Critical Explorations
Asynchronous Session
Featured Transformations in Indigenous Cultural Tourism: Visitor 'Awakenings' or Journeys in 'Becoming Aboriginal'?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vanessa Whittington
Drawing on scholarly literature on travel and transformation and my own empirical research, this paper explores whether visitors to places of recognised Aboriginal cultural heritage can experience processes of change, or what Bawaka Country et al. (2015, 270) call “an ontology of co-becoming”, when they travel to Australian protected areas, recognising the agentic nature of Country itself in these hypothetical transformations. For some visitors this can involve developing a (self-identified) connection with Country and a deeper self-perceived understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage. My ethnographic research with visitors revealed that this enhanced understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage most frequently occurred in cultural tours developed and led by Aboriginal peoples, particularly longer-term immersive experiences. However, this is not to say that visitor transformations are inevitable or even straightforward, as some visitors’ cultural tourism experiences simply reinforced pre-existing stereotypes of authentic and inauthentic Aboriginalities that they brought with them. Settler-colonial discourses about Aboriginality thus represent very real barriers to tourist transformations, discourses which are to some extent reinforced by the tourism industry and some Indigenous cultural tour providers themselves.
Painting Landscapes and Creating Cultural Ensembles: Women Entrepreneurs and Tourism in a Magical Town - Tlaxco, Tlaxcala View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martha Cuéllar
Today, the territories and regions where tourism is promoted reveal realities, forms, and interactions among themselves, in constant contact with the outside world. Some practices are culturally instituted, but also activities such as ventures that are guided by local economies, however, they have a multi-situated integration with commercial exchanges, subjection to state policies and adoptions of lifestyles with adaptability to change and modernity of the 21st century, but also with genuine effects. This work is an in-situ approach to the territory, which as a cultural system is impacted by the economic, political, and social worlds, the transitory of "places and non- places", the macro-processes of the markets in capitalist relations. Two stories of life are presented, of entrepreneurs surrounded in activities of creations and authorship: Maya Balcazar who paints pictures of the natural territory with landscapes and elements of the terroir and Mrs. Teresa Hernandez who with her artistic cultural center forms and directs "assemblies" from the identity symbols, characters, and historical events. All this in the Magical Town of Tlaxco, Tlaxcala, with haciendas, sawmills, micro-enterprises, and cheese stores by tradition, where now burst, handicrafts in worked wood and jewelry in lost wax, novel enterprises in the solidarity economies of knowledge.
