Contribution short abstract:

Employing the concept of schismogenesis, the following article analyzes the time-related contradictions between tourists and locals at the tourist site known as Ballermann and the transformative and heritage practices that natives use to imagine a future horizon without tourists.

Contribution long abstract:

Batesonian concepts like double bind and schismogenesis reveal the mutually-reinforcing link between internal contradictions on the individual level and the monstruous social bonds that stem from cumulative interaction of such contradictions. Whenever involved in schismogenetically-driven communicative processes, individuals, or entire communities, are not only overwhelmed by contradictory messages, but also, in trying unsuccessfully to “solve” these contradictions, fail to imagine new future horizons.

Based on 15 months of Fieldwork in s´Arenal, Majorca, better known in Germany as “Ballermann”, this paper argues that “party tourism” is the form of a schismogenetic relationship between partygoers and Majorcan population, and aims at understanding the time-related contradictions that this implies for the local population and the transformative practices they put into play to overcome them.

Trapped for decades in the authoritarian capitalist fallacy that the more they invest in the so-called “quality tourism”, the more they will get rid of “party tourism”, Majorcan population became more dependent and sunk nearly into despair, making the idea of a non-touristic future almost unimaginable. This is because, to borrow a Luhmannian idiom, schismogenesis entails “defuturization”, the reduction of future horizon.

Yet, partially aware of it, some social groups in s´Arenal, in commoning heritage knowledge related with the old mining trade (Trencadors) and the landscape of quarries (Pedreres) of the site, have precisely reinvented their celebratory practices not to oppose to, but to symbolically incorporate the foreign celebration. With new celebrations, they reconsidered the long-time perspective, thus relativising the harshness of the present in-view of articulating new futures.