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Katrín Lund will deliver a paper entitled "Just like Magic: Activating
Landscape of Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rural Tourism, Iceland". It is one
in a series of seminars "Inimkond/Humankind – Current Issues in
Anthropology and Beyond". This seminar will be held in auditorium N207
(Tallinn University Nova building) on Tuesday, 16 April from
18:00-20:00.Abstract:Strandir is a remote, rural region in the north-west
of Iceland. Steady declining of the traditional economic backbone - sheep
farming and coastal fisheries - in recent decades means that the
inhabitants are increasingly looking towards tourism as a new source of
income. In this they have not necessarily used conventional economic
methods in order to shape the landscape as an attraction and in 2000 a
Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft was opened in the only urban centre in the
region, a town of 400 inhabitants called Hólmavík. The opening of the
museum re-invokes an old history since the 17th century when the region
became notorious for witch hunting and burning; history that tells about
people fighting dreadful situation of scarcity and hunger trying to
activate the powers of nature to change their circumstances. Many of those
living today in Strandir did not think in favour of the museum at the
beginning and worried about activating this horrific part of history in
order to create an image for the region. This attitude seems to have
changed dramatically since the museum appears to have performed magically,
at least in terms of growing numbers of tourists visiting the region. The
seminar will examine how the museum brings together different temporal and
spatial realities that creates a place of ‘in-betweeness’, that is
constantly in the making, continuously becoming through the magic that the
museum brings about in order to activate the regional landscape as an
attraction.Anthropologist Katrín Anna Lund is an associate professor at
the Department of Geography and Tourism at the University of Iceland.
Currently, she is visiting the Department of Social and Cultural
Anthropology at Tallinn University in the process of writing the
introduction to her new book on movement in Iceland. With a PhD in Social
Anthropology from Manchester University, UK, Katrín has worked as a
visiting lecturer at Victoria University, New Zealand, as a researcher at
the University of Aberdeen, UK, and as a lecturer at Queens University
Belfast, Northern Ireland, before joining the University of Iceland in
2006. Katrín has published widely on landscape, tourism, walking, the
senses and narrative in Spain, Scotland and Iceland.The series of seminars
"Inimkond/Humankind - Current Issues in Anthropology and Beyond" features
speakers from anthropology and related fields, and fosters discussion of
their research with an interdisciplinary audience. It aims to contribute to
the culture of academic scholarship and debate at Tallinn University.
Speakers include local researchers as well as guests from a variety of
background disciplines including those with different interpretations of
anthropological theory and methodology. Presentations in the seminar series
will be of particular interest to staff and students in anthropology,
cultural theory, sociology, and history.For further information about the
seminar series, please contact:Franz KrauseE-mail: franz.krause@tlu.ee