Paper short abstract:

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Paper long abstract:

This poster explores relations between Anthropology, Tourism and Cultural process and derives from PhD work in progress. Applying a combination of ethnographic and discourse-centered approaches to an exploratory case study in the city of Malacca, West Malaysia, it focuses in spatial identities and tourism process. This is drawn from a general interest in how experience is embedded in place and how space holds memories that implicate people and events. Taking Malacca's Portuguese Settlement as the empirical locus, it considers strategies that Portuguese Eurasian Community has to cope with tourism. Regarding spatial identities, residents imagine the Portuguese Settlement as the stage upon which social memory is constructed, where locality is 'produced', as well as a site for tourism performance both on local, national and trans-national contexts. Local residents' multi-vocal discourse seems to appropriate 20th century ethnographic (colonial and post-colonial) discourses on the Settlement, also appropriated within tourism process. The visual material to be presented includes text, map and photographs. A short discussion will be drawn from the preliminary data presented.

Key-words: Tourism, Ethnography, Place, Portuguese-Eurasians, Malaysia.