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Scavenging Mount Tourism

At Coimbra last week I presented some ideas about tourism as I've been traveling almost nonstop for the last six months. The slides are too heavy to upload (with my present devices) as it is packed with images of refugees traveling and Ai Weiwei's images. I've started out with Hakim Bey's Overcoming Tourism and moved to an economic analysis of the construction of the tourist object that precedes the actual tourists. They want to see things already prepared for them. Then I finished up with Byung-Chul Han's remarks on transparency applied to tourism. Tourism is a central locus for the friction between the locals and the globals - this is why I'm interested in the tourist guide, in the tourist interfaces that builds up the attraction from behind the scene. Presentation was at the Epistemologies of the South conference organized by Boaventura Sousa Santos and his group.

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