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Tourism, Culture and Island Identity

The very spatial limitation of islands can create an idea of self-containment that is reflected for tourists (in their perception of visiting a ‘complete world’) but can also more clearly connect their inhabitants to the place experienced (Grydehøj; Nadarajah, Markussen 2018). Islands haunted by tourism share an awareness of their limits both in cultural terms -their dissolution in a global market of holiday flows- and also in terms of the sustainability of their territory. Stephen A. Royle ( 2009) identifies this awareness in the essential limitation of islands whose cultural references can be translated or adapted to welcome the receiving public, even creating a particular concept for the visitors’ identity – for example, in Hazel Andrews’ (2011) study for the English visiting Magaluf in Majorca. The image of village to be preserved that these places of residence defend will, however, also always be an indirect product of tourism, a counterpoint generating authentic pre-tourist images that reuse the myth of insular isolation to defend a local identity threatened by globalizing tourism. However, as we have seen, the history of the islands is often one of constant contact. According to Eduardo Brito Henriques (2009: 43), what they share is not isolation but the hybridization to which their ports and their maritime vocation lead.

The debate on the cultural affectation of tourism in island environments shares its positions with that which takes place in the wider framework of cultural anthropology, and in which, roughly speaking, we can identify two positions: that of those who see in tourism, a form of acculturation of the local and that of those who understand – from different positions – that tourism can function as an engine of cultural preservation or of creation of new cultural forms. In the first position, we would mainly find analyses on how cultural commodification in island environments causes the modification of the local culture which, as Michel Picard (1996) has already noticed from his studies in Bali, changes when it becomes a performative representation for tourists. At the same time, Keith G. Brown and Jenny Cave (2010) note that they necessarily convert the relationship between tourist and resident into a relationship between consumer and producer, who can adapt their product to the expectations of the former. Access to local culture is therefore reserved for a few demanding tourists and often those with high purchasing power who, for example, when they arrive in Mallorca visit the tomb of Robert Graves in the picturesque – and expensive – municipality of Deyà and do not go out on the streets decorated with German or British flags in Magaluf or El Arenal.

Studying cultural tourism in the Trobriand Islands, Michelle MacCarthy reflects on the uses of the concept of authenticity in the valuation of cultural products consumed by tourists, an authenticity that its very presence could corrupt. However, in a constructivist position of the cultural element – she concludes -, authenticity as such that only exists as a projection of the tourist himself, is itself a tourist product sold by cultures in a constant process of evolution. From this point of view, Antoni Vives and Francesc Vicens (2021) analyse the link between tourist culture and local identity, and – so they believe – it is not very useful to understand tourism as a process of acculturation of pure and immobile pre-tourist identities. Tourism would also import complex and creative forms of cultural contact, which emerge – as Michel Picard also concluded from Bali – through the creation of new forms of modern cultural production.

Also in its environmental dimension, tourism promotes -since the first attempts to invent nature as a place of contemplation for visitors (Martínez-Tejero and Picornell 2022) – a patrimonialization of the natural element that has a double effect especially relevant in tourist insularities. On the one hand, it transforms nature into landscape, cancelling out, for example, the productive relevance of the rural or the need to respect changes in the environment and its resources. The drive to visit the patrimonialized landscape environment ends up, in a perverse paradoxical circle, raping the nature it celebrates, motivating urban exploitation, the media, the over-occupation of the territory. On the contrary, it generates an awareness of the very limits of the territorial, but in which these do not only refer to the awareness of the coastline, but also, to an evaluation of the very materiality of the land that derives, at the same time, in two interconnected registers: the generation of an ecological discourse where the island identity is largely linked to the natural space and, likewise, in a certain essentialisation of this nature as a place of reception of the roots of resident cultures that can lead to an almost nostalgic idealisation of pre-tourism as authentic, sometimes ignoring the stories of transit that, as we have seen, often condition the island histories and their most interesting literary determinations in terms of methodological innovation. Considering the terrain, the oppressions of the labour market, the constant reinvention of the local in its tourist projection and/or resistance, the global imaginary of the insular seems even more a literary construction, real in its ability to attract visitors and configure looks, as well as to evaluate how these looks are readjusted or answered  by the local culture.

Mercè Picornell

References:

Andrews, Hazel (2011). “Porkin’ Pig goes to Magaluf”. Journal of Material Culture, 16: 2. 151-170.

Grydehøj, Adam; Nadarajah, Yaso; Markussen, Ulunnguaq (2018). “Islands of indigeneity: Cultural Disctinction, Indigenous Territory and Island Spaciality”. Area, 52(1): 14-22.

Martínez-Tejero, Cristina; Picornell, Mercè (2022). “From Pleasant Difference to Ecological Concern: Cultural Imaginaries of Tourism in Contemporary Spain”. Luis I. Prádanos, A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Londres: Tamesis Books. 195-205.

Picard, Michel (1996). Bali: Cultural tourism and touristic culture. Singapur: Archipelago.

Royle, Stephen A. (2009). “Tourism Changes on a Mediterranean island: Experiences from Mallorca”, Island Studies Journal, 4: 2. 225-240.

Vives Riera, Antoni; Vicens Vida, Francesc (2021). Cultura turística i identitats múltiples a les Illes Balears. Passat i present. Barcelona: Afers.