Tourism, Magic and Modernity

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Runion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Runion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

Autorentext

David Picard is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) at New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of La Reunion, Indian Ocean and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Klappentext

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

Inhalt

Foreword
Nelson Graburn

Preface

Introduction: Penguins in the Paris Underground

Part I: Aestetic Transfigurations

Chapter 1. Tourism and Magic
Chapter 2. Creole Beautiful
Chapter 3. Cultivating Society as Human Garden

Part II. The Hospitality of the Garden

Chapter 4. Hospitality and Love
Chapter 5. Bougainvilleas at the Riverside
Chapter 6. Poachers in the Coral Garden

Part III. Cultivating the Human Garden

Chapter 7. History as an Aesthetics of Everyday Life
Chapter 8. Towards a Global Gardening State

Bibliography
Endnotes