Culture and Society in Tourism Contexts

Culture and Society in Tourism Contexts strives to understand the social and cultural dynamics in Mediterranean tourism destinations through ethnographic examples and case studies from places including Greece, Spain, Morocco, Croatia, Lebanon, France, and Crete. Exploring themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, leisure mobilities, power, and late capitalism, this volume analyzes the blurring edges of tourism and migration, the role the former plays in the dialogical construction of cultural identities, or how the interconnection between each of the diverse residing sociocultural groups influences the relation with other groups. The volume has abandoned the prevailing "acculturative perspective" in tourism studies. Instead, it considers tourism as a constituent power of the present and as a mediator in the production of senses-meanings in those Mediterranean territories where tourists have long been present.

As this occurs, the practices that constitute daily life seem to blur traditional exclusive categories such as leisure and labor, residents or locals, nationals or foreigners. Thus, the volume approaches tourism as one of the names of power, since it creates and enhances social and cultural differences, sorts them out and manages them. The work of several social scientists, from different interdisciplinary backgrounds, over numerous years is documented using multiple research techniques to observe cultures and societies as they occur in daily practices. This analysis discovers how tourism characterizes the daily lives of social groups living in tourists' destinations and how it offers a distinctive sense of collective memories, thus unfolding cultures and societies in tourism contexts.