Shaping the ‘good’ hunting experience in a contested space

Hunting tourism, broadly defined as travelling to other places other than one´s usual home or work environment for recreational hunting, takes many forms. It can be seen as a form of special interest tourism in the border area between recreation and tourism, and between market and non-market. In Sweden, there is an established form of reciprocal domestic hunting tourism, where hunting in other domains than one´s own home environment is viewed as a friendship- or hunting team exchange. This form of tourism exists both in parallel with, and intertwined with, a marketised form of commercial hunting tourism. The present paper is based on a study of hunting tourism entrepreneurship in Sweden. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs and participant observation of tourism events, the study focuses on the ongoing moral and social negotiation of what it means to be a ‘serious’ hunting entrepreneur, providing a ‘good’ hunting experience. We argue that the entrepreneurs are acting as moral guides or gatekeepers, navigating in the cross-section between different types of expectations among the visiting hunters, and in a wider sense, in the cross-section between different forms of social and economic exchange. Through the concept of ‘balancing work’, the paper demonstrates how the hunting entrepreneurs balance different norms and expectations about ‘good hunting business’ as well as a ‘good hunting experience’. The balancing work is discernible in accounts of the culture of ‘allmogejakt’ as a traditional, democratic form of hunting and how it relates to commercial hunting; in the valuation and critical negotiation of different hunting styles and practices related to game meat; in critical and educational reasoning about how hunters should relate to photography and social media communication, in ideals and norms of hunting business ethics, and in accounts of human well-being and the role of nature.