1. 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

2. Concepts matter

3. 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

4. Sustainability

5. 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

6. 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

7. Resilience

8. Tour guiding

9. 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

11. 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

12. 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

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

19. Time’s up!

20. 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.

22. 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),
2012. Tourism imaginaries: A conceptual approach. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(2),
2010. Tourism and cosmopolitanism: A view from below. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 1(1),
2010. Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. Oxford: Berghahn.
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