‘From the Inside to the Inside’: A New Development Model in Tourism Environments

Abstract

A scheme to assist both researchers in understanding culture in tourism contexts and policy-makers for tourism development is presented: an ethnology-friendly perspective centred around ‘culture’ as the compound of social practices, contexts, realities and facts that gives sense to the process of life in society. The argument starts with the transformation of culture into a metonymic metacultural product labelled ‘cultural heritage’ and with the destination community as reference point. The model distinguishes between the tourism development measures designed and thought from the outside (by tourist agents, capital or tourism experts) and addressed to the outside, and those designed from the inside to the inside (by and for the people of the community). It is not a question of empowerment but a theoretical scheme to analyse the social and cultural processes in tourism contexts: the conversion of the place through the meaningful mediation of tourism space. Consequently, new types of actions and measures for the social development of tourist destinations thought from the inside and addressed to the inside might be designed. The paper vindicates the regenerative power of culture.

Acknowledgements

The earliest draft of this paper was presented to the Interim Symposium of the Research Committee on International Tourism (RC-50) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) held in Mytilini (14–16 May 2004) and it was most recently presented to the 5th Annual Tourism Symposium of the University of Brighton at Eastbourne (22–3 June 2006). I am most grateful to the participants at both conferences for their helpful comments, and especially to Professor Jeremy Boissevain (University of Amsterdam), Professor Ricardo Sanmartín (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and the two anonymous referees, whose insightful comments and suggestions made this paper worthy to be published.

Notes

1 Quite to the contrary, in many Andalusian tourism destinations the promotion of cultural heritage is precisely the political instrument promoted to differentiate one destination from another, and to stress local or regional identity.

2 Zygmunt Bauman updated Boorstin's classical view and coined the term ‘tourist syndrome’ as being characterized by ‘looseness of attachment’ to the place visited, ‘grazing behaviour’ in the consumption of ‘pure relationships’ and ‘frailty of relationships’ wherever they go (Franklin, 2003).

3 Very explicit in those cases sponsored by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the various multinational funds and financial instruments for development.