scholarly journals The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nost

Full-text, in-print version here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616688.2012.699090Citation: Nost, E. 2013. The Power of Place: Tourism Development in Costa Rica. Tourism Geographies. 15(1): 88-106.In this paper, I question how representations of tourist destinations color and are colored by development. Presenting the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, I find that the authenticity of portrayals of place is important not for its veracity, but for the social work it performs. Authenticity is not merely socially constructed but expressive of social relations which value people and places. Tourist perceptions of the caribe sur as genuinely underdeveloped—gauged by an analysis of photos and guidebooks as well as surveys—produce an approach to resource use within the community that is limiting. Because the value of the place is its underdevelopment, development itself constrains the possibility of sustaining further growth. Ultimately, reading development via place can be a guide for critically appreciating contemporary patterns of tourism and sustainable development in the caribe sur and elsewhere.

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Coulter

Abstract This study centers on equestrian show culture in Ontario, Canada, and examines how horses are entangled symbolically and materially in socially constructed hierarchies of value. After examining horse-show social relations and practices, the paper traces the connections among equestrian culture, class, and the social constructions of horses. Equestrian relations expose multiple hierarchical intersections of nature and culture within which both human-horse relations and horses are affected by class structures and identities. In equestrian culture, class affects relations within and across species, and how horses are conceptualized and used, as symbols and as living animal bodies.


1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (8) ◽  
pp. 1377-1394 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Lee

Local exchange employment and trading systems (LETS) have spread rapidly throughout the United Kingdom during the 1990s. Like all economic geographies, they are socially constructed and are more than a simple response to social exclusion. The economic activity generated by and conducted through LETS is based upon direct forms of social relations and a local currency which facilitate locally defined systems of value formation and distinctive moral economic geographies. Nevertheless, LETS take on some of the class and gender characteristics of the wider economy. Furthermore, the ways in which LETS are represented—not least in the media—may serve to stereotype them as exclusionary and marginal to the needs of those most in need and so to distance them from those excluded from the formal economy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Ilako ◽  

Introduction. Information practices manifest differently among diverse library users, because space influences the different activities that library users engage in. Lefebvre’s spatial triad theory was used to illustrate how library spaces influence spatial activities and hence affect information behaviour of users. Method. A qualitative, ethnographic study method was applied. Participant observations and interviews with library users were conducted from May to December 2019 within Makerere University. Analysis. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results. Information behaviour appears as the central activity within the library spaces, within those spaces and academic and non-academic behaviour manifest as a result of user engagement within the different spaces. It was thus revealed that different attributes support users’ activities such as reading, discussionsamong users and therefore sharping their space preference. Conclusion. Space is both a physical and social object that has a direct influence on its inhabitants’ spatial activities, perceptions and experiences. The concept that space is socially constructed is empirically supported through the social relations that users create as they engage in different activities. The availability of space attributes such as enclosed spaces, noise levels, lighting and space attachment influence the spatial activities and experience of users in a positive or negative way.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Alzaga

Cristina Alzaga: Indoor Prostitution: The Parlour as a Social Space This article presents a sociological hermeneutic analysis of the lived everyday working world of Danish indoor prostitutes. It draws upon observations and interviews, as well as documentary and experiential data, produced during a six-month period of ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen massage parlour, where the author served as “telephone lady“. The article uncovers the social order (nomos) of this life world, its social relations and shared interpretations as well as organizational traits and practical-corporeal terms. It also discusses the variety and multidimensionality of the relations between prostitutes and clients. The article seeks to uncover the meanings of the distinct experiential dynamics and work experiences that take form within this particular working universe, and examines their contradictory relations to the dominant views and accounts of prostitution in the outside world, including the views pre¬sented by mainstream research on prostitution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Anna Bræmer Warburg ◽  
Steffen Jensen

This article explores the social and moral implications of Duterte's war on drugs in a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, and human rights interventions, the article sheds light on policing practices, social relations, and moral discourses by examining central perspectives of the state police implementing the drug war, of local policing actors engaging with informal policing structures, and of residents dealing with everyday insecurities. It argues that the drug war has produced a climate of ambiguous fear on the ground, which has reconfigured and destabilised social relations between residents and the state as well as among residents. Furthermore, this has led to a number of subordinate moral discourses — centred on social justice, family, and religion — with divergent perceptions on the drug war and the extent to which violence is deemed legitimate.


1997 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rik Scarce

AbstractWhat does "nature" mean? This general question, central to the social construction of nature, is addressed here by examining one of nature's particulars, Pacific salmon, and by looking at how one group of people, salmon biologists, imbue the fish with meaning. Based upon historical, comparative, and qualitative data, it appears that nature is socially constructed through both cognitive and physical processes. "Salmon"- and indirectly nature - emerges not as a monolithic, timeless, certain entity, but rather as one that is manipulable, fleeting, and the product of a variety of social relations. In particular, public policy and economics appear to have profoundly influenced salmon biologists' cognitive and physical constructions of salmon.


2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasan Mahmud

Why do migrants send remittances? Through ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews among Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo, this article explores the social determinants of migrants’ remitting practices. It offers a realist analytical approach following Durkheim’s perspective on how society determines an individual’s action. It recognizes social relations between the migrants and their families and relatives as the essential foundation for remitting to occur, while migrants’ adherence to social norms, as well as legal and social exclusion in the destination, causes them to participate in various qualitatively distinct remitting practices. Therefore, it argues that migrants’ social relations to the family and community cause them to remit, and changes in these relations result in subsequent changes in their remitting. It complements the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) approach by incorporating the social (both relational and spatial) context of remitting. By bringing in migrants’ agency, it also overcomes the limitations in social-cultural approaches that prioritize structural determinants.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175774382110116
Author(s):  
Stefano Ba’

The ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood famously maintains that childhood is socially constructed and supposedly places a much greater emphasis on the agency of children: children should not simply be framed as the passive receivers of socialisation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that such a ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of the ‘social construction’ of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. In doing so, it advances a new criticism of the New Paradigm and radicalises previous ones. Here, key is the theoretical engagement with the concept of ‘human capital’: foregrounding its critique, this article proposes the link between ‘human capital’ as a neoliberal version of labour power and the concept of socialisation. The aim is to show that the ‘social construction’ of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. Two alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide an example of such a concrete critique.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Alario Ennes

O presente artigo tem como objetivo central a análise de algumas obras de Pierre Bourdieu tendo em vista sua contribuição para o desenvolvimento de uma agenda de pesquisa em torno da ideia do “corpo-migrante”. Esta agenda visa compreender como o corpo é socialmente produzido no contexto migratório e como isto resulta nas relações sociais e de poder das quais o imigrante é parte. O artigo foi elaborado com base em (re)leituras de obras de Bourdieu com foco na ideia de incorporação e corpo e a partir de um levantamento bibliográfico por meio do qual foram identificados alguns artigos que já fazem o diálogo entre conceitos bourdieusianos e a questão migratória, e outros que tratam do corpo no contexto migratório mas sem problematizá-lo teoricamente. Como resultado, sugiro que Bourdieu nos oferece elementos suficientes para apreender e compreender o “corpo-migrante” como resultado de relações de força e poder que geram a inserção, o posicionamento e o reposicionamento de imigrantes em campos específicos em que atuam. This article sets out to analyse a number of works by Pierre Bourdieu, focusing specifically on his contribution to the development of a research agenda surrounding the ‘migrant-body.’ This agenda aims to understand how the body is socially constructed in the context of migration, and how this results in the social and power relations in which the migrant becomes embedded. The article is based on (re)reading Bourdieu’s books with a focus on his ideas of embodiment and the body. Additionally, a review of the literature enabled two groups of articles to be identified, the first comprising texts that already develop a dialogue between Bourdieu’s concepts and the topic of immigration, while the second group studies the body in the migration context without problematizing the issue theoretically. In the conclusion, I suggest that Bourdieu offers us enough elements to understand the ‘migrant-body’ as an outcome of power and social relations that generate the insertion, positioning and re-positioning of migrants within the specific fields in which they act.


1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Figlio

This paper is informed by the recent attempts to construct Marxist views of nature, by the lively historical work on 19th-century British class structure, and by the dedicated work of feminist historians of medicine. Using the common disease of adolescent girls, chlorosis, as an example of a real “physical” illness, I shall argue that disease is, in part, socially constructed. Not only is the social class of both doctor and patient an important determinant in the perception of illness, but so too is the relationship between the disease and the mode of production. Both the “existence” of chlorosis and the way it was understood served ideologically to conceal the growing importance of adolescent labor and the recognition of the social genesis of illness. In doing so, chlorosis was similar to other forms of chronic illness. In a time when the conditions of work were strikingly insalubrious, the etiological emphasis was on individual failure, not on physical or social conditions of work. I argue that notions of health and disease partake of the struggles and social relations of the society that sustains them, but in a way which hides that very social nature. In this sense, they are like Marx's concept of a commodity—and in being a commodity, diseases appear not to embody social relations, but rather to be part of nature. I suggest that we see this “nature” in part as a commodity fetish-something we construct as “other” for a reason-and that we rediscover the social in the natural.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document