Framing Time and Power in Tourism Contexts

Tourism is not simply an industry that produces commodities or provokes millions of people to move all over the world. Social scientists have overall mostly approached tourism as an external force inducing all sorts of changes in receiving societies. However, social sciences cannot approach tourism as such any longer for it has been overtly present in the world for almost sixty years. Besides, it can be said that tourism is the most sophisticated elaboration created by capitalist forces and interests. It is so because the tourism industry constantly occupies new places for the leisure consumption of certain social groups. It contributes to the renovation of dependency relations among regions by relocating the economic capital and the labour force. It soaks through the social structure, inducing cultural patterns of consumption. It presents itself as the sole ‘‘passport to development’’ for many communities and territories. It marks rhythms and impose new uses of the places. It markets the intangible and thus produces meanings and sense. Tourism has the capability to spread all over the world producing new social actions, to name them, to create differences among them, to order them, and, most importantly, to manage those differences by means of distinctive policies. In this paper we analyse how in tourism contexts the past is continuously re-enacted and re-visited through policy-making in terms of using the past (i.e. resource) to be projected onto the future (the idea of development through tourism).