Paper short abstract:

Allegorical Gardens: Tourism Liturgy and the Making of Tropical Insularity

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I will argue that modern mass tourism to tropical shores and islands has long developed its own liturgies playfully recreating the philosophical principals and institutions organising the late modernist being in the world and integrating destinations within a global tourism system. I will stress that on the level of tourism production, tropical destinations have been strategically produced as globally largely interchangeable settings made up of sights and itineraries allegorically embodying the modernist and late modernist ideas, conceptions and institutions of truth, innocence, beauty, diversity, time, and progress. From an ethno-historical perspective, I will suggest that the integration of tropical tourism destinations within global tourism systems re-actualize the classical role of gardens within the widened scales of social life in the contemporary world. From a tourism perspective, tropical tourism destinations can be seen as bounded spaces concentrating, articulating and festively celebrating a set of essential symbolic elements underlying the modernist philosophy. At the same time, as a result of the long established contact, participation and continuing relation between tourism institutions, tourists and tropical destinations, the latter have often adopted the semantics of the gardener role and developed tourism cultures within a globally integrated tourism system. In this sense, tropical destinations have often quite explicitly self-fashioned themselves as the gardens/gardeners of one of the major moral and aesthetic resource bases of late modernity. To approach interrelated issues of cultural production, personal and public liturgy and ritual performance, intersubjective distance, enchantment, and participation underlying this theoretical proposal, I will use data collected through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the tropical island of La Reunion, Indian Ocean (1995-2001, 2005, 2006) as well as research on international relations within the wider field of tourism policy (2005-2006).

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