Workshop on Tour Guiding and Sustainability 7-8 December 2017 – Uppsala University, Gotland Sustainability or Resilience? Preparing the Future of Tour Guiding in Tourism Noel B. Salazar, PhD Cultural Mobilities Research soc.kuleuven.be/cumore

Concepts matter

Sustainability Well-known discourse Sustainability’s 9/11 Sustainability = ongoing process of development that does not jeopardize current and future environmental, economical or social resources Sustainability’s 9/11 Our Common Future (1987), UN World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) Ecological: Environmental degradation Social: Third World poverty Focus on environmental quality (vs. human equality) Sustainable development Value-laden: Project (linear) vs. Process (cyclical) Misnomer? Development vs. Sustainability

Sustainability

Sustainable tourism According to UNWTO Sustainability and heritage Tourism that meets the needs of present tourists and host regions while protecting (~ low impact) and enhancing opportunity (~ income & employment) for the future Sustainability and heritage Common theme of ‘inheritance’ of assets Protection: Conservation vs. Safeguarding Transport: Sustainable mobility Environmentally sustainable holiday travel: e.g. voluntary carbon offsetting schemes for aviation Type of product vs. Ethos? Alternative forms of tourism vs. Mass tourism

Resilience Ability to resist & recover from ‘difficulties’ Adaptation to change by attempting to build capacity to return to a desired state following both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions May or may not align with sustainability principles Cultural resilience considers how cultural background (i.e. culture, values, language, customs, and norms) helps people overcome adversity

Resilience

Tour guiding

Alternative tour guiding Official tour guiding Alternative tour guiding Groups Individuals Domestic Commercial guiding Alternative Event Official Hospitality International Coach Independent Private Entrepeneurial tour guiding Internet-mediated tour guiding

Interpretation = the art of interpreting (and provoking) by ‘painting’ evocative mental pictures that are at the same time educational and entertaining Mediates the gap between the tourism imaginaries sold and the reality on the ground Performance > actual transmitted content Interactive = always to some extent improvised, creative and spontaneous, defying complete standardization ( external image control) Selling  Telling  Sharing

Stories the kind of stories told to visitors   knowledge-based experience-based Style the way of telling stories selling sharing Message the message behind the stories told factual critical Motivation the motivation for tourism storytelling profit passion Preparation the way of preparing for tourism storytelling training autodidactism Offer the kind of guided tours offered supply-driven demand-oriented Specialization the targeted (niche) markets general segmented Organisation the level of organisation supporting the guiding activities institutionalised unstructured Change the degree of openness to organisational change conservative innovative Offer

‘Lowland people’: irrigated rice agriculture (wet rice-cultivating peasant society)

Time’s up!

Points for discussion Sustainability Inherited or borrowed conceptions and assumptions Mass tourism vs. sustainability Various sustainabilities are difficult to combine and some seem not to be at all compatible A sustainable society must also be an equitable society Future challenges of tour guiding, also in the context of crises, will be linked to the dynamic interplay between sustainability and resilience. Destinations (including their tour guides) may be resilient without being sustainable, but cannot be sustainable if they are not also resilient. Importance of culture.

More at: http://is.gd/nbsalazar Selected References 2016. Culture broker, tourism. In J. Jafari & H. Xiao (Eds.), Encyclopedia of tourism. Cham: Springer International. 2014. Tourism imaginaries: Anthropological approaches. Oxford: Berghahn. 2014. To be or not to be a tourist: The role of concept-metaphors in tourism studies. Tourism Recreation Research, 38. 2013. Imagineering otherness: Anthropological legacies in contemporary tourism. Anthropological Quarterly, 86(3), 669-696. 2012. Tourism imaginaries: A conceptual approach. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(2), 863-882. 2010. Tourism and cosmopolitanism: A view from below. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 1(1), 55-69. 2010. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. Oxford: Berghahn. More at: http://is.gd/nbsalazar