Tourism in the Global South

Abstract

Tourism is a powerful mélange of cultural, social, economic, political and spatial phenomena, ceaselessly growing. It carries within itself numerous ambivalences, but it is undoubtedly significant in terms of environmental, socioeconomical, cultural and political implications. Although nothing of this is new, it seems that in the last decades tourism is everywhere and its force in landscape, in identity and development is escalating. Tourism can be seen as a consumer of places and as an active agent in the creative destruction of places (Crang 2004). It occurs in a socially divided and dividing world and it actively contributes to these processes (Kaplan 1998, Williams, Hall and Lew 2004). At the same time, tourism approximates and blends populations and cultures. Through tourism, consumers and producers are put face to face, and places in very different parts of the world see themselves interconnected by new flows of people, goods and ideas. The power of tourism resides in its capacity to transform landscapes, economies, peoples’ lifestyle and cultures, and in shaping identities and behaviors, by establishing new networks of power, forging new ideas and representations, and creating discourses of place and difference.