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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Africa and its tourist bubbles
| Panel |
1. Tourism in Africa
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| Paper ID | 705 |
| Author(s) |
van Beek, Walter E.A.
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Tourism studies in the last decennia have shown that the impact of tourism on host populations is nowhere near as nefarious as has been supposed in the older literature. The main reason is that tourists do not impinge directly upon a local community, but that the phenomenon of the 'paying guest' generates a mediating infrastructure between 'hosts' and 'guests' that is usually called the 'tourist bubble'. Especially in areas with long standing and intense tourism these 'bubbles' not only mediate the interaction between tourists and local population, but also form the main venue to profit from the foreign presence. Tourist 'bubbles' consist of several layers or sectors, both from the sending and the receiving sides. The development of these bubbles seems to follow some regularities. This paper wants to address the question under what circumstances, what ecological settings, historical trajectories, and cultural backgrounds bubbles are formed that do effectively mediate the tourist encounter. In order to arrive at a general picture, a selection of cases 'out of Africa', will be compared with processes of bubble formation inside African tourism. It will be shown that some of the preconditions for adapting to tourism are missing from African situations, but that the diversity of African tourist settings makes for a unique position of tourism in the continent.
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