Tourism, magic and modernity
Subtitle: cultivating the human garden
By: David Picard
Series: New directions in anthropology -- v. 32
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 189
ISBN-13: 9780857452016
Subjects: Social aspects; Culture and tourism; Tourism; Magic; Anthropology
Description: "Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation."--P. [4] of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-186) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Penguins in the Paris underground; title: Tourism and magic; title: Creole beautiful; title: Cultivating society as a human garden; title: Hospitality and love; title: Bougainvilleas at the riverside; title: Poachers in the coral garden; title: History as an aesthetics of everyday life; title: Towards a global gardening state.