The New Interpretive Impulse --- the OPEN Possibilities: Some Liquid Modern Imperatives for Imaginative Tourism Studies, Today

This presentation is the second of two bedfellow papers on the condition of culture under globalisation and the interweaving of populations. It focusses upon the altered function of culture under liquid modernity and (like presentation 1 of 2) it constitutes a contextual application (to Tourism Studies) of the ideas of the social studies theorist, Bauman.

This follow-up presentation on the imaginative power of representation in Tourism Studies today will focus upon the provision of several 'open-to-the-future' propositions to help guide researchers studying the parameters of cultural interpretation … in relation to the changing ethno-epistemic assemblages of our era. Here are four of them:

PROPOSITION 1 = VISIONS OF CULTURE NOT AS ESSENTIALISED OBJECTS BUT AS ONGOING PROCESSES

Considerable gains can be made Tourism Studies by viewing culture not as a fixed or essentialised set of objects but as an ever-dynamic realm of processes…

PROPOSITION 2 = VISIONS OF A MORE PROVISIONAL GLOBAL ORDER

Considerable advantages can accrue to Tourism Studies researchers who are open to a more contingent and less authoritative view of and about the global order of things…

PROPOSITION 3 = VISIONS OF PLURAL KNOWABILITY

Considerable benefit --- in terms of equity and creative opportunity --- can result for governing bodies in tourism management / development who are alive to (become aware of) the hegemonic understandings they uphold in their day-by-day / quotidian acts of promotion…

PROPOSITION 4 = VISIONS OVER CULTURAL POESIS AS WELL AS CULTURAL POLITICS

Considerable dividend can ensue for researchers in the social science field of Tourism Studies (who have a large mandate for matters of culture) when they turn their disciplinary / crossdisciplinary attention towards ethnoaesthetic meanings…