SOCIAL IMAGINARIES OF TOURISTIC EXTRACTIVISM AND TOURISTIC SECONDARY EXTRACTIVISM

Among the most important contemporary changes, the “extractive” character of tourism is becoming increasingly evident, especially in its massive forms. This phenomenon is not limited to the appropriation of material resources – land, water, landscapes, infrastructures – but also involves intangible resources such as culture, memory, authenticity and local practises. The tourism industry is therefore a new form of exploitation in many regions, accompanied by social ideas that facilitate the consumption of selected, artificially valorised and often only temporarily used territories, identities and cultural assets.
However, alongside these processes of intense appropriation, other social imaginaries are also developing – albeit more difficult and less visible – that facilitate forms of ‘slow’, local, identity-based and sustainable tourism. These imaginaries and the practises they generate propose a different relationship with territories, based on different notions of time, dialogue-based relationships with host communities and a more conscious and respectful use of material and symbolic resources.
This workshop aims to bring together scholars who, on the one hand, examine the social imaginaries of tourism as an extractive practise (“tourism as extraction”), linking practises of valorisation and exploitation to the dynamics of the production of territorial imaginaries. On the other hand, it is about the question of alternative social ideas that can contribute to reshaping the relationships between place, inhabitants and visitors without falling into new forms of aestheticisation or exploitation.
Reflections may include theoretical contributions, case studies, ethnographic research, historical analyses and interdisciplinary considerations

Contact: Francesco Barbalace, Researcher in Sociology