TOURISM, MAGIC AND MODERNITY Cultivating the Human Garden

• Main Author: Picard, David (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: New York Berghahn Books 2013
• Series: New directions in anthropology v. 32
• Subjects: Magic > Social aspects; Culture and tourism > Social aspect; Tourism > Anthropological aspect
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.
• Physical Description: xvi, 189 pages 23 cm
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-186) and index
• ISBN: 9781782383215; 1782383212

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Reunion, 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 Reunion, 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.