This paper explores the power relations in and between local villages and outside tourism operators on the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea (PNG). The analysis of power focuses on the contingencies of agency in the interactional order allowing greater participatory approaches to sustainable tourism. The notion of power applied in this case study is derived from Michel Foucault's concept of power relations. It is argued that local power and ensuing interactions are neither a zero sum gain or over-determined structurally, but a symbiotic process. By applying Foucault's concepts to the preparation of the Ecotrekking Strategy developed by the villages on the Kokoda Track, we illustrate how power is exercised through dominance, negotiation, rationalities and resistance, all of which are interwoven into day-to-day social interactions between tourism operators and local villages. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of this analysis for sustainable tourism development.

No abstract

In this review article, Wearing and Wearing attempt to develop an interactionist, constructionist, and postcolonial framework for conceptualizing tourist experiences of space. They argue that the tourist place provides social spaces for individual experiences related, among other things, to leisure expectations, guest-host relationships, and interactions with community members. To Wearing and Wearing, operations of power between the culture of the tourist and that of the host enable hegemonic constructions of the host's culture. These sorts of constructions position the "otherness" of hosts as inferior to the tourist's original culture, which is usually "White" and "infused with Western knowledge." The authors maintain thereby that the tourist destination then generally becomes a place for the voyeuristic gaze of the tourist, which, at best, reduces the destination culture to an inferior exoticism.

No abstract

No abstract