Evolving Identities
University of Curaçao
Assessing Tourism Empowerment and Local Identity in Manta Ecuador View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xavier Alberto Basurto Cedeno, Estefania Basurto
In tourism planning and marketing, it is necessary to consider the community and its cultural characteristics as a transversal axis. Therefore, local perception must visualize the costs and benefits of development without compromising the intrinsic values of the destinations. All types of planning must have a clear vision of the local identity and how included or empowered the community feels in the decision-making process. This study seeks to quantitatively identify the levels of empowerment of the Manta community with respect to local tourism development and the relationship between the perception of empowerment and the demographic variables of the citizens. Additionally, a qualitative component is carried out to determine the identity characteristics of the mantenses. Therefore, a mixed-method approach is adopted in which a qualitative component of the study is used and subsequently validated by triangulation by a quantitative component. For the correlational statistical analysis, multiple regression was carried out. The results obtained from this study identified aspects that can be implemented at the government planning level to increase the levels of tourist empowerment of Mantenses and training plans to avoid the identity dispersion determined in the qualitative component. The strategies proposed in this research were included in both the Manta Tourism Development Plan and the Marketing Plan.
Producing Diaspora Identity Through Consumption: The Scots of British Columbia
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Derek Bryce
This paper takes forward work by Bryce, Murdy & Alexander (2017) by linking the phenomenon of how ancestral identities are carried, enacted and experienced by visitors to the destination (Scotland) itself with how versions of Scottish identity are produced and consumed at home by hyphenated ‘Scots’ within the diaspora (British Columbia, Canada). By drawing on the oral history collection at the Research Centre for Scottish Studies, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. I explore how they celebrate, maintain and perform their ‘Scottishness’ as a form of ‘returning’ and determine how the imagined Scotland may serve as a ‘symbolic anchor’. Findings highlight conflicting views of a contemporary ‘real’ Scotland shaped by mythologies of place and narratives of exile and migration. Through analysis of stories of individual and group consumption, we examine how this Scotland of the individual and collective imagination shapes the needs of diasporic Scots as a set of anchor points in the maintenance of Scottish identity across time and space; the construction of other versions of ‘Scotland’ at some remove from Scotland itself and the intersection of both of these with other facets of identity production in the overseas diaspora.
