Playing out postcolonial predicaments: representations of indigeneity and the tourist space in ecotourism marketing (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tourism, experience and photographs
"This paper explores tourist practices by means of an experiential approach within a semiotic construction of a place. Considering the experience of a space as one altered by a defined construction of images and abstract ideas of the place fixated in a stream of common beliefs. A social construction of space that boost the tourist desirability or undesirability of a particular place. Furthermore, this document traces tourist perceptual cognition in parallel to hegemonic and established signs, and photographic practice as one way in which the space is explored and narrated. With no intend to deride a preconception of a place as a false view; the document narrates a set of circumstances involved in touristic practices, in order to explore different aspects of the relation between the idea and the experience. Subscribing the photographic practice as an important way to explore and as the same time narrate the experience of the space. Considering as keystone the approach of Yan Fu Tuan around the experience of space and the definition of place within culture, the paper takes Merleu Ponty analyses of visual perception and Michel de Certau explorative practice of discourse. In order to set a discursive line where the tourism theories of Jhon Urry, Peter Osborne and Mike Crang could encounter a phenomenological detour. "
International Sociology, 2001
This article develops a critique of aspects of Urry's `tourist gaze; through an analysis of contemporary tourism in New Zealand. We argue that the metaphorical basis of the gaze seems to lie in the experience of tourism in Europe among particular classes of tourists. In that situation, tourists spend a considerable amount of time looking at historical landscapes and related interpretative sites/sights. By contrast, both international and domestic tourists in European settler societies such as New Zealand participate in active forms of touristic recreation; thus gazing is only one component of the tourist experience. This leads us to suggest that a better metaphorical approach to tourism is to talk about the tourist performance, which incorporates ideas of active bodily involvement, physical activity and gazing.
A Critique of the Touristic Phenomenon
This is a paper I wrote for a course work and hence it is not very elaborate but I have tried for arguing and developing an insight on a post-modernist phenomenon called "Tourism". Though I develop a critique of the touristic experience but my aim is to locate culturally a common individual in the neo-liberal society. The conclusion of this paper is short due to limitations but there is a lot that could be said once the crux of the arguments is understood. I leave it to the readers to understand where they belong in this discourse.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020
Tourism affects the lives of an increasing number of people across the world and has been growing and diversifying immensely since the turn of the 21st century. Anthropological approaches to tourism have also expanded from the early contributions of the 1970s, which tended to focus on the nature of tourism and its “impact” on peripheral host communities. These first interventions see anthropologists theorizing tourism as a “secular ritual,” studying its workings as a process of “acculturation,” and countering macroeconomic views of tourism’s potential for the economic development of peripheral societies by underscoring instead its neocolonial and imperialist features. Tourism is linked to the exacerbation of center-periphery dependencies, seen as an agent of cultural commoditization and responsible for the promotion and dissemination of stereotypical images of people and places. Moving beyond the impact paradigm, which has the disadvantage of portraying tourism as an external, disembedded, and imposed force on a passive population, constructivist approaches highlight its creative appropriations and integral role in the reinvention of culture and traditions. Anthropologists pay attention to the varied range of actors and agencies involved in tourism, accounting for the multi-scalar dimensions of this phenomenon and the uneven circulation of images, discourses, and resources it engenders. Tourism exerts a powerful global influence on how alterity and difference are framed and understood in the contemporary world and contributes to the valorization and dissemination of particular views of culture, identity, and heritage. Tourism is increasingly intertwined with processes of heritage-making, whose study helps advance anthropological reflections on cultural property, material culture, and the memorialization of the past. A key source of livelihood for a growing number of people worldwide, tourism is also becoming more and more associated with development projects in which applied anthropologists are also enrolled as experts and consultants. The study of the tourism-development nexus continues to be a key area of theoretical innovation and has helped advance anthropological debates on North–South relations, dominant responses to poverty and inequality, and their entanglements with neoliberal forms of governance. Given its diffuse and distributed character, tourism and touristification have been approached as forms of ordering that affect and restructure an ever-growing range of entities, and whose effects are increasingly difficult to tease out from concomitant societal processes. The ubiquitous implementations of tourism policies and projects, the influx of tourists, and the debates, reactions, and resistances these generate underscore, however, the importance of uncovering the ways tourism and its effects are being concretely identified, invoked, acted upon, and confronted by its various protagonists. Research on tourism has the potential to contribute to disciplinary debates on many key areas and notions of concern for anthropology. Culture, ethnicity, identity, alterity, heritage, mobility, labor, commerce, hospitality, intimacy, development, and the environment are among the notions and domains increasingly affected and transformed by tourism. The study of tourism helps understand how such transformations occur, uncovering their features and orientations, while also shedding light on the societal struggles that are at stake in them. The analysis of past and current research shows the scope of the theoretical and methodological debates and of the realms of intervention to which anthropological scholarship on tourism can contribute.
Tourism, visual culture and everyday life
2008
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the tourist, like the vagabond or flâneur, as a marginal figure, until in the post-modern world it moved to the centre of a world 'fully and exclusively structured by aesthetic criteria'. 1 This paper is concerned wiith the last decades of the nineteenth century, an era when tourists were relatively common features of the urban landscape and the tourism industry became one of the agencies generating economic and social change. Tourism became taken for granted as more and more people incorporated tourist practices into their everyday lives, even if these only extended to local sight sightseeing. 2 Tourism as an activity belongs in the public sphere. Tourist practices help to produce places while being the product of the discursive structures determining the way that places are imaged and experienced. Not surprisingly therefore, a major influence on ways of modelling the relationship between tourists and their environment has been the use of a dramaturgical metaphor in that it gives scope for the analysis of tourism as a social and cultural institution from a number of different perspectives. My presentation will deal with some visual examples. By the end of the century tourists were extremely visible in the principal cities of Europe, though not of course, in the numbers we associate with the next century, but significant none the less. The more important resorts and capital cities were crowded with tourists and even small towns, unknown to foreigners, were noted in Baedeker and represented on postcards. In thriving cultural centres new restaurants and cafés, opera houses, theatres, concert halls were attractive to tourists as well as local residents. The everyday life of major tourist centres became an object of touristic interest and its more distinctive features incorporated into the way that places were presented and experienced by their visitors. For people living and working in the principal tourist zones, encounters with tourists became a regular feature of their lives and even those who did not tourists on a daily basis or engage with tourism themselves were increasingly aware of tourism as a feature of the modern world.
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2011
AAU and involved with the Tourism Master's Programme. Her main research areas are: tourist experiences, consumption and identity, with a particular interest in cultural aspects of these. kvarter akademisk academic quarter Volume 02 • 2011 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Open Access Journals at Aalborg Universit kvarter akademisk academic quarter Volume Tales of Tourism Karina M. Smed 02 238 everywhere. Traditionally, although somewhat undiscriminating, it has been the privileged few of rich, developed countries touring poorer and less developed destinations, whereby perspectives and effects of tourism are very different across these actors in a tourism setting. The tourists are in a specific place at a specific time by choice, whereas locals 1 , or so-called hosts, are often by no choice of their own part of a tourism product that tends to trivialise and commoditise the culture that these locals represent (Greenwood, 1989)-thereby reducing these locals to servants of the tourism industry. This relationship is underlined by the very discourse, hosts vs. guests, which places emphasis on the specific roles that tourists and locals are assumed to play. It is hereby articulated not as an equal but a very uneven relationship, in which power is distributed unevenly between the parties involved. This presumably affects the dynamics of tourism and the very way in which it becomes part of globalisation processes and the dominant discourse-among tourists, locals at tourism destinations, the tourism industry, as well as in academia relating to tourism. The activity of actually being a so-called global tourist, the voluntary, temporary, guest role, has largely been a phenomenon reserved for certain people, although many communities around the world are involved in tourism and heavily affected by it. It has been assumed that tourists as well as local hosts have been fairly one-dimensional at a general level, and therefore, the dominant discourse has been self-explanatory, e.g. what the host/guest distinction implies. But current changes in economies and social structures, e.g. in China, India and Russia, which are at the moment viewed as the new emerging markets in tourism (WTO, 2010), have caused somewhat of a reversal in the traditional flow of tourists on a global scale. This means that flows are now increasing from these new emerging markets to the traditional tourism generating countries, and one could perhaps claim that there is no longer any specific flow in world tourism, as patterns of tourism have become much more complex. This could cause a broader spectrum of tourists/guests and possibly change the overall effects of tourism as well. Although structures are now changing and people around the world take on different roles in relation to tourism, it seems that meanings of tourism will always be manifold and characterised by diverse relationships at various levels. It could be claimed that academic quarter Volume Tales of Tourism Karina M. Smed 02 243 personal and social factors play into the positioning of the tourist, as implied by social identity theory mentioned previously.
8.-eRTR_BKRVW_Vol.13-No3.4_Tourism-Research-Frontiers (1).pdf
A Book Review: Tourism Research Frontiers: beyond the boundaries of Knowledge * In only eight chapters and 165 pages, this book discusses the needs of introducing new themes of investigation in the specialized literature of tourism research. Likely, this globalized world looks pretty different from a couple of decades back, when the discipline was founded. New times, new horizons and new challenges need new thinking. As a part of prestigious Emerald Series, Chambers and Rakic present an edited book, oriented to expand the epistemological boundaries of tourism research, imagining not only new themes and issues to explore but new problems. Based on the legacy of Jafar Jafari, the editors worked hard to compile different voices, dotted of different arguments, into a shared viewpoint. In the first chapter, the editors introduce the concept of frontiers as the fringe between the known and unknown. The fieldwork suggests that we shed light on some issues while others remain unchecked. The legitimacy of academic disciplines rests on their explanatory capacity. These borders, far from being stable, are in continuous renegotiation. Though tourism-research has been consolidated as a promising academic option for graduate and postgraduate students, a radical turn undermines the dominant understanding of tourism as it has been formulated by the founding parents. Most certainly, beyond tourism, critical scholars unveiled a commoditized discourse where the " Other " is subordinated to a ruling class of developed countries. As something else than a peace-making industry, tourism covers racialized allegories which lead to control of the periphery. This paradigm sees in tourism an alienatory mechanism of surveillance. Nonetheless, this book proposes an alternative way. Instead of proclaiming the dismantling of epistemological borders of tourism, the editors suggest a shift offering a fertile ground to shore up new paradigms. Through the second chapter, Gyimothy et al, discuss the ebbs and flows of popculture tourism which represents an extension of cultural behaviour in a globalized and multiculturalist universe. In chapter 3, Mondoca presents a study case based on the relationships of stakeholders in Ilha do Grande, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Those communities