to a full-fledged tourist destination. Nowadays Penedo is a popular day or a weekend trip destination that attracts predominantly domestic Brazilian domestic tourists with its Finnish exoticism in its townscape. Pequena Finlândia shopping center and the folk-dance nights organized by the Clube Finlândia are the two primary tourist attractions. In Penedo, there still lives a Finnish community of a few dozen people. Only a handful of the Finnish Penedians participate in the tourism industry, but many more reside in the area affected by tourism. This study examines the Finnish Penedians’ perceptions of tourism and of its impact on the town, community, and Finnish culture. Tourism in Penedo is built on the image of Finnishness, and thus the work concentrates on some of the classic discussions in anthropology of tourism about commodification of culture and cultural authenticity in a tourist setting. In addition, the work discusses the potential of tourism in the maintenance of Finnish culture in Penedo. The data for this study was collected during a six-month long ethnographic fieldwork period from September 2017 until March 2018. The data was gathered mainly by participant-observation and different types of interviews. The data is comprised of 24 transcribed interviews and field notes, but it also includes a small amount of other written data. The data was analyzed by employing the grounded theory method. The research shows that the Finnish Penedians’ perceptions of tourism are not uniform and straightforward. From the local perspective, tourism does not embody such meanings that it could be unequivocally deemed as good or bad. Tourism is understood as indispensable for the town’s existence, but its rapid growth has brought about challenges to the town’s infrastructure and negative consequences especially to the environment. The local community feels it does not culturally benefit from the growing mass tourism. The commodification of Finnishness divides the community. On one hand, it is seen as cultural exploitation for economic profit, particularly when the culture is being commodified by the Brazilian entrepreneurs. On the other, the commodification of Finnish culture is regarded as means for the preservation of Finnishness in Penedo. The local Finnish community experiences that there is not much “real Finnishness” in the town anymore. Instead, culture and traditions have adopted new forms and embraced new functions and meanings. The maintenance of Finnishness and its appearance to tourists is considered important. Finnishness works as a reference of the origin of Penedo as a Finnish colony and as a nest of Finnish culture in Brazil. With the growing tourism and disappearing Finnishness, phenomena brought about by globalization and modernization are seen as a future challenge, since they are perceived as something that take the interest of tourists and Finnish descendants away from the cultural traditions.