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- Convenor:
-
Gregory Teal
(University of Western Sydney)
Send message to Convenor
- Track:
- General
- Location:
- University Place 4.206
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 August, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel of the IUAES Commission on the Anthropology of Tourism provides scope for retrospective reflection and identify and contribute to current directions in theory and research of tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological research on tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean is empirically diverse and theoretically complex. Over the last two decades anthropologists have produced innovative and critical work on sex tourism, tourism and indigenous land rights, race, heritage and dispossession, spectacle and authenticity, tourism and post-revolutionary societies, to list a few themes. Often at the core of anthropological discourse on tourism in the region is a focus on relations and structures of power and inequality. This panel provides a space for papers on these and other topics and on diverse cultural and geographical foci of current research, and welcomes papers that identify critical issues and directions in anthropological/tourism theory.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 August, 2013, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses issues on tourism and its relation to religion and the idea of national heritage in the area of Occidente de Mexico (Western Mexico)
Paper long abstract:
The paper will explore the different forms that take tourism in holy places, particularly in Western Mexico. Religious sanctuaries hold important cultural and spiritual significance in Mexico; pilgrimages, the movement of people towards them, have already being regarded in part as local tourism enjoyed by pilgrims and their families. However, it is important to explore how tourism is now enhanced by complex processes which involve state policies and the transformation of Catholicism in present Mexico. Some of these transformations have to do with public policies developing regional tourism based in religious heritage, that wish to launch sanctuaries as touristic places in order to enhance local and regional economies. The Catholic Church in Mexico is another important influence allowing -or not- the rising in religious tourism in what it considers its holy places, presenting contradictory positions towards it. The waning in catholic numbers in the country has made this region a Catholic fortress, since western Mexico forms most of the country's priests. And last and not least, new agers in the area are also creating and giving new meanings to old and new holy places, shaping the rise in religious tourism in the area. These tendencies will give new lights on the relation of tourism, religion and the configuration of holy places in Mexico.
Paper short abstract:
On the basis of findings from fieldwork on the local dimensions of power relations and mechanism of identity construction in Jamaica the author explains the tourism-related issues as rooted in both, external cultural influences and local habitus.
Paper long abstract:
The tourist industry is the main sector of Jamaican economy and also a powerful force in the Jamaican social life. Control over tourism-related capitals and revenues, the ways of their redistribution, inevitable resistance of the omitted or subaltern, as well as identity construction and representations building in order to achieve political or mercantile goals (Carrier 1995; Hall & Tucker 2004) are among the factors influencing power relations in majority of the contemporary societies.
However, the interplay between tourism and Jamaican communities cannot be reduced to Jamaica subordination to the global capital, overwhelming neoliberalism and Western tourists needs evident in mass tourism expansion and symbolised by enclave resorts - 'The all-inclusive prisons'. Many of Jamaicans perform their own agency of everyday make do on the basis of the local habitus (see Bourdieu 1990). Tourism in this perspective is also exploited, not only exploiting. One potentially good illustration may be sex interplay between locals and visitors. Sexually based agency appearing in some circles of poor Jamaicans has been long described in terms of illegitimacy or social dysfunction (Clarke 1957; Kerr 1951; Simey 1946) before tourism got involved into this discourse. Tourism may be treated as another area of activity in this context.
On the basis of multi-sited fieldwork on the local dimensions of power relations and mechanism of identity construction conducted in several destinations in Jamaica, and with implementation of ethno-historical perspective I describe the tourism-related issues as rooted in both, external cultural influences and local habitus.
Paper short abstract:
The border areas of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are marginalized from the political and economic centers of both countries, yet are important to relations between them. There are creative initiatives to develop local, community based environmentally responsible tourism along the border.
Paper long abstract:
The border regions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic are marginalized from the political and economic centers of both countries, yet are of central importance to relations between the two countries. There are creative initiatives to develop local, community based and environmentally responsible tourism development along the border. These initiatives are constrained particularly by the neoliberal model dominating tourism development in the Dominican Republic, by the power of the national political and economic elites, and by the ideology of national and cultural separation between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Local organizations and cross-border networks challenge the dominant model and seek to address local and cross-border issues of poverty, employment and environmental vulnerability.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the connections between touristic and migratory international flows in Ponta Negra, (Natal-RN, Northeast Brazil).
Paper long abstract:
Starting from a systemic perspective on the global mobility of people, the main purpose is understand how tourism and migrations are articulated in the context of intimacy transnationalization (e.g. love, sex, marriage) between European tourists and Brazilian women on the "global beach" of Ponta Negra.