Autor: Hana Horáková

Political and economic restructuring launched in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 has had a substantial effect on the whole social reality of the countries, including their countryside. In Czechia, a particular impact was felt in small remote municipalities attractive for tourists, whose local authorities decided to replace a decline in traditional forms of living with a sector of services. A newly emerging rurality based predominantly on consumption involves different forms of land-use consumption, concerns over the environment, and a rise of new forms of international nature-based tourism whose aim is to meet the needs of urbanized and industrialized societies. One of the most significant transformational factors is the advent of so-called Dutch villages, located in a Czech „natural“ environment which include both Dutch second home ownership and recreational complexes. A case in point is Lipno nad Vltavou, a Dutch village par excellence, that has recently turned into a stage for vast recreational and tourist activities. The post-socialist ethnography of the Lipno community from an anthropological perspective will show how this large-scale tourist project is instrumental in commercialization, individualization and commoditization of the rural sources – landscape and community. It will reveal the nature of conflict over the rural sources perceived as a clash between a vision and practice of the neoliberal order, embodied by the key power agents (local political and entrepreneurial elites and the media) and the former, now peripheral perspective of using the countryside in a non-competitive way, stressing the compatibility of cultural and environmental practice, cherished by marginalized layers of the local population. The paper shows that preserving „valuable“ countryside could be achieved through community participation, which is, however, substantially aggravated by the adverse legacy of state socialism.

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