Short Abstract

This panel explores tourism practices in economically and infrastructurally marginalized post/colonial regions. We ask how adventure and heritage tourism connect with past and present migration and how touristic affects draw on post/colonial imaginaries and shape economic and societal change.

Long Abstract

Tourism moves. Tourists and tour guides circulate through space, money influx shifts local power relations, and actors co-laborate to create affective touristic experiences. Informed by our research in three economically and infrastructurally marginalized regions in Morocco – the High Atlas mountains, the Rif mountains, and the Eastern Moroccan Sahara –, we ask how heritage and adventure tourism move tourists and touristic entrepreneurs, facilitate infrastructural change, challenge moral continuity and thereby re-imagine post/colonial dreams in a globalized world.

We invite contributions that ethnographically reflect on questions such as: How do variously positioned actors work together to re-imagine, sustain, and monetize such territories as tourist destinations that re-articulate (post/)colonial imaginaries and contemporary cosmopolitan ideals, and which instances of change do these actors pursue? How do networks of migration and digital media shape those collaborations? And how do touristic actors renegotiate past and present power relations as well as State and religious authority?

Three key areas thereby draw our attention.

1) How does tourism reshape food practices, taste, moral expectations, processes of professionalization and coming-of-age?

2) How do tourism professionals and tourists use social media and AI to produce and circulate [and monetize] imaginaries? Which tropes do these build on? How do they inform architecture, decoration and tour guiding practice?

3) How and why do tour guides, tourists and travel agents cooperate to create experiences of exoticness, escape, and adventure? How do these fabrications shape attachments and claims to landscapes, communities, and belonging? And how do gender and sexuality act in those dynamics?