Tourism Magic And Modernity

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.

At the bottom of the sea, freedivers find that the world bestows humans with the magic of bodily and mental freedom, binding them in small communities of play, affect and respect for nature. On land, rational human interests dissolve this magic into prescriptive formulas of belonging to a profession, a nation and an acceptable modernity. The magical exploration is morphed by such multiple interventions successively from a pilgrimage, to a cinematic and digital articulation of an anarchic project, to an exercise in national citizenship and finally, a projection of post-imperial cosmopolitan belonging. This is the story of an embodied, relational and affective journey: the making of the explorer of worlds. At its heart stands a clash between individual and collective desires to belong, aspirations to create and the pragmatics of becoming recognised by others. The primary empirical context in which this is played is the contemporary margins of European modernity: the post-troika Greece. With the project of a freediving artist, who stages an Underwater Gallery outside the iconic island of Amorgos, as a sociological spyglass, it examines the networks of mobility that both individuals and nations have to enter to achieve international recognition, often at the expense of personal freedom and alternative pathways to modernity. Inspired by fusions of cultural pragmatics, phenomenology, phanerology, the morphogenetic approach, feminist posthumanism and especially postcolonial theories of magical realism, this study examines interconnected variations of identity and subjectivity in contexts of contemporary mobility (digital and embodied travel/tourism). As a study of cultural emergism, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in critical theory, cultural, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and tourism/pilgrimage theory.

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism explores and critically evaluates the debates and controversies in this field of Tourism. It brings together leading specialists from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical regions, to provide state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research on this significant stream of tourism and its future direction. The book is divided into 7 inter-related sections. Section 1 looks at the historical, philosophical and theoretical framework for cultural tourism. This section debates tourist autonomy role play, authenticity, imaginaries, cross-cultural issues and inter-disciplinarity Section 2 analyses the role that politics takes in cultural tourism. This section also looks at ways in which cultural tourism is used as a policy instrument for economic development. Section 3 focuses on social patterns and trends, such as the mobilities paradigm, performativity, reflexivity and traditional hospitality, as well as considering sensitive social issues such as dark tourism. Section 4 analyses community and development, exploring adaptive forms of cultural tourism, as well as more sustainble models for indigenous tourism development. Section 5 discusses Landscapes and Destinations, including the transformation of space into place, issues of authenticity in landscape, the transformation of urban and rural landscapes into tourism products and conservation versus development dilemmas. Section 6 refers to Regeneration and Planning, especially the creative turn in cultural tourism, which can be used to avoid problems of serial reproduction, standardisation and homogenisation. Section 7 deals with The Tourist and Visitor Experience, emphasising the desire of tourists to be more actively and interactively engaged in cultural tourism. This significant volume offers the reader a comprehensive synthesis of this field, conveying the latest thinking and research. The text is international in focus, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study and will be an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in Cultural Tourism. This is essential reading for students, researchers and academics of Tourism as well as those of related studies in particular Cultural Studies, Leisure, Geography, Sociology, Politics and Economics.

The study of tourism has made key contributions to the study of anthropology. This volume defines the current state of the anthropology of tourism, examining political, economic, ideological and symbolic themes. An extraordinarily rich collection of case studies illustrate topics as diverse as hospitality, sex and tourism, enchantment, colonial and neo-colonial consumption, and the relation between tourism and gender and ethnic boundaries, as well as questions of global, economic and cultural systems, modernism and nationalism. The book also covers practical and policy issues relating to urban, rural and coastal planning and development. Thinking through Tourism assesses the enormous potential contribution that analysis of tourism can offer to mainstream anthropological thinking. The volume opens up new avenues for enquiry and is an essential resource for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, tourism, sociology and related disciplines.

This book is the first to explore the relationship between tourism and Brexit from a social science perspective. As the UK repositions itself in the uncharted waters of a post-Brexit world the book considers three interconnected themes all bound up in touristic practices: travel, borders and identity. The volume uses diverse examples, including UK-Polish tourism, royal events, Arthurian-based heritage in Cornwall, media representations of Brits abroad, ideas of freedom on holiday in Mallorca, the impacts of Brexit on migrant workers in Mallorca and on tourism for Commonwealth and Overseas Territories. Contributors to the book are based in the UK, EU, Southeast Asia, USA, Australia and New Zealand, giving the analysis a strongly international focus. It will be useful for students and researchers in tourism, migration, European studies, social anthropology, geography and sociology.