No abstract

By combining critical discourse analysis and multi-sited ethnography, this article looks at the discursive spheres where ideologies of race and development intersect in tourism contexts outside the Andean highlands. It illustrates how dominant discourses construct and situate social subjects within the structure of Peruvian society, while ideologically justifying the expansion of the tourism industry. Based on the case of Máncora, Piura, it explores the tensions and negotiations that emerge from implementing tourism within fishing communities in Northern Peru. The author argues that the tourism industry has advanced into a contemporary platform where old discourses and racialized practices are reproduced, creating the conditions for the processes of social exclusion to occur.

The case of Mancora, Northern Peru, illustrates a process of neoliberalisation through which conceptions of place, local identities and the recent history of the place have been reformulated due to the rapid expansion of global tourism. In this former fishing village, tourism development altered local conceptions of place, allowing the emergence of contrasting projects for converting it into a beach resort. This process brought about a context governed by land conflicts and tension between local authorities, where local inhabitants reshaped their identities and the recent history of the place in order to gain or maintain ownership over valuable natural resources.

Resumen: Este artículo explora los procesos de desarrollo turístico recientes liderados por la inversión privada y el mercado en la costa norte del Perú, a través del marco conceptual elaborado por los estudios sobre desarrollo y turismo sostenible. Se utiliza el caso del distrito de Máncora, Piura, para analizar las características de lo que el autor denomina el 'modelo turístico neoliberal peruano'. Luego, se examinan, desde una aproximación etnográfica multi-escalar, las tensiones y problemas que vienen ocurriendo como resultado de la implementación de dicho modelo en el distrito de Máncora. Finalmente, se exploran los cambios ocurridos en materia de política ambiental y los escasos intentos por modificar el modelo turístico actual. Con ello, se busca contribuir al debate sobre el turismo en la región andina, pero sobre todo, se resalta la urgente necesidad de cambiar el rol del Estado en el desarrollo de los destinos a fin de asegurar la sostenibilidad del turismo en el Perú.

care for the residentse.g., they produce ethnographies explaining how the people's 'degenerate' lifeways are a functional response to the city context; they deliver healthcare education; and in the past IPAC employed local residents and lobbied for them. But they also displace themthe data scientists collect provide evidence of 'degeneracy'; the data inform governance mechanisms that include relocations and evictions; the police harass and even kill residents. Residents, for their part, participated in these processes in order to further their own ends. This was partly a matter of engaging with and manipulating the 'data' that they perceived were so important to IPAC, whose workers carried out endless surveys. It also meant recognising themselves as objects of special scientific and patrimonial interestquasi-sanctified (hence the 'saints' of the title) or what Collins calls 'properly historical subjects'and using this status to make calls on the state, and to claim status not just as patrimony but also as patrimonialists and researchers. A second argument is that, as researchers, we need to pay attention to the specificity of the material techniques or mechanisms by which people make meaningful connectionsbetween people and the past or presentand think about belonging and identity. It is not only the categories and meanings themselves, in some abstract sense, that matter, but the techniques people use to know them. This means paying ethnographic attention to the diversity of people's everyday practices. It is not easy to illustrate briefly what concrete difference is made by approaching things this way. One example is that the creation of 'culture heritage' is a specific technique that inflects a category like 'race'which posits relations between external signs and interior qualitiesallowing people in the Pelourinho, who actually live through patrimonialisation, to construct connections and senses of belonging that construe race as property, just as 'culture' is property. In the Pelourinho, while this is going on, the particularities of the property regime therewhere people carve out tenuous living spaces in the interstices of ruined colonial mansions, competing with others for roomalso work against such proprietary essentialism, and mesh with the social conventions that discourage open talk about race. This argument fleshes out the common observation that race is becoming more essentialised and polarised in Brazil, alongside the continuing reticence about race that resonates with ideologies of mixture and 'racial democracy'. Collins' book is a Caribbean pepperpot stew, an ongoing accretion of ingredients simmered for long periods. It is mature, flavourful, surprising and rewarding. Its constant reflexive re-framings and maze-like progressions fascinate, and occasionally produce an Alice-through-the-looking-glass sense of (not unpleasurable) disorientation.