TRAVELS INTO NATURE AND SOCIETY WITH ROD AND LINE

From its origins in Victorian Britain, freshwater game-angling for trout and salmon, mostly by fly-fishing, has spread to become a significant international tourism form. However, as the sport has travelled its traditional codes and values are challenged by the varied geographies, natures and cultures it meets. This paper examines the dynamics and tensions this sporting culture experiences as it attempts to exploit the opportunities of expansion that tourism affords while protecting game-angling’s sporting traditions from the ‘otherness’ that international tourism brings. Central cultural actors in this process are game-angling magazines who promote the sport’s commodification and global expansion but who also have vested interests in maintaining game-angling’s culture and heritage. To analyse how these magazines manage the potential contradictions between maintenance of the sport’s integrity and promoting its expansion through tourism a discourse analysis of three editions of three of the most important UK game-angling and field sports magazines is undertaken. This work is further triangulated by a content analysis of six editions of one of these magazines, Trout & Salmon magazine, which is the preeminent game-angling periodical in the UK. The case is made that angling tourism is having potentially major impacts on the sporting traditions of game-angling which are as yet unresolved and are in process, but to which these magazines, as important cultural brokers, are responding with some discursive vigour, albeit in very nuanced and subtle ways. Finally, avenues of future angling-related research are suggested that have the potential to make a significant contribution to the tourism and leisure literatures.