“This is not only about culture”: on tourism, gender stereotypes and other affective fluxes

ABSTRACT

In this article, I challenge the idea of a “one-way” relationship in which tourists are supposed to contribute with economic resources and freer gender roles to the development and empowerment of “poor, rural and traditional women”. By reflecting on my own located, gendered and embodied position during my ethnographic fieldwork among women performing bobbin lace in the Coast of Death (Galicia, Spain), I analyze how gender roles and stereotypes interact in both directions, leading to misunderstandings and performances of pride and resentment on behalf of the craftswomen. Some gender stereotypes associated with the craftswomen by the tourist gaze and other affective fluxes such as policies, economy and heritage regimes are not only changing contexts but also being embodied, traditionalizing the craftswomen and curtailing their flexible economic practices by transforming both crafts and bodies into something that is just “culture”.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• affect
• crafts
• tourism impacts
• heritage management
• Galicia

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork on Costa da Morte is part of the dissertation research conducted by the author, named “Crafting and affective landscapes: heritagization processes of textile crafts and landscapes in Costa da Morte (Galicia,Spain)” which was funded by the programme Jae-predoc (Spanish Research Council). I am grateful to my PhD supervisors Dr. Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (Incipit, CSIC) and Dr. Victoria Quintero-Morón (UPO) for their valuable support throughout my carreer and to the journal reviewers for their substantial contributions. I am also grateful to Ursula Neilson who made a good effort to review my English. At last, but not least, I am very grateful to Camariñas and Muxía people, who kindly put up with me and made me feel at home, and also to my tireless research team: my mate Juan P. Venditti and our son Luca.

Disclosure statement

This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the funding institutions cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Notes

1. In Turgalicia report on formal labour directly related to tourism in the region of Galicia, it is referred to as a “feminized activity” as women working in tourism represent 58% of the total (p. 15). Women work mostly in accommodation and food services, and men in transport. There are also more women than men in temporary contracts (p. 28). This report does not take into account informal labour, care labour and labour not directly related to tourism. Retrieved November 23, 2015, from http://www.turgalicia.es/aet/portal/index.php?idm=15.

2. In words of Spinoza: “By affect I understand the affections of the body, by which the power of acting of the body is increased, diminished, helped or hindered, together with the ideas of these affections. […] I understand affect to be an action, otherwise it is a passion” (Spinoza, 1883, p. 106).

3. European funds such as LEADER (Liaisons entre Activités de Development de L'Economie Rural) and FEADER (Fondo Europeo Agrícola de Desarrollo Regional), among others, and also national funds. For a critique on the clientelistic management of European funds on rural heritage projects, see Alonso González and Macías Vázquez (2014).

4. The myth of Galician Matriarchy is based on the existence of matrifocality, matrilocality and matrilineality kinship patterns that are common in some small Galician and northern Portugal fishing communities (Brøgger & Gilmore, 1997; Cole, 1991; Kelley, 1994). Galician rural women have been frequently characterized in anthropological literature as strong matriarchs with an “absolute” power in all spheres of life and weak submissive men (Lisón Tolosana, 1974, p. 249). This myth has been criticized by some authors because women-centred kinship patterns do not necessarily mean women having absolute power over all areas of social life (Alonso Población & Roseman, 2012; Anvik, 2012; Kelley, 1999; Roseman, 2002). On the contrary, these matrifocal patterns of inheritance and residence are actually working as a strategy to avoid potential homelessness and abandonment in contexts where men emigrated massively in the past and are enrolled in hazardous deep-sea fishing. This results in a “relative autonomy” and certain gender equality in some parts of rural Galicia (Cole, 1991, p. 105; García-Ramon et al., 1995; Roseman, 1999, p. 126), with women occupying central positions in the everyday life and community survival, and a high number of women acting as head of household, performing “men's work” (García-Ramon et al., 1995, p. 278) undertaking a huge number of economic activities, both paid and unpaid.

5. An interesting analysis on how textile industries such as Inditex (Zara) was fed by the unrecognized work of many Galician women can be seen in the documentary “Fíos Fora”. Retrieved November 24, 2015, from http://fiosfora.gal/.

6. Between 1981 and 2014, Camariñas and Muxía has lost 20.03% and 28.5% of their population, respectively. Currently, there are 5068 people living in Muxía and 5774 in Camariñas. Data obtained, on November 23, 2015, from www.ige.eu.

7. I spent two years doing multisided fieldwork of which more than a year I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in the Coast of Death based mostly on participant observation, but also dozens of recorded in-depth interviews, thousands of photographs and hours of video recordings.

8. Retrieved October 9, 2015, from http://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/carballo/camarinas/2015/10/09/camarinas-4500-personas-visitaron-faro-vilan-mes-septiembre/0003_201510C9C11995.htm.

9. Swain (1995, p. 261) also analyzed and found that textile souvenir buyers are usually women.

10. In some texts from the 1920s bobbin-lace-makers from the Coast of Death were considered as workers in an “industry” which brings millions of “pesetas” to the region. Seen in the text “Aires da Terra” in the newspaper A Nosa Terra, vol. 15 (1917).

11. The economic strategy tends to focus on the “house” as the minimum economic unit and the sum of all the family members’ incomes (García-Ramon et al., 1993; Roseman, 1999).

12. In fact, there is an artisan living museum in the Castle-Museum of Vimianzo, a nearby village.

Additional information

Funding

TRAMA3 funded by CYTED [613RT0473]; NEARCH funded by the European Comission in the framework of the Culture Programme [2013-1126/001-001] and also to the project “Heritage and participation: methodological proposal and critical review” funded by the Spanish MINECO [HAR2014-54869-R].

Notes on contributors

Guadalupe Jiménez-Esquinas

Guadalupe Jiménez-Esquinas is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela. She received a Master's degree in gender studies from International University Menéndez-Pelayo for her work on the touristification of Galician witches (2010). In 2009, she received her Bachelor degree in sociocultural anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and conducted her undergraduate fieldwork on flamenco dance. Her current interests are around the critical analysis of heritagization processes using a feminist approach, the application of theories of affect and emotion and the analysis of “participation” in heritage field. She is currently preparing her PhD dissertation titled “Crafting and affective landscapes: heritagization processes of textile crafts and landscapes in Costa da Morte (Galicia, Spain)” (to be defended in EHU, University of Basque Country) where she analyzes the heritagization of textile crafts and the affective/emotional relationship with heritages and landscapes.