The End of Tourism

Estimados oyentes, esta entrevista requirió que Aldo y Gloria se conectaran desde zonas rurales. Por lo tanto, la conexión a internet fue intermitente. Hay algunos momentos del episodio en los que puede resultar difícil comprender lo que se dice. Para mayor claridad, consulten la transcripción abajo. Gracias por su comprensión.Mis entrevistados en este episodio son Aldo Gonzalez y Gloria Romero López. Aldo es zapoteco de la comunidad de Guelatao de Juárez, Oaxaca, México. Ingeniero de formación, promueve el pleno reconocimiento y la implementación de los derechos de los pueblos indígenas. Trabaja en defensa de la biodiversidad local del maíz, especialmente de una variedad de maíz autofertilizante llamada olotón.Gloria es una mujer Mixteca que nacio en Lázaro Cardenas, Coicoyan de las Flores, Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca. Curse sus estudios de ingeniería en Tecnologías de la información y comunicaciones en el Instituto Tecnológico Superior - San Miguel el Grande. Actualmente Realizó registros de Nacimientos en el Municipio de Coicoyan de las Flores. Ella gusta mucho platicar en Mixteco.Notas del Episodio* Las consecuencias al pueblo* El derecho a no migrar* Cambios atraves del NAFTA y el derecho a no migrar* “Yo tengo maiz, no necessito dinero”* La complejidad de las remesas* Las contradicciones y discriminaciones entre migrantes* La posibilidad del retorno masivo de migrantes* La violencia como causa de migracionTareaEl Derecho a No Migrar (Libro) - AmazonEl DERECHO A PERMANECER EN CASATranscripcion en espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenido Aldo y bienvenida Gloria al podcast al fin de turismo. Gracias a ambos por estar dispuestos a hablar conmigo hoy sobre estos temas. Tengo curiosidad por saber si ustedes dos se están bien dispuestos a ofrecer una pequeña introducción o resumen sobre ustedes mismos.Ah, ado, no te escuchamos. Aldo: Bueno sobre mis viajes, bueno, no me dedico a viajar. Casi no tengo vacaciones. Pero por las cuestiones del trabajo me he tocado ir a diferentes lugares del mundo. Podríamos decir. Este básicamente por el trabajo que realizo? Más que ir a conocer los lugares a donde a donde me han invitado, lo que he hecho es ir a platicar con la gente que está en esos lugares sobre los problemas que tenemos aquí en la región.Los problemas que tenemos en México y [00:01:00] quien lo que me ha posibilitado, poder viajar a distintas partes ha sido el problema de la contaminación del maize transgénicos. Entonces eso ha hecho que, con esa bronca que peso en el año 2001, este yo haya tenido la posibilidad de ir a otros lugares a platicar un poco sobre ese problema en particular y muchos otros que se relacionan con él no o el tema de los transgénicos o el tema de los agroquímicos o el tema de el control de las corporaciones hacia la alimentación, hacia las semillas también.Entonces, digamos que en general, la mayoría de los viajes que yo he realizado están relacionados con estos acentos o con los derechos de los pueblos indígenas también. Chris: Gracias, Aldo. Y nos podrías decir donde te encuentres hoy? Aldo: Eh? Bueno, hoy estoy en Guelatao y es mi comunidad y estoy en las oficinas de la organización de mi organización, que es la unión de organizaciones de la Sierra Juarez Chris: Muchas gracias, [00:02:00] audo Aldo y gloria.Gloria: Sí, igual. Yo casi no he salido así del estado, pero sí conozco mucha gente que si emigra por lo regular a los estados unidos, es que es donde la mayoría de acá, pero casi no emigran mucho así hacia otros estados. Pero si la mayoría emigra para estados unidos, ya si tengo muchos vecinos, familia y mucho de acá de Coycoyan, si emigran más para allá que son para los estados unidos. Chris: Muy bien. Muchas gracias por eh, a tiempo con nosotros hoy. Entonces, aunque es temprano en la conversación, mi pregunta es sobre cómo han visto que el regreso de los migrantes a sus pueblos ha afectado a la comunidad en sus propios lugares o pueblos?Gloria: Sí en en cuando han cómo ha afectado la comunidad? Que muchos cuando regresan, pues ya tienen otras ideas, otras cultura, otra forma de ver la vida y a veces mucho ya no [00:03:00] quieren este participar así en las asambleas de la comunidad o ya vienen con otras técnicas, digamos, de cultivo y las técnicas que anteriormente habían acá, pues ya se van perdiendo y yo más cada veo como también esto afecta también en sus vidas personales, porque muchos cuando regresan ya regresan ya enfermos, cansados. En en el mejor de los casos, muchos ya regresan con dinero, no? Y eso hace que la gente que está en el pueblo, ve que como ellos les fue bien, pues también quieren emigrar y ya después ya son más personas que quieren migrar y ya se se hacen más y de idea de que, pues allá en estados unidos existe la oportunidad de que puedan mejorar sus vidas.Pero yo digo que así en ,general el impacto es un tanto positivo como [00:04:00] también negativo, porque igual, como digo, muchos regresan ya cansados, enfermos. Muchos igual dejan aquí sus familiares y cuanto regresan, pues sus familia ya no los encuentran, o algunos que dejan sus papás, cuando regresan sus papás ya, ya murieron o ha o esas situaciones que impacta así su vida personal.Chris: Gracias, Gloria. Aldo, querrías responder? Aldo: Aunque aquí en la comunidad de Guelatao, no hay muchos, no hay una migración tan alta como en otras comunidades cercanas. Digamos que una de las cosas que nosotros vemos que ha afectado, es que se elevan los precios, porque traen dinero, ya no trabajan en el campo. Entonces, para sus familias reciben recursos.Y pues eso hace que ellos tengan mayor capacidad para poder pagar a los mozos, por ejemplo, para que vayan a ser la [00:05:00] misma. Entonces, eso hace que el resto de la población pues se sienta afectada, porque no tiene los recursos para poder pagar lo que está pagando un migrante. Bueno, eso en alguna medida, está afectando la producción también de maíz, de por sí, ya la había afectado, porque muchos salen y dejan de trabajar la tierra. Los que quieren que se siga trabajando la tierra por parte de su familia mandan recursos, pero digamos que allí los costos se elevan para el resto de la población porque ellos pagan salarios más altos. Entonces, si alguien viene a la comunidad a trabajar, te va a cobrar más de lo que te cobraba anteriormente y muchos no lo pueden pagar.Entonces nos dice, "ya no voy a sembrar, porque el mozo está muy caro." No? Y eso es una afectación, pues directa, digamos a la economía de quien no migra. Y como hay pocos migrantes también, o digo [00:06:00] como hay poca gente que se que que se queda trabajar el campo en la comunidad, ya no hay suficientes personas para que se pueda hacer lo que nosotros llamamos gozona.O sea que vayamos entre todos a trabajar la parcela de cada uno de los que entran a ese tipo de trabajo. Bueno, también, eso es una afectación por la migración. No? Chris: Y Gloria, tú piensas que esa misma dinámica existe o ha pasaron en tu pueblo?Gloria: No, yo digo que igual, sí, estoy de acuerdo con lo que dicen algo y si sí, ha influenciado mucho de las personas que emigran si pagan más que los que no migran. Sí, si se ve mucho ese cambio.Chris: Gracias. Este pues parte de mi mi interés o cómo empecé, eh, acercándome a la cuestión de inmigración fue en parte por mi familia. [00:07:00] También eran migrantes de Macedonia y Grecia, y el otro lado de Inglaterra hacia Canadá hace como 50 años. Entonces este lo que he sentido, es que las dinámicas, las consecuencias de la migración en los pueblos y la gente que no migren, que hay patrones en el nivel mundial, y son casi bueno, muy parecidos. . Encontré un un libro en inglés, pero también existía en español. Eh? Que se llama El Derecho A No M igrar o The Right To Stay Home por David Bacon. Y ese libro, es titulado por una declaración que la gente de FIOB o La Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales hicieron en ahí en Santiago Juxtlahuaca en La Mixteca, Después de días de días de discutir sobre las [00:08:00] consecuencias de migraciones en los lugares de los migrantes, o sea, los pueblos originarios de los migrantes, resultó una declaración: "el derecho a no migrar conjunto con el derecho a migrar." Entonces tengo curiosidad por saber si ustedes podrían hablar sobre esos tiempos y la declaración, si saben cómo se formó o cómo se fue recibida en la mixteca o en la sierra norte de Oaxaca.Aldo: Bueno, nosotros aquí en la organización. Sí, hemos hablado del derecho a no migrar, porque estamos interesados en fortalecer la identidad de las personas que vivimos en nuestras comunidades. Pues, al final, somos parte de un pueblo más grande. No solamente es nuestra comunidad, sino que hay varias otras comunidades que pertenecemos al mismo pueblo, al pueblo zapoteca y en ese sentido, pues lo que estamos tratando [00:09:00] de hacer es que se fortalezcan nuestras comunidades, que se fortalezcan nuestra comunalidad, que es nuestra forma de organización comunitaria, y por esa razón es que preferiríamos que la gente no migra.Pero el problema es que ha habido un empobrecimiento muy brutal del campo en general, no solamente en México. Lo vemos también en otros países, que los que emigran principalmente son gente que sale del campo y van hacia los estados unidos a trabajar al campo en estados unidos, pero en condiciones que son completamente distintas a como se trabajaba en la comunidad. Incluso aquí en México, algunos van a trabajar en los campos del norte del país, también este en condiciones, pues terribles, con muchos agroquímicos.La gente regresa en algunos casos regresan enfermos, no? O regresan con las patas por delante, dijeron en el pueblo, porque [00:10:00] ya pues están muertos. Regresan nada más para que los entierren en la comunidad. Pero pues, prácticamente toda su vida la hicieron fuera, no? Entonces, quienes se van sufre porque añoran estar en la comunidad. Quieren comer lo que en la comunidad. Quieren escuchar la música de la comunidad. Quieren hacer la vida como si

Mi entrevistado en este episodio es Carlos A. Scolari, Catedrático del Departamento de Comunicación de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Barcelona. Ha sido Investigador Principal de diversos proyectos de investigación internacionales y estatales, desde el proyecto H2020 TRANSLITERACY (entre 2015 y 2018) hasta el proyecto LITERAC_IA, que comenzó en 2024 y dirige junto a María del Mar Guerrero. Sus últimos libros son Cultura Snack (2020), La guerra de las plataformas (2022) y Sobre la evolución de los medios (2024). Ahora está trabajando en un libro sobre los fósiles mediáticos.Notas del Episodio* Historia de ecologia de los medios* Historia de Carlos* Diferencias entre el anglosfero y el hispanosfero* La coevolucion entre tecnologia y humanos* La democratizacion de los medios* Evolucion de los medios* Alienacion y addiccion* Como usar los medios conscientementeTareaCarlos A. Scolari - Pagina Personal - Facebook - Instagram - Twitter - Escolar GoogleSobre la evolución de los mediosHipermediaciones (Libros)Transcrito en espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenido al podcast el fin de turismo Carlos. Gracias por poder hablar conmigo hoy. Es un gran gusto tener tu presencia aquí conmigo hoy. Carlos: No gracias a ti, Chris, por la invitación. Es un enorme placer honor charlar contigo, gran viajero y bueno, yo nunca investigué directamente el tema del turismo.Pero bueno, entiendo que vamos a hablar de ecología de los medios y temas colaterales que nos pueden servir para entender mejor, darle un sentido a todo esto que está pasando en el mundo del turismo. Bueno, yo trabajo en Barcelona. No vivo exactamente en la ciudad, pero trabajo, en la universidad en Barcelona, en la zona céntrica.Y bueno, cada vez que voy a la ciudad cada día se incrementa la cantidad de turistas y se incrementa el debate sobre el turismo, en todas sus dimensiones. Así que es un tema que está la orden del día, no? Chris: Sí, pues me imagino que aunque si no te gusta pensar o si no quieres pensar en el turismo allá, es inevitable tener como una enseñanza [00:01:00] personal de esa industria.Carlos: Sí, hasta que se está convirtiendo casi en un criterio taxonómico, no? ...de clasificación o ciudades con mucho turista ciudades o lugares sin turistas que son los más buscados hasta que se llenan de turistas. Entonces estamos en un círculo vicioso prácticamente. Chris: Ya pues, que en algún memento se que se cambia, se rompe el ciclo, al menos para dar cuenta de lo que estamos haciendo con el comportamiento.Y, yo entiendo que eso también tiene mucho que ver con la ecología de los medios, la falta de capacidad de entender nuestros comportamientos, actitudes, pensamientos, sentimientos, etcétera. Entonces, antes de seguir por tu trabajo y obras, este me gustaría preguntarte de tu camino y de tu vida.Primero me pregunto si podrías definir para nuestros oyentes qué es la ecología de los medios y cómo te [00:02:00] interesó en este campo? Cómo llegaste a dedicar a tu vida a este estudio?Carlos: Sí. A ver un poco. Hay una, esta la historia oficial. Diríamos de la ecología de los medios o en inglés "media ecology," es una campo de investigación, digamos, eh, que nace en los años 60. Hay que tener en cuenta sobre todos los trabajos de Marshall McLuhan, investigador canadiense muy famoso a nivel mundial. Era quizá el filósofo investigador de los medios más famosos en los años 60 y 70.Y un colega de el, Neil Postman, que estaba en la universidad de New York en New York University un poco, digamos entre la gente que rodeaba estos dos referentes, no, en los años 60, de ahí se fue cocinando, diríamos, lo que después se llamó la media ecology. Se dice que el primero que habló de media ecology que aplicó esta metáfora a los medios, fue el mismo Marshall McLuhan en algunas, conversaciones privadas, [00:03:00] cartas que se enviaban finales dos años 50, a principios de los 60, se enviaban los investigadores investigadora de estos temas?Digamos la primera aparición pública del concepto de media ecology fue una conferencia en el año 1968 de Neil Postman. Era una intervención pública que la hablaba de un poco como los medios nos transforman y transforman los medios formar un entorno de nosotros crecemos, nos desarrollamos, no. Y nosotros no somos muy conscientes a veces de ese medio que nos rodea y nos modela.El utilizó por primera vez el concepto de media ecology en una conferencia pública. Y ya, si vamos a principio de los años 70, el mismo Postman crea en NYU, en New York University crea el primer programa en media ecology. O sea que ya en el 73, 74 y 75, empieza a salir lo que yo llamo la segunda generación, de gente [00:04:00] formada algunos en estos cursos de New York.Por ejemplo Christine Nystrom fue la primera tesis doctoral sobre mi ecology; gente como, Paul Levinson que en el año 1979 defiende una tesis doctoral dirigida por Postman sobre evolución de los medios, no? Y lo mismo pasaba en Toronto en los años 70. El Marshall McLuhan falleció en el diciembre del 80.Digamos que los años 70 fueron su última década de producción intelectual. Y hay una serie de colaboradores en ese memento, gente muy joven como Robert Logan, Derrick De Kerchove, que después un poco siguieron trabajando un poco todo esta línea, este enfoque. Y ahí hablamos del frente canadiense, eh?Toda esta segunda generación fue desarrollando, fue ampliando aplicando. No nos olvidemos de Eric McLuhan, el hijo de Marshall, que también fue parte de toda esta movida. [00:05:00] Y si no recuerdo mal en el año 2000, se crea la asociación la Media Ecology Association, que es la Asociación de Ecología de los Medios, que es una organización académica, científica, que nuclea a la gente que se ocupa de media ecology. Si pensamos a nivel más científico epistemológico, podemos pensar esta metáfora de la ecología de los medios desde dos o tres perspectivas. Por un lado, esta idea de que los medios crean ambientes. Esta es una idea muy fuerte de Marsha McLuhan, de Postman y de todo este grupo, no? Los medios - "medio" entendido en sentido muy amplio, no, cualquier tecnología podría ser un medio para ellos.Para Marsha McLuhan, la rueda es un medio. Un un telescopio es un medio. Una radio es un medio y la televisión es un medio, no? O sea, cualquier tecnología puede considerarse un medio. Digamos que estos medios, estas tecnologías, generan un [00:06:00] ambiente que a nosotros nos transforma. Transforma nuestra forma, a veces de pensar nuestra forma de percibir el mundo, nuestra concepción del tiempo del espacio.Y nosotros no somos conscientes de ese cambio. Pensemos que, no sé, antes de 1800, si alguien tenía que hacer un viaje de mil kilómetros (y acá nos acercamos al turismo) kilómetros era un viaje que había que programarlo muchos meses antes. Con la llegada del tren, ya estamos en 1800, esos kilómetros se acortaron. Digamos no? Ahí vemos como si a nosotros hoy nos dicen 1000 kilómetros.Bueno, si, tomamos un avión. Es una hora, una hora y cuarto de viaje. Hoy 1000 kilómetro es mucho menos que hace 200 años y incluso a nivel temporal, se a checo el tiempo. No? Todo eso es consecuencia, digamos este cambio, nuestra percepción es consecuencia de una serie de medios y tecnologías.El ferrocarril. Obviamente, hoy tenemos los aviones. Las mismas redes digitales que, un poco nos han llevado esta idea de "tiempo [00:07:00] real," esta ansiedad de querer todo rápido, no? También esa es consecuencia de estos cambios ambientales generados por los medios y las tecnologías, eh? Esto es un idea muy fuerte, cuando McLuhan y Postman hablaban de esto en los años 60, eran fuertes intuiciones que ellos tenían a partir de una observación muy inteligente de la realidad. Hoy, las ciencias cognitivas, mejor las neurociencia han confirmado estas hipótesis. O sea, hoy existen una serie de eh metodología para estudiar el cerebro y ya se ve como las tecnologías.Los medios afectan incluso la estructura física del cerebro. No? Otro tema que esto es histórico, que los medios afectan nuestra memoria. Esto viene de Platón de hace 2500 años, que él decía que la escritura iba a matar la memoria de los hombres. Bueno, podemos pensar nosotros mismos, no, eh?O por lo menos esta generación, que [00:08:00] vivimos el mundo antes y después de las aplicaciones móviles. Yo hace 30 años, 25 años, tenía mi memoria 30-40 números telefónicos. Hoy no tengo ninguno. Y en esa pensemos también el GPS, no? En una época, los taxistas de Londres, que es una ciudad latica se conocían a memoria la ciudad. Y hoy eso, ya no hace falta porque tienen GPS.Y cuando han ido a estudiar el cerebro de los taxistas de Londres, han visto que ciertas áreas del cerebro se han reducido, digamos, así, que son las áreas que gestionaban la parte espacial. Esto ya McLuhan, lo hablaba en los años 60. Decía como que los cambios narcotizan ciertas áreas de la mente decía él.Pero bueno, vemos que mucha investigación empírica, bien de vanguardia científica de neurociencia está confirmando todas estos pensamientos, todas estas cosas que se decían a los años 60 en adelante, por la media ecology. Otra posibilidad es entender [00:09:00] esto como un ecosistema de medios, Marshall McLuhan siempre decía no le podemos dar significado,no podemos entender un medio aislado de los otros medios. Como que los medios adquieren sentido sólo en relación con otros medios. También Neil Postman y mucha otra gente de la escuela de la media ecology, defiende esta posición, de que, bueno, los medios no podemos entender la historia del cine si no la vinculamos a los videojuegos, si no lo vinculamos a la aparición de la televisión.Y así con todos los medios, no? Eh? Hay trabajos muy interesantes. Por ejemplo, de como en el siglo 19, diferentes medios, podríamos decir, que coevolucionaron entre sí. La prensa, el telégrafo. El tren, que transportaba los diarios también, aparecen las agencias de noticias. O sea, vemos cómo es muy difícil entender el desarrollo de la prensa en el siglo XIX y no lo vinculamos al

Mi entrevistado en este episodio es Ernest Cañada. Es coordinador de Alba Sud y docente de la Universidad de Barcelona. Investiga en torno al trabajo, los conflictos socioecológicos y las alternativas en el desarrollo turístico. Ha publicado: Viajar a todo tren. Turismo, desarrollo y sostenibilidad (Icaria, 2005, con Jordi Gascón); Turismo en Centroamérica: un nuevo escenario de conflictividad social (Enlace Editorial, 2010); Turismo placebo. Nueva colonización turística: del Mediterráneo a Mesoamérica y El Caribe. Lógicas espaciales del capital turístico (Enlace Editorial, 2011, con Macià Blàzquez); El turismo en el inicio del milenio: una lectura crítica a tres voces (FTR, 2012, con Jordi Gascón y Joan Buades); Turismos en Centroamérica. Un diagnóstico para el debate (Enlace Editorial, 2013); Turismo comunitario en Centroamérica. Experiencias y aprendizajes (Enlace Editorial, 2014).Notas del Episodio* Alba Sud y su historia* El despojo en Nicaragua* El surgimiento de turismo en Costa Rica como una herramienta neoliberal*  El Malestar en la Turistificación: Pensamiento Crítico Para Una Transformación de Turismo* El fin de turismo barato y el policrisis de hoy* Postcapitalismo y terminos complementarios* Monstruos peores* Aprender poner limites* La pluralidad de posibilidades de turismos postcapitalistasTarea* El malestar en la turistificación. Pensamiento crítico para una transformación del turismo - Icaria Editorial* Alba Sud - Facebook - Instagram - Twitter* #TourismPostCOVID19. Turistificación confinada* Ernest Cañada - Facebook - Instagram - TwitterTranscripcion en espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenido Ernest, al podcast del fin de turismo. Ernest: Muchas gracias. Muy encantado estar aquí. Chris: igual es un gran honor poder hablar finalmente contigo. Mi pregunto si, pues, para empezar, si podrías decirnos de este, dónde hablas hoy y cómo es el mundo allá por ti? Ernest: Yo habitualmente resido en Barcelona, entre Barcelona y Mallorca, porque estoy entre la universidad de las Islas Baleares y Alba Sud, y en estos momentos estoy en Buenos Aires que estoy trabajando en una investigación sobre experiencias de gestión distinta, fuera de las lógicas del capitalismo. Y esto nos llevo a identificar distintas experiencias. Y ahora estoy empezando una investigación con el Hotel Bauen, a lo que fue el Hotel Bauen y a cerrado y la cooperativa que lo gestionó durante 20 años, Es parte el proceso que estamos haciendo, identificación [00:01:00] de experiencias diversas plurales que tienen que ver con como pensar la posibilidad de organizar el turismo bajo otros modos y esto nos elevado por caminos distintos de América Latina, de España. Y ahora estoy aquí.Chris: Pues gracias Ernest. Y si vamos a estar hablando de ese tema pero más allá de las vision que que hay, que existe, que podemos imaginar sobre un turismo post-capitalista o algo alrededor, algo así. Pero antes de meternos en eso, pues tú y yo hemos estado en contacto durante los últimos dos años, en parte debido a tu trabajo en el ámbito de los estudios críticos de turismo y a tu proyecto Alba Sud que en algunos de nuestros invitados anteriores incluidos de Ivan Murray, Robert Fletcher y Macia Blasquez ha participado.Me encantaría que pudieras contarme un poco [00:02:00] sobre Alba Sud, Ernest, su misión, su historia y su situación actual Ernest: Con mucho gusto. Ah, mira, Alba Sud nace en 2008. Legalmente lo habíamos legalizado antes por si algún grupo de compañeros por si algún día nos hacía falta, pero formalmente empieza a funcionar el año 2008 y empieza a funcionar en Managua, Nicaragua, que era donde yo residía en ese momento.Y fundamentalmente fue un acuerdo de personas que nos dedicábamos a la investigación y a la comunicación para trabajar con análisis críticos y al mismo tiempo propositivos en torno al turismo. Esto fue algo que fue original desde el principio, esta doble preocupación, por cómo pensar los impactos, los efectos que tenía el desarrollo turístico bajo el capitalismo y que tipo de dinámicas de violencia estructural y directa generaban y al mismo tiempo, cómo pensar posibilidades de salir de ese [00:03:00] marco de esas lógicas. Y eso fue un sello que desde el principio empezamos. Con los años Alba Sud fue creciendo, integrándose como una red de investigadoras e investigadores en turismo. Ahora tenemos presencia en 10 países en España, en Francia, en Europa, y luego en América latina, en la República Dominicana, en México, en El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brasil, Uruguay y Argentina.Entonces es una red que conformamos gentes que nos dedicamos a distintos ámbitos de la análisis turístico y que compartimos espacios de trabajo y análisis e intervención política. Para nosotros, Alba Sud es un centro de investigación, pero no es un centro académico si nos preocupa menos las dinámicas académicas, aunque hay una parte de nuestro equipo de personas que colaboran que están en la universidad, distintas universidades. Lo que nos preocupa es cómo generar [00:04:00] conocimiento que sea útil para las comunidades, para las organizaciones comunitarias, para las asociaciones civiles, para sindicatos, para cuando es posible la administración pública. Es decir, intentamos generar conocimiento, análisis sistematización, propuestas que de alguna manera contribuyen a hacer visible las cosas que funcionan mal, que son un desastre que generan dolor en este mundo en relación con el turismo y al mismo tiempo, a pensar horizontes de esperanza.Este es un poco el propósito. Para ello, nos dotamos de eso de un equipo amplio de personas que colaboran unas más estrechamente con el día a día, otras que puntualmente colaboran y montamos básicamente nuestros trabajos se articula en torno a una web, la www.AlbaSud.Org, y lo estructuramos en trabajos de investigación que salen después en un formato [00:05:00] escrito por distintas formas, que luego te cuento un trabajo, además de la forma de la investigación, vinculado a la formación a poner a generar procesos de diálogo que nos permitan escuchar, reflexionar conjuntamente, poniendo en el mismo nivel personas que vienen de la academia con personas que tienen experiencias concretas de trabajo. Y finalmente, un ámbito más de incidencia política, más de acompañamiento organizaciones y de acompañarles para incidir políticamente. En el ámbito de la investigación, luego lo expresamos, básicamente a través de unos artículos cortos que hacemos, publicamos alrededor de 100, 110, 120 al año, que son artículos cortos de 2000-2500 palabras, que sabemos que son muy usados en las universidades, como material de discusión. Y un poco del propósito es este que se hiervan como pequeñas artículos bien escritos o intentamos que estén bien [00:06:00] escritos, que estén en un lenguaje simple, que la complejidad no tiene que ver con las palabrotas académicas que usamos, sino la profundidad del pensamiento que incorporan, pero que tienen que estar poder ser leídas por mucha gente.Tenemos esto. Luego, pusimos en marcha un sello editorial propio que es Alba Sud Editorial, en el cual tenemos una colección de libros, una de informes y recientemente una de policy brief más dirigidos a recomendaciones de política. Y básicamente Alba Sud eso. Es un espacio de encuentro entre personas que no nos resignamos a pensar que el desarrollo turístico necesariamente tenga que comportar esto, que estamos acompañando las resistencias, las luchas de los muchos males y violencias que genera este desarrollo capitalista a través del turismo y que al mismo tiempo, intentamos construir lo que decía antes "horizontes de esperanza" que nos permitan estimular la lucha y la resistencia, [00:07:00] pensando en en futuros más deseables que es creo que en estos momentos también necesitamos.Chris: Gracias, Ernest. Sí. Pues por lo que he visto, lo que he leído, lo que he encontrado ahi en el sitio de Alba Sud. Pues es, es una organización y sitio único en el mundo. Y pues yo tengo mucho honor de estar contigo hoy hablando de estas cosas y especialmente contigo como el fundador, Y entonces, para agregar, para profundizar un poco más de la historia, de tu historia, la próxima pregunta viene de nuestro amigo mutuo compañero Macía Blasquez a quien entrevisté en la temporada cuatro. Europa. Y el pregunta, "afirma que tú has sido entre muchas otras cosas activista en Centroamérica, como nos dijiste, y entonces él quiere saber cómo han cambiado tus opiniones y tu carrera de este [00:08:00] entonces?" Ernest: Buena pregunta.Ah, yo empecé a trabajar en Centroamérica acompañando. Bueno, primero pasé seis años que iba y venía. Estaba medio año en Centroamérica más o menos a otro medio en España. Y finalmente me quedé a trabajar en Nicaragua con una organización que se le llamaba "Luciérnaga" ahora "Ilegalizada," dedicada a la comunicación.Y desde ahí empezamos a organizar campañas de comunicación en distintos temas que tenían que ver con las necesidades y los derechos de la mayoría de la gente y de como estaban sufriendo procesos de despojo de posesión. Y trabajamos en torno a temas que tenían que ver con la salud y los derechos sexuales o reproductivos o la soberanía alimentaria. Y en una de estas, organizamos una campaña que duró cuatro años de investigación y comunicación sobre turismo. En un contexto, estoy hablando del año [00:09:00] 2004-2008, en el cual Nicaragua se estaba abriendo al turismo en esos momentos. Y entonces identificábamos claramente los altos niveles de violencia que eso podía comportar con procesos de desplazamiento.Y había que acompañar a las comunidades en esas dinámicas, y que además eran compartidas en El Salvador, en Guatemala, en Honduras, en Costa Rica y al mismo tiempo, empezar a pensar posibilidades de "si era posible utilizar el turismo bajo el control de las propias comunidades." Esa fue mi mi inserción en el mundo fundamentalmente del turismo.Y a partir de ahí, después de trabajar unos cuatro años en Luciérnaga y pusimos en marcha Alba Su

Mi huesped en este episodio es Claude Guislain, un antropólogo peruano que pasa la mayor parte de su tiempo con pueblos indígenas en Perú, Colombia y Brasil. Con su primera investigación sobre el uso de la ayahuasca y el chamanismo por parte de los occidentales en Iquitos (2005-2007), inició el viaje que lo llevó a dedicar su vida a tender un puente entre la sabiduría indígena y el mundo moderno. A lo largo de más de quince años dedicados casi exclusivamente a apoyar tanto a curanderos indígenas como a pacientes y exploradores occidentales, ha estado al servicio de los procesos de curación de cientos de personas. Ha estado trabajando y formándose con los Shipibo desde 2013, ayudando a la familia López a construir su propio centro. Fue facilitador y asesor en relaciones indígenas en el Templo del Camino de la Luz (2015-2023). Trabaja y aprende con un mamo Arhuaco desde 2012, con un Jaguar del yurupari del Tubú desde 2016 y con el pueblo Yawanawa de Brasil desde 2018.Hoy es asesor y miembro del Comité Técnico del Fondo de Conservación de Medicinas Indígenas y colabora también con ICEERS, y otras organizaciones, inspirándolas y ayudándolas a tejer sus esfuerzos y dones con los procesos indígenas de base.Notas del Episodio* La historia y esperanza de Claude* La idealizacion de los pueblos indigenas* El renacimiento psicodelico* Curacion y cantos* Contradicciones en el turismo psicodelico* La deforestacion, la demanda y la continuidad del conocimiento* Conservacion biocultural* ICEERS & MSCTareaClaude Guislain - Facebook - InstagramIndigenous Medicine Conservation FundInternational Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and ServiceTranscripcion en Espanol (English Below)Chris: Bienvenido Claude, al podcast El Fin del Turismo.Claude: Chris. Muchas gracias.Chris: Me gustaría saber si podrías explicar un poco de dónde te encuentras hoy y cómo el mundo aparece para ti?Claude: Buena pregunta. Estoy, ahora mismo estoy en Rio de Janeiro, donde vivo. Soy peruano y también estudié antropología y dedico mucho mi tiempo a los pueblos indígenas, sobre todo en Brasil, en Colombia y en Perú y he estado trabajando en las Amazonas durante muchos años. Y como veo el mundo hoy, desde aquí, pues con mucha preocupación, evidentemente, pero también por lo que hago con alguna esperanza, Chris: Yeah y pues en esa cuestión de lo que haces y de lo que hemos hablado antes, parece que es un gran camino, un camino de ya [00:01:00] décadas y décadas. Y me gustaría, si podemos viendo un un poco más de ese camino. Podrías comentar un poco de cómo llegaste en este gran momento sea por tus viajes, a otros países, a otros mundos, a otros maestros y maestras. Claude: Sí, claro, a ver cómo te explico. Llevo unos 20 años trabajando con lo indigena en general, pero sobre todo con el tema de espiritualidad, plantas maestras como la ayahuasca y esas cosas, y llegue ahí como, creo que, como la mayoría de personas que hoy en día llegan ahí a la selva, o a buscar estas medicinas como se les llaman, que es una, una cierta o una profunda insatisfacción por nuestra propia cultura, por la respuesta que nuestra propia sociedad [00:02:00] nos puede dar existenciales, diría yo. Es como siempre hay una pregunta que uno se dice, "No tiene que haber algo más. No puede ser eso solamente." Esa propuesta, digamos de occidente, no puede ser solamente eso, debe haber algo más, verdad? Entonces eso me embarcó a mí en una búsqueda desde, no sé cuando tenía por ahí unos veinti, veinti y pocos años.Que me llevó a experimentar estas medicinas como la ayahuasca, el San Pedro, los hongos, no por una cosa lúdica, ni ni evasiva, sino por el contrario, con una curiosidad por otras formas de saber y conocer, . Entonces yo me acerqué a estas medicinas, con curiosidad de entender cómo los pueblos indígenas saben lo que saben. Cuál es el origen de su [00:03:00] conocimimomento verdad?Entonces, estudié antropología. Me alejé de la academia rápidamente porque, me pareció mucho más interesante lo que me enseñaban los abuelos que para la antropología eran mis informantes, verdad? Era como, tenía que a mi informante tal, el informante tal. Y me di cuenta que no, que no eran mis informantes, sino que eran maestros y aprendía mucho más con ellos que lo que me enseñaba los libros, o las clases, o los seminarios, verdad?Entonces decidí mas dedicarme a seguirlos a ellos y a seguir aprendiendo con ellos, y ver de qué manera los podía ayudar a ellos. Estos abuelos, estos sabios indígenas. Y eso me llevó a un camino maravilloso de que hoy en día le llamo "la gente puente," no? O sea, gente que estamos en ese lugar de interface, entre el conocimimomento, la sabiduría que nos queda de los pueblos [00:04:00] indígenas y el mundo occidental, el mundo moderno. Y en ese nuevo tipo de encuentro que está surgiendo hace una década o tal vez dos décadas. Es este nuevo tipo de encuentro de nuestros mundos, verdad? Que hasta hoy era, siempre había sido extremadamente problemático, sino asesino, verdad? La manera con nuestro mundo occidental se encontraba con los mundos indígenas era pues y destructor. Hoy en día nos encontramos en una manera diferente, en el que muchos jóvenes y adultos y gente del norte global llegan en busca de conocimiento, de sabiduría, de cura, de sanación, de alternativas, buscando respuestas que nuestra propia civilización no nos puede dar. Habiendo un hambre, una sed de sentido por algo mayor, pues mucha gente empieza a ir allá con otros ojos, con un [00:05:00] respeto que no creo que había existido antes. Y eso trae cosas positivas y cosas negativas, evidentemente.Parece ser que estamos mal. Hay una gran maldición, que, como todo lo que toca, occidente eventualmente se vuelve en un gran desastre. parece como un súper bonito, súper maravilloso, ilusorio, nos enamora, nos seduce, pero después al poco tiempo nos vamos dando cuenta de las de las terribles consecuencias que traemos, verdad?Pero algo, no sé, algo también está cambiando, algo está mudando. Hay como una cierta madurez de ambos lados, tanto de los del lado indígena como del lado no indígena para encontrarnos desde un lugar en donde podemos celebrar nuestras diferencias y entender que esas diferencias son material para la construcción de un tiempo nuevo, verdad?Entonces esa es la parte que traigo un poco de esperanza. Chris: Ya, qué bonito. Gracias, Claude . o sea, yo siento [00:06:00] mucho de la esperanza, pero también de la desesperación por alguien que ha visitado a varios pueblos indígenas en las Amazonas hace como 15 años de más ya, en ese tiempo esas medicinas fueron llegando poco a poco a la mentalidad colectiva del occidente. Y pues me ha ayudado un montón, no solo por cuestiones espirituales, pero también por reparar el daño que hice a mi cuerpo, por ejemplo, pero también metiendome en esos círculos, en las Amazonas, por ejemplo, pero también mi tierra nativa Toronto, Canadá y otras partes Oaxaca, México. hemos visto poco a poco la descuidado de la sabiduría indígena, las culturas indígenas, las medicinas, y más que nada, las contradicciones que [00:07:00] aparece dentro de el renacimiento" psicodélico. Entonces, ya tienes mucho tiempo en esos no solo respecto a la medicina, pero también en las culturas indígenas en las Amazonas. Me gustaría preguntarte que has visto allá en el sentido de contradicciones, sobre el turismo sobre la medicina, puede ser el lado del extranjero viniendo para sanarse, o igual los locales o indígenas aprovechando al momento.Claude: Contradicciones tienen todas las culturas, tienen contradicciones. Y la contradicción principal es entre lo que se dice, no? Lo que se profesa y lo que uno ve en la práctica no? Es como si tú vas a la iglesia y escuchas al pastor hablando de cómo debe ser un buen cristiano.Y después te paseas por yo que sé por Chicago o por ciudad de México, y ves lo que [00:08:00] son los cristianos y dices wow hay una enorme contradicción, verdad? Es terrible la contradicción Cuando hablamos de los pueblos indígenas y de los conocimientos, de los pueblos indígenas, la sabiduría indígena, parece ser que hablamos desde un lugar de idealización no?Y a mí no me gustaría, caer en eso de idealizar sino tratar de ser muy concreto. Una cosa es la realidad, que es realmente terrible. Vivimos en un momento que es la cúspide, es la continuación de un proceso de colonialismo, de exterminación que no fue algo que sucedió con la llegada de los españoles, y los portugueses y el tiempo de la conquista. Y no fue algo que pasó.Es algo que sigue pasando,. Es algo que [00:09:00] sigue pasando. Como decía el gran Aílton Krenak, un gran líder indígena de aquí de Brasil, y un intelectual, miembro de la academia brasilera de las letras, recientemente. Decía lo que ustedes no entienden es que su mundo sigue en guerra con nuestro mundo. El decía eso. Él lo dice, o sea, ustedes no entienden que el mundo occidental, el mundo moderno continúa en guerra y de, y haciendo todos los esfuerzos para que las culturas indígenas desaparezcan.O sea, en la práctica, eso es lo que estamos haciendo. Entonces, cuando yo hablo de esperanza, hablo porque hay algo que está surgiendo, que es nuevo, pero realmente es muy pequeño. Y como dices tú, cuando, o sea, la expansión de la ayahuasca, del San Pedro, de lo del peyote y de una cierto [00:10:00] respeto y un cierto entendimiento sobre la importancia de los conocimientos indígenas, todavia realmente e no entendemos eso, no entendemos. Y cuando hablamos desde el norte global, y lo que se llama esta el renacimiento psicodélico, cuando hablan de los pueblos indígenas, hay una idealización, sobre todo, es solamente parte de un discurso que es un poco "woke." Es un poco para hacer bonito tu discurso, pero en la práctica no se ve, no, no, no ocupa un lugar importante. Ya está diseñado el camino por donde va esta revolución psicodélica, es extraer los principios activos de las plantas, hacer medicamentos, de hacer una pastilla que va a ayudar a la gente a mantenerse en mej

En este episodio, mi invitada es Alf Bojórquez, novelista y ensayista yucateca. Su primera novela, Pepitas de calabaza (2023) salió en la editorial Fondo Blanco. Se segundo libro, No existe dique capaz de contener al océano furioso. Potencia, alegría y anarquismo, apareció hace unos meses. Fue ganadora del premio Moving Narratives (2024) de Prince Claus Fund y el British Council. Ha hecho giras en América Latina, Europa, Estados Unidos, Marruecos y Filipinas haciendo lecturas de su obra y dando talleres sobre narrativa, arte y teoría crítica. Tiene un programa de radio sobre lo mismo que se puede escuchar gratis en cualquier aplicación de podcasts: Un sueño largo, ancho y hondo. Ha colaborado con varios colectivos y organizaciones abajo y a la izquierda.Notas del Episodio* La traduccion de Joyful Militancy a Militancia Alegre* Diferencias en el radicalismo rigido entre norte y sur* Recuperando la miltancia y el contexto contemporaneo en militancia alegre* Tejiendo a la Organización Revolucionaria* La perdida de propiedad comunal en Mexico y la llegada del turismo* Las redes sociales como una arma del imperio* La imagen y la gestion, el usuario y el premio* Contraturismo como peregrinajeTarea* Pagina profesional - Instagram* Un sueño largo, ancho y hondo - Instagram* No existe dique capaz de contener al océano furioso - Volcana - Polilla - Utopicas - Traficantes de Suenos - Novedades don Gregorio (OAX)* Militancia alegre: Tejer Resistencias, florecer en tiempos toxicas* Pepitas de calabazaTranscripcion en espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida al podcast El Fin del Turismo, Alf. Un placer hablar contigo hoy. Alf: Ajá. Chris: Este me gustaría empezar preguntándote donde te encuentras hoy y cómo se ve el mundo a través de tus ojos? Alf: Este hoy me encuentro en mi cocina. Desde ahí trabajo yo. En la ciudad de México, en una colonia se llama Iztaccihuatl. Cómo se ve el mundo? Pues mira, yo no tengo una vista tan mala. Este no es un edificio grande, pero tengo una vista linda, no? O sea, no me tapa la vista otro edificio ni nada. Se ven muchas plantas. Y bueno, supongo que sabes que yo soy de provincia. Entonces yo siempre he sentido que aquí donde yo vivo es como una, un poquito provincia en la capital, porque no hay edificios tan grandes.Este y bueno, desde aquí se ve, se me olvida que estoy en CDMX ahora, sabes a Chris: Gracias. Pues eres entre otras cosas, autora de varios [00:01:00] textos entre ellos Pepitas de Calabaza y el muy reciente No Existe Dique Capaz de Contener al Océano Furioso. También coordinaste la traducción al español del texto en inglés de Militancia Alegre:Deje Resistencias Florecer en Tiempos T óxicos. (o Joyful Militancy) A esa traducción le siguió un podcast complementario con Pamela Carmona titulado Alegría Emergente: Deshaciendo el Radicalismo Rígido. Entonces, para empezar, me gustaría preguntarte cómo conociste, el libro Joyful Militancy y qué te llevó a traducirlo. Alf: Yo conocí ese libro. Lo cuento un poquito en el prólogo, pero yo conocí ese libro, en Estados Unidos, porque yo tenía una banda. Yo toqué en una banda de hardcore punk muchos, muchos años, la batería. Y entonces así accedí a Estados Unidos y estando [00:02:00] en el underground americano, que fue una parte importante de mi de mi de mi vida, estando en en California en concreto.Me encontré ese libro como en una cafetería y yo me enamoré. Entonces lo traje y primero lo leí en inglés con alguna gente y muy lentamente empecé a trabajar con ese libro, traducir. Eso es una historia más larga que está ahí bien en el prólogo, pero bueno, llevo años como militando ese libro. También hubieron una serie de coincidencias de gente muy amable como Tumba a la Casa, como los autores canadienses, los derechos nos los regalaron. Se metió la gente de Traficantes de Sueno.O sea, en realidad hay un montón de gente. Es como una red de redes, ese libro y una serie de casualidades y favores y gestos agradables de mucha gente que logró que eso saliera como salió, la verdad. O sea, yo pienso mi irrepetible, esa esa serie de factores. Ajá. Chris: Ah chingón. Muy bien, Bueno, pues ese libro originalmente [00:03:00] se publicaron en 2016. A leer, reeler y traducir ese texto, tengo curiosidad por saber que crees que ha cambiado de este entonces, o qué diferencias principales has visto entre el radicalismo rígido descrito en el libro de la anglosfera o America norte, Anglosajona y la hispanesfera o Latinoamérica? Alf: Este? Pues muchas cosas que decir, no. La parte que confirmé yo fui trabajando ese libro, eh? Porque digamos que yo, todavía este año presenté ese libro. O sea, y le fue muy bien en Costa Rica. Fue la última. A mí se me acabaron los ejemplares. Y digamos, terminé mi labor con con Militancia en Costa Rica hace dos, tres meses.No es tanto, no? O sea todavía después de la del programa de radio con Pamela, se hizo en Costa Rica de presentación y le fue muy bien, eh? Y se [00:04:00] reimprimió ese sí. Ese libro fue un éxito de muchas maneras, no? Y fíjate a mí. Una cosa que con por me pasaban los años, no me gustó, es que yo siento que tiene un lado como muy liberal, osea, hay un lado donde es demasiado suave, no? O sea, al criticar lo rígido, siento que se pasa de flexible, por decir así. Entonces, y eso pasa un poco como con ciertos radicalismos del norte, que tienen que ver con la retórica de la amistad de la ternura como tan enfocados en el cuidado.Y así, yo siento que sin querer como por llevarle la contraria al opuesto, como el machismo lo rígido, bla, bla, bla, caen en una cosa un poco... o sea yo siendo que ese el libro o por lo menos mi lectura de ese libro, ya estas alturas, si lo siendo demasiado suave, porque yo creo que la parte negativa de militar y de organizarse, pues es importante, no, eh?Es importante de hablar, no? Entonces, cierto que en el libro, se pasa de buena onda, por [00:05:00] decirlo asi. Creo que por eso es un éxito porque hay lado "pop" en ese libro, un lado suavecito, dulcecito, que se mastica bien. Y está bien para los activismo, pero hay una parte en mi que dice bueno, pero hay que hablar del resentimiento, hay que hablar del odio.Hay que hablar de la importancia de romper entre nosotras, de pelearnos entre nosotros, sin caer en el castigo y la culpa y la persecución. Pero yo sí, creo que la ruptura o la negatividad en general ese el libro no lo logra del todo. Habría que ir a otros lados y pienso que de un año para acá, desde que se recrudeció el genocida ahora, pues justo toca repensar el antiimperialismo, toca repensar cosas que no pueden ser tan flexibles, no? O sea, pues están matando, están cayendo bombas y no se trata de vamos a ver si nos cae el 20 o no, o cuando nos cae el 20.Pues hay un imperio gestionando un genocidio que se recrudeció muy fuerte el último año. Y eso implica, se endurece, se endurece. O sea, ha cambiado el panorama político. Y hay [00:06:00] procesos donde podemos ser muy flexibles y pacientes, pero hay procesos donde no, donde hay que responder porque la bomba te ca en la cabeza, o sea, y ya está.Entonces me recuerdo un poco como en los del paso de los 60s a los 70s, o el paso hacia los 20, no? O sea, históricamente esto ha pasado. Se acaba el hipismo y y llega la guerrilla. Se acaba el anarquismo y empieza el partido comunista. O sea, hay momentos donde la historia te come y se vuelve un poquito más pues no te voy a decir duro, pero pero sí, incluso en el norte, los anarquistas que venían de escribir ese libro como muy ticunistas se están volviendo más de izquierda, más revolucionario, más leninistas mucho. Y yo creo que eso tiene que ver, bueno, una especie el leninismo, pues moderno o buena onda.El tipo zapatismo en versión anglo, pero yo creo que eso tiene que ver con las condiciones actuales. Yo creo que antes de la pandemia, después de la pandemia, son dos planetas, tanto por el reconocimiento de genocidia, como porque lo que se [00:07:00] hizo toda la década que para mí acaba en pandemia. Pues tenía un lado muy chido, pero también a un lado muy de todo es válido.La insurrección ya está aquí. Y pues ahora decimos no, pues no está aquí. No estamos parando a Estados Unidos este el imperio, no lo estamos parando. En otros momentos de la historia, si se la podido o poner ciertos límites al imperialismo." No del todo, pero se han ganado algunas luchas.Entonces, bueno, ese libro creo que fue de su época. O sea, 2016 y ese anarquismo de la amistad y de hay que conectar y fluir y todo ese lado que para un poco hippie. Creo que es muy de su momento, de la década pasada, pero yo creo que esa época, ya no es la nuestra, por las por las condiciones. O sea, porque estamos reaccionando y respondiendo y organizándonos frente a otros problemas.Chris: Claro, claro. Y si podrias actualizarlo en tus propios palabras, cuáles serían los temas más importantes [00:08:00] para cambiar o reemplazar? Alf: O sea, mira te voy a contar de otro libro, pero también es del norte.Entonces, pues no me encanta darle tanto entre ellos, pero un libro que, por ejemplo, le respondería fuerte de ese libro, sería este que me regalaban los de Traficantes, ahora que trabaje con ellos en en Madrid, que se llama Hacia Una Nueva Guerra Civil Mundial, de Lazzarato, no?Entonces digo, lo que pasa es que él es un leninista, no? Entonces, le pega duro, le pega duro. O sea, pero esto ha pasado siempre, pero hay varias banda que está respondiendo, no? O sea, por ejemplo, en el caso de este libro que te a acaba de mencionar Lazzarato.Pues él dice que los últimos 50 años, incluido militancia, que estaría al final de 50 años, lo político como tal no se habló? Entonces, si le aplicas Lazzarato a Militancia Alegre, efectivamente, nunca se habla de que a ver, o sea, el gobierno estadounidense control el mundo y va ganando. O sea, y hubieron luchas en los 60s, 70s, que lograron más o menos parar [00:09:00] ese imperialismo, los liberaciones nacionales, por ejemplo.Las luchas de empezamos por Vietnam, Malher y Cuba y

Mis entrevistados en este episodio son Anny Gabriela Ventura Puac y Jairo Chamalé Lemus. Anny es ajquij(guía espiritual), politóloga e investigadora, actual curadora en jefe de Espacio/C. Nacida en Chuwila, Chichicastenango, Quiché, Guatemala. Es mujer Maya Kiche con identidad diversa, sanadora y contadora del tiempo. Tiene estudios en Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Relaciones Internacionales y una especialidad en ODS para Naciones Indígenas. Es confundadora de Espacio C, en dónde se ha desempeñado como gestora cultural desde 2013 y curadora en Jefe desde 2023.En Guatemala su trabajo está presente en diversos espacios sociales, políticos y culturales, como consultora independiente para organizaciones no gubernamentales, trabajando con niñas, mujeres y adolescentes mayas y no mayas a nivel nacional, en temas concretos como empoderamiento político, salud (diabetes / VIH) y sanación desde la Cosmovisión Maya.Jairo es persona disidente, del territorio Poqomam de Mixco, viajero e investigador se la religiosidad popular, las expresiones culturales y la espiritualidad de su contexto cercano. Es guía de turismo y estudiante de antropología.Notas del EpisodioAnny y Jairo y el Cristo NegroEl camino de peregrinacion entre Mixco y OaxacaQuirio Catano y las origines del cristo negroLas diversas formas de sacrificar y bailarLas colonizaciones de EquipulasEl base de cristo negro en el mundo maya/mexicaEl crisis climatico y la falta de ofrendasLas consecuencias de la perdida de hospitalidadLa memoria vivida del intercambio intercultural antiguaTarea Abisaí Navarro María Jacinta Xón / Proyecto Tux Cocina Gourmet de OrigenHoja de Pacaya - InstagramLos Cofrades Chichicastenango - Instagramespacio/C arte+memoria - InstagramTranscripcion en espanol (English Below)S6 - Anny Puac & Jairo - Peregrinacion a EsquipulasChris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida y bienvenido al podcast El Fin del Turismo Annie y Jairo. Gracias a ambos por acompañarme hoy. Me encantaría que pudieran contarles a nuestros oyentes desde dónde llaman y cómo aparece el mundo ahí para cada uno de ustedes.Anny: Muchas gracias, Chris y buenos días a quienes nos escuchen o buenas tardes o buenas noches, dependiendo su zona horaria.Mi nombre es Anny y yo le saludo desde el territorio maya K'iche' de Chuwila, K'iche' Guatemala específicamente.Jairo: Buenos días a ambos, para mi un gusto estar por acá. Sawe ta inteer winaq (Buenos días a todas y todos) mucho gusto desde el territorio pues Poqomam de Mixco y también desde las cercanías a la ciudad de Guatemala, pues gracias por esta [00:01:00] oportunidad para compartir conocimiento.Chris: Y gracias a ustedes dos. Yo estoy aquí en Oaxaca y el mundo parece obviamente un poco raro. Bueno, quizás no es obvio, pero parece más raro día por día. Estamos aquí hoy para hablar de Esquipulas en Guatemala. Y Esquipulas es el lugar de varias iglesias que han abergado al cristo negro de la ciudad, que es famosa por sus supuestos milagros durante los últimos cuatro siglos.De manera similar, la peregrinación al santuario es la más grande de América Central y la segunda más grande de las Américas, con lo que leí, 5 millones de personas que lo visitan cada año. Ahora, para empezar, ¿Estarían dispuestos a explicar que impulsó a cada uno [00:02:00] de sus intereses o relaciones con este lugar y la práctica de la peregrinación?Anny: Sí, por supuesto Chris. Pues, yo desde como mi relación, digamos personal o individual como familia, yo tengo, digamos, como clara la idea de cuando inician estas peregrinaciones, de pronto, cuando yo ya tenía unos siete u ocho años de edad, así, para decirte que yo tengo claridad, pero cuando yo retrocedo a los archivos de la familia, pues veo que el tema de peregrinar a Esquipulas, pues comienza con mis abuelas.Jairo: Entonces yo te podría decir que dentro de mi familia, la peregrinación a Esquipulas , así quizá llevará mínimamente unos 80 años presente en la familia, sobre todo del lado de [00:03:00] mi abuela materna. Que ella es de un territorio K'iche' de Quetzaltenango, en donde pues empezaban el viaje, en conjunto, allá fuera un viaje de barrio organizado por el barrio, o era un viaje familiar, entonces se iban uno o dos buses en aquel tiempo cuando no había tanto transporte, verdad? Era un lujo también irse por alguna ruta en donde hubiera paso para bus. Y pues, lo que no se pudiera transitar ya en bus, pues se hacía caminando, se hacían burros, pero, más o menos por ahí viene un poquito la historia de de cómo inician estas rutas de peregrinaje en mi familia, digamos. Con el caso de nosotros, yo no tengo conciencia de pequeño de haber, pues, llegado a Esquipulas. Bueno, hay un dato bien interesante, cuando yo cumplo 40 días de haber nacido, mi familia decide llevarme a [00:04:00] Esquipulas, eso pues está en el archivo fotográfico de la familia como agradecimiento, porque al final nací con... nací bien.Jairo: Y entonces la familia decide peregrinar es el dato más cercano que tengo de la personal de las idas a Esquipulas. Claro, esto siempre lo he tenido muy familiarizado dentro de mi contexto cercano, puesto que la gente pues de mi municipio suele ir justo organizada en excursiones de las diferentes organizaciones religiosas que hay en mi municipio.Estas, pues designan fechas y son buses llenos de aproximadamente 50 personas. Cada bus suelen llegar hasta tres, de acá de Mixco, pues que se van para para Esquipulas. Y ese es algo bien interesante porque es pues, parte de la modernidad, digámoslo ir en bus, pero hay muchas anécdotas de las personas de acá del pueblo que [00:05:00] cuentan cómo, pues iban de una forma más rústica, verdad? Que podía ser, pues en peregrinaje caminando, que no era la única peregrinación, de hecho la del cristo negro de Esquipulas. Hoy puntualmente, vamos a hablar de ella.Pero pues están también las peregrinaciones Antigua Guatemala que está aquí cerquita, aquí detrás de nosotros hay un cerro que es el cerro Alux. Este cerro se cruzaba, pues caminando, todavía lo hace la gente caminando porque detrás del cerro está, pues la bajada para llegar a la Antigua Guatemala.Chris: Gracias. Gracias a ustedes. Pues así, por conocer un poco más de sus historias, como de peregrinación, me gustaría saber un poco más si se podrían ofrecer algo de la larga historia de Esquipulas, del cristo negro y pues, ¿Cómo se originó la la peregrinación? ¿De donde viene esa historia?.Jairo: Bueno, como lo mencioné antes, diciendo algunas [00:06:00] palabras en el idioma poqomam. Es el idioma que se hablaba, pues en nuestro pueblo. Lo voy a decir nuevamente más despacio para, pues, describirles que es lo que dije, técnicamente es:Sawe’ ta inteer winaq, kiroo wilkee’ chipam ma’ q ’oriik taqee, reh ma’ ojeer winaq reh qatinimiit Mixko’ buenos días a todos. Qué gusto pues poder compartir estas palabras y también un poco de la historia de la gente antigua de nuestro pueblo. Porque pues, la verdad es que el peregrinaje a Esquipulas está muy relacionado e intrínseco con la gente de Mixco y justamente también con el territorio oaxaqueño. Mi nombre, pues es Jairo, Jairo Andrés Chamale Lemus. Yo pues pertenezco a este territorio, a la gente maya poqomam. De acá es la mitad de mi familia de mis antepasados. Y , pues me dedico al turismo. Yo soy guía [00:07:00] de turistas de hace aproximadamente ocho años ya desde que me gradué muy joven. Y, pues me he dedicado justo a peregrinar para que las personas conozcan también el contexto histórico de Guatemala y de las diferentes expresiones culturales, religiosas y también de resistencia de la gente en el territorio de lo que ahora conocemos como Guatemala.Pues también, soy estudiante de la carrera de antropología, de la licenciatura específicamente en antropología, y pues me he dedicado también a estudiar el caso del idioma maya poqomam en Mixco, que es una comunidad muy cercana a la ciudad de Guatemala, que hemos tenido pues un impacto, demográfico y social, pues bastante fuerte, pues debido al crecimiento del área metropolitana de la ciudad de Guatemala. Es algo a lo que me he dedicado a estudiar durante los últimos años. Y también, pues, a [00:08:00] documentarlo, porque tenemos muchas prácticas culturales y espirituales en nuestro pueblo, que han ido desapareciendo conforme este avance demográfico de la ciudad, muchísimas gracias. Rontyoox aq’oo taAnny: Bueno Chris. En realidad hay un registro, digamos histórico, donde dice que el primer peregrinaje que se inicia a Esquipulas, fue en Marzo 1595, cuando la imagen sale del taller de este señor escultor Quirio Cataño, que sale hacia Esquipulas, hacia Chiquimula. Esto está al oriente de Guatemala. Nosotros lo conocemos como la zona caliente de de Guatemala. Pero es la zona, digamos, como caliente árida. Es un territorio en donde hay comunidad Xinca, Popti', si no estoy mal Chortí también. Y pues, la producción que se [00:09:00] tiene por las tierras de por allá, estamos hablando de frutas de algunas plantas, de algunos tubérculos más o menos, pero más que todos se dedican a la fruta, verdad.Esta primera peregrinación la documenta y la registra el cronista, que se llama Miguel Álvarez. Y él dice que, cuando cuando salióó del taller y se dirigió hacia Esquipulas la imagen iba haciendo diferentes milagros en todo el recorrido hasta llegar a la basílica. Entonces habían personas que le pedían justamente que, que por favor que la imagen pasara por lo menos una noche dentro de la casa de las personas para, bendecirlo. Y Y más o menos se calcula cada año, digamos en la actualidad, ahora en Guatemala y en alrededor de 300 mil personas de todo el mundo, más que todo entre México, Centroamérica, países del sur, por ejemplo de Perú [00:10:00] de Ecuador de Ecuador, Bolivia, si no estoy mal, es como mucha la cantidad de gente que llega, más o menos entre noviembre, que ahorita es como una fecha de noviembre y diciembre y todo enero, digamos, esas son como los tres meses de muchísima más afluencia de personas que llegan llegan a la basílica, ver

En este episodio, mis entrevistados son Laura Sofía Montoya Gómez y Carlos Alberto Montoya Correa. Carlos es arquitecto egresado de la Universidad Nacional sede Medellín. Experto en planificación, gestión y ejecución de proyectos de desarrollo urbano con énfasis en viviendas económicas en tratamientos de expansión urbana, consolidación, mejoramiento de barrios, renovación urbana y en zonas con restricciones geotécnicas. Ha participado como gestor en la ejecución de más de 50.000 viviendas económicas desde el sector público, en proyectos de cooperación internacional, de aplicación de políticas nacionales y de ejecución local en varias ciudades de Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín, Armenia, Bucaramanga, Rionegro y Bello). Ha sido docente en la Facultad de Arquitectura Universidad Nacional sede Medellín y ha participado de publicaciones colectivas de carácter técnico.Sofia es arquitecta egresada de la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Magíster en Arquitectura, Crítica y Proyecto de la misma institución donde actualmente también es docente en el área de Taller de Proyectos. Ha participado durante más de 13 años de varias colectividades en la ciudad de Medellín, donde ha podido desarrollar proyectos de investigación en el área del patrimonio urbano-arquitectónico que han sido publicados mediante recursos financiados a través de los estímulos de la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana. Es cofundadora de la Corporación Proyecto NN, organización sin ánimo de lucro que acompaña procesos comunitarios y promueve la educación y la dignificación de los espacios de encuentro populares.Notas del EpisodioQue esta pasando en MedellinEl encaricimiento de la ciudadEl turismo sexual y el pueblo moralistaLa gentrificacion de Pablo EscobarLa construccion y venta de vivienda paisaResentimiento y el dios dineroLas mascaras del gobierno“No se puede morir del exito”El derecho a la ciudad y viviendaTareaProyecto NN - Sitio Web - InstagramTranscripcion en Espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida Sofía, bienvenido Carlos al podcast El Fin del Turismo. Muchas gracias por estar conmigo hoy para platicar de este tema, pues si, tan complejo. Me gustaría preguntarles en dónde se encuentran hoy y como se ve el mundo para cada uno de ustedes allá.Sofia: Bueno, estamos aquí en la ciudad de Medellín. Estamos juntos en mi casa, Carlos es mi padre, y bueno, decidimos juntarnos para tener como una conversación más fluida, desde aquí, desde mi casa en el centro de la ciudad, que es un centro, pues además, bastante particular. Pues Medellín es una ciudad montañosa que queda en los Andes. Es un valle. Y digamos que el centro de la ciudad tiene, pues, unas dinámicas muy distintas a muchos centros de otras ciudades. Carlos: Es una ciudad muy estrecha [00:01:00] y tiene en el costado oriental y occidental un par de montañas llenas de barrios. Aquí mismo por la ventana se ve toda las montañas urbanizadas y en el centro está, digamos la metrópoli, lo que pudiéramos llamar una ciudad más tradicional, mientras arriba son barriadas o comunas populares. Hoy en día, muy populares para cierto turismo.¿ Y usted dónde está? Chris: Pues yo llevando en Oaxaca, en la capital de Oaxaca, México también en un valle un poco mas amplio geográficamente que Medellín . Conozco Medellín porque andaba como turista hace 15 años quizás allá. Y pues empezando toda la [00:02:00] investigación para este episodio, encontre como muchos Entonces me gustaría leer unas citas de esos artículos para los oyentes que quizás no conocen Medellín, no saben qué está pasando allá, según los medios masivos. Entonces, primero este, Nomad List. "Nomad List es una plataforma que publica su ranking de los destinos más populares para trabajar de forma remota. Colocó a Medellín en segundo lugar, el año pasado entre 157 ciudades de Latinoamérica." El próximo dice que "en la colonia de Manila de Medellín hay alquileres a corto plazo cuyos propietarios ganan más de cinco millones de pesos colombianos por mes o alrededor de $1,000 estadounidenses."El próximo decía que "aunque no se llevó [00:03:00] a cabo, el presidente local dijo en ese momento 'que prohibiría los alquileres a corto plazo en la ciudad como medida para prevenir el abuso y la explotacion sexual infantil. En esa búsqueda por encontrar una solución a ese flagelo, Guitierrez, el presidente local se reunió con representantes de la plataforma de Airbnb para llegar a un acuerdo.Desde entonces se ha trabajado de común acuerdo con las partes en conjunto para evitar medidas extremas, pero si establecer acciones que permiten prevenir este delito en la ciudad" Siguiendo, "en tanto, el número de apartmentos anunciados en Airbnb, la popular empresa de alquiler de propiedades vacacionales, subió de 8 mil en octubre de 2022 a 14 mil a [00:04:00] finales de 2023, según datos recabados por AirDNA."Y finalmente, "los datos recientes dice que Medellín recibe 1.7 millones de visitantes extranjeros a una urbe de 2 millones y medio de habitantes." Entonces, me gustaría empezar preguntándoles a ustedes dos sobre la gentrificación en Medellín. Yo encontré otro artículo sobre el tema. Y quizás se se exhibe, expone un poco de lo que está pasando allá y dice que "Wilson y Felipe, ambos se reservaron sus nombres reales. Son dueños, cada uno, de un bar cafetería en Manila en El Poblado, una de las zonas más turísticas de mayor actividad económica. Los dos vecinos son de los pocos que quedan en su [00:05:00] cuadra, porque prácticamente todas las casas de la zona se transformaron en restaurantes, pequeños hoteles y hostales, escuelas de español o viviendas para alquileres cortas a través de aplicaciones como Airbnb, que toman los extranjeros y que en parte son la causa del sobrecosto en los precios de la vivienda para los habitantes tradicionales. Entre 2022 y 2023, los arriendos crecieron entre 50 y 100%.Este barrio cambió demasiado, dice Wilson, era familiar y vea, se volvió tierra de viciosos y jíbaros que atiende a domicilio. Toda esa 'gentrificación' como le dicen, es a raíz de los inversionistas extranjeros y se encareció todo. Carlos, tú has trabajado para empresas estatales en Medellín y Bogotá, la Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano. y [00:06:00] sofia, tú has trabajado en el Proyecto NN ahí en Medellín. Entonces quizás podrían ofrecernos una idea de lo que ha sucedido en Medellín en los últimos años y las últimas décadas en términos de gentrificación y qué papel tiene que desempeñar el turismo y los turistas en ello. Carlos: Pues yo, yo percibo esta situación como supremamente novedosa y reciente. Vale decir que Medellín en los 90 era una ciudad a donde no venía nadie. Es decir, la situación de violencia urbana. Toda esta crisis que desató el narcotráfico en la ciudad nos tenía marginados del resto del mundo. Era una ciudad bastante poco atractiva por lo violenta y de inversiones relativamente paralizadas.[00:07:00] Sofia: Fue la ciudad más violenta del mundo. Carlos: SíSofia: En cierto momento Carlos: Y necesitó de una estrategia de atención entre la presidencia de la república y la alcaldía local que ustedes en México le llaman "presedencia local" para encontrar alternativos de futuro. Se llamaban los seminarios de muchas conversaciones.Entonces, lo primero que quiero enseñar es que es un hecho muy nuevo, y muy reciente. Nosotros para ver un extranjero, era un futbolista que venían a los dos clubes. De resto aquí no venía a nadie. Ver rostros chinos o japoneses o alemanes eran, eso es muy sui géneris. Y el paisa, la cultura antioqueña es una cultura supremamente hospitalaria.La gente acá desborda de amabilidad. Es una cosa muy curiosa. El solo hecho de sentir a una persona de otra [00:08:00] región, no necesariamente extranjero, puede ser de otra región colombiana. El antioqueño desarrolla un, unas habilidades y unas formas de relación, muy amenas, muy atractivas. El antioqueño es una persona muy conversadora, muy dicharachero, y es muy abierto. Es muy tranquilo en las relaciones, diría eso en principio. Entonces sí, si sentimos, realmente se siente abrumadora la presencia de extranjeros, porque es notoria. Aquí mismo nosotros vivimos aquí. Yo vivo en un par de cuadritos donde los hoteles pequeños proliferan en dos cuadras han, se han desarrollado en los últimos tres años.cinco, seis, siete hoteles, y la presencia del extranjero, es notoria. Y como le digo en un principio, era muy bienvenida, porque el extranjero, pues trae monedas con un [00:09:00] cambio muy fuerte y también aquí, el país es de una mentalidad comercial y negociante extrema. Aquí el negocio se ve pa vender un hueco, pues hacemos otro hueco.Es decir, la gente aquí es supremamente ingeniosa en la forma de establecer negocios. Sofia: Si, y, y creo que la ciudad hizo un esfuerzo institucional por cambiar también la narrativa. Pues porque, como lo dice Carlos, estuvo muy estigmatizada, pues somos la ciudad de Pablo Escobar. Cierto.Eso es una carga como simbólica muy fuerte. Y entonces se ha hecho pues un un esfuerzo, por mostrar otras cosas que también somos. Creo que el reggaetón tiene mucho que ver como con la visibilidad de la ciudad también. Cierto, porque digamos que el reggaetón no solamente pues han salido grandes estrellas, grandes cantantes pues como de de aquí de Medellín, sino [00:10:00] que el reggaetón pues como muchas otras géneros musicales, pues como que en salsa o, o bueno enaltece, pues esas figuras como el narcotráfico de bueno, como cierta estética también. Y entonces es muy atractivo para muchos extranjeros venir a conocer la ciudad del reggaetón.Y esa era una cosa que estaba pasando, digamos, de una manera más orgánica y más lenta antes de la pandemia. Con la pandemia se corta y luego de la pandemia, si se desbordó. O sea, ocurre como un fenómeno desbordado. También me imagino, pues como por esas ansias de mucha gente de viajar y de pues, de haber estado como paralizada en sus lugares, y la ciudad realmente no estaba preparada.O sea, yo creo que todo ese esfuerzo institucional que

ENGLISH TRANSCRIPT BELOWEn este episodio, mi entrevistado es Cesar Pineda, sociólogo por la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Obtuvo el Doctorado en Ciencias Políticas y Sociales y la Maestría en Estudios Latinoamericanos, ambos con mención honorífica en la UNAM. Realizó estancias posdoctorales en el Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco. Su investigación se centra en la contradicción del capital en la naturaleza, los movimientos sociales, la autonomía, el Estado y la comunidad. Investigador Nivel I en el Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, es profesor de asignatura en la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la UNAM. A partir de 2024 es profesor-investigador de tiempo completo en el Instituto de Investigaciones José María Luis Mora. Es activista y acompañante en múltiples movimientos sociales.Notas del Episodio* La teoria y proceso del capital como metabolismo social* Biomercantilizacion* El problema de clase* Consecuencias escondidas del ecoturismo* Limites* Autoregulacion de las comunidades* Construyendo comunidad en la ciudad* Autonomia es la clave* Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundosTareaPagina profesional César Enrique Pineda (Ensayos, Libros, Proyectos)Twitter de CesarFacebook de CesarTranscripcion en EspanolChris: [00:00:00] Bienvenido César, al podcast El Fin del Turismo. Muchas gracias por estar dispuesto a hablar conmigo hoy. Me gustaría comenzar preguntándote, ¿Dónde te encuentros hoy y cómo se ve el mundo para ti allá? Cesar: Yo habito en Ciudad de México. Desde hace tiempo estoy haciendo una investigación, de nuevo, la continuidad del proceso del proceso del aeropuerto. Entonces estoy yendo muchas veces hacia Texcoco hacia el oriente de la ciudad, hacia el viejo lago de Texcoco, entonces tengo una doble mirada, la mirada urbana tradicional donde vivo y donde doy clases, que es en la UNAM y en el Mora, y por el otro lado, los pueblos, la comunidad y el el sistema lacustre al que estoy yendo cotidianamente.Chris: Y cómo va eso en Texcoco, si te puedo preguntar?Cesar: Va bien, creo que el frente de pueblos en defensa de la tierra ha tenido un nuevo triunfo. Y creo que es un nuevo avance, es un movimiento un poco anómalo en México porque [00:01:00] prácticamente ha ganado todas sus batallas, ha detenido los dos aeropuertos, ha liberado a sus presos y ahora ha logrado proteger el territorio.Y hoy se encuentran frente a un nuevo reto que es ser gobierno local, no? Entonces, en todas ha triunfado al final, a pesar de los costos enormes, pues que ha sufrido por la represión, por la persecución, por la precariedad también por la que viven muchos de sus miembros. Pero creo que van muy bien.Chris: Claro, wow, pues, qué bueno, qué hermosa resultado no? Cesar, parece, que mucho de tu trabajo, se basa en lo que podemos llamar la conversión de la naturaleza en capital, o al menos así es como los teóricos lo han descrito tradicionalmente. Me gustaría preguntar, ¿Cómo ves que eso sucede en el mundo del turismo, la conversión de naturaleza en capital para, para empezar, para darnos un [00:02:00] base de seguir? Cesar: Sí, bueno, hay que decir que lo que he tratado de también estudiar o teorizar. Cuando teorizamos hacemos generalizaciones. La teoría es una generalización para poder dialogar en contextos distintos, en casos distintos, sino cada caso por supuesto, es totalmente distinto que el otro por su historicidad, por su localidad, por su particularidad.Cuando teorizamos tratamos de hacer una generalización válida para muchos casos. Entonces, y eso nos permite a dialogar y pensar a muchos con una misma forma de nombrar y conceptualizar. Entonces, ese trabajo de conceptualización y teorización lo he hecho en la idea de cómo intentar comprender, se despliega efectivamente el capital territorialmente. Generalmente pensamos al capital solo como relaciones dinerarias, como inversiones y como ganancias, de hecho, compensamos el capital como, la [00:03:00] cosa, el dinero, en todo caso, como riqueza material, mercancías, puede ser ropa, puede ser autos, pero en general, el capital es un proceso. Que es lo que plantea a Marx, y el proceso es cómo la gente se organiza, organiza el trabajo, unos trabajan para otros y cómo toman efectivamente de la naturaleza lo que necesitan para producir nuevas mercancías o nuevos valores de uso, que es lo que, la utilidad que es lo que le llama Marx.En ese sentido, producir muchos valores de uso requiere necesariamente, de algún vínculo con la naturaleza. Ese vínculo Marx le llama metabolismo social porque es un vínculo, no solo, porque tomas lo que necesitas, los materiales, por decir así, algunos les llaman recursos en la economía. Generalmente en la ecología política o en la agro ecología les llamamos bienes [00:04:00] naturales. Porque no son cosas para simplemente recursos que están ahí disponibles para gastarse. Y ese vínculo que hoy se ha desarrollado todavía más con algunos teóricos de que han seguido la idea de metabolismo social de Marx, plantean siguiendo también algunas ideas de Marx, que es la forma de organizarnos, de organizar el trabajo. El trabajo es el vínculo con la naturaleza y ese vínculo es a la vez un intercambio de materia y de energía con los ecosistemas locales. Ese intercambio este más le llama metabolismo. Entonces, digo todo esto porque es muy importante pensar como lo que le llamamos la economía, desarrolla ciertas formas de actividad, de trabajo material y no solo de intercambios dinerarios y monetarios, porque a veces parece que una actividad da muchas ganancias y podría estar, tomando, por ejemplo, de la naturaleza, [00:05:00] demasiados bienes naturales, aunque produzca en realidad muchas ganancias, monetarias.Y en ese sentido, lo que he estado estudiando es precisamente cómo se despliegue el capital, buscando por decir así, lo que necesita de los ecosistemas, pero de los ecosistemas no necesita todo a veces, en ocasiones, si necesita todo el ecosistema, que eso es lo que voy a explicar, rapidísimo ahorita.Pero en otras ocasiones, necesita solo uno de los bienes naturales, necesita tierra para cultivar y entonces acapara sea comprando, sea despojando, sea rentando la tierra. Por el otro lado, puede no necesitar el suelo para producir, no solo es la tierra para producir, sino que además necesita que esa tierra tenga climas.Esto parece, no tan de sentido común. Lo tienen mucho más claro todos los campesinos, pero es evidente que en ciertas zonas se dan ciertas, [00:06:00] especies y en otras, por ejemplo en lugares fríos, se dan más pues la producción boscosa y por tanto, la producción, se cultiva pino y eucalipto. Y en los trópicos se cultivan frutas.Entonces las inversiones económicas que le podríamos llamar el capital, pero ese capital es un proceso como he dicho, reorganiza los trabajadores, a las trabajadoras. Organiza también la relación con la naturaleza o la reorganiza. Entonces, doy estos ejemplos siempre porque son muy ilustrativos de lo que sucede, por ejemplo, si hay más inversiones para cultivar, para producción maderera. La producción, obviamente los quien invierte requiere su ganancia rápido. Entonces tienes que invertir y tener ganancias. Tienes que invertir y vender rápidamente la madera, por ejemplo. Por tanto, pues, se cultivan las especies que crezcan más [00:07:00] rápido.Y por como crecen más rápido, necesitan más agua. Si necesitan más agua, agotan los mantos acuíferos. Aquí tenemos una consecuencia directa de la organización humana en la naturaleza, en como reorganizarla porque va sustituyendo el bosque nativo y lo sustituyes por especies que solo son las que se pueden vender, en este caso, pino y eucalipto.Ahí está claro, como entonces, se reorganiza el tiempo, a los trabajadores, por ejemplo. Si hay todos los trabajadores de la industria forestal que les ofrecen un tipo de trabajo y la relación con el agua, con los ecosistemas locales y con las especies que cultivas, ahí está todo el circuito de lo que organiza.Entonces, cuando pensamos en inversiones, no estamos pensando generalmente en lo que hay detrás. Así podríamos seguir la producción de un auto, la producción de algodón para nuestra ropa, la producción de cristal, la producción de hierro, de plásticos, todo se puede, pensar así. Y también dentro [00:08:00] de las formas de despliegue de la naturaleza, he pensado que haya en ocasiones, hay otra forma que le llamo bio mercantilización turística, que es acaparar ecosistemas completos para ponerlos, por decir así, poner a las ballenas, poner a los caimanes a trabajar, que es una forma de decirlo en el sentido de la renta de la tierra, la renta de los ecosistemas y sobre todo, la gran industria que se construye alrededor de los enclaves turísticos.Todo esto constituye una nueva relación con la naturaleza que es, creo la que vamos a estar conversando en tu programa, porque no modifica o no solo se le ha visto generalmente al turismo como una industria benévola porque no tiene chimeneas. Es muy distinta, por ejemplo, de pues de la industria petrolera, que es la que generalmente pensamos que es la única sucia.Pero la industria turística es [00:09:00] una industria. Lo que pasa es que es una industria de servicios. Es una industria también global. También es monopólica. O sea que está concentrada en pocas corporaciones y cambia, por supuesto, la forma de organizarnos alrededor de los ecosistemas.Chris: Wow. Me ha dejado pensar mucho en como las cosas que parecen como tours o recorridos, quizás podrían estar promocionados como ecológicas o ecológicas, caminatas en el bosque o igual esos recorridos en el mar, en el Yucatán o aquí en Oaxaca para ir a solo ver las las ballenas o tortugas, etc. ¿Es un poco así de lo que estás hablando, no? Cesar: Sí. Ahora hay que decir que estos servicios que tú mencionas generalmente que a veces les ponen el nombre eco turístico, son las de menor [00:10:00] producción de valor o mejor dicho, no producen valor, sino solo hay intercambi

On this episode of the pod, my guest is David Cayley, a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. For more than thirty years (1981-2012) he made radio documentaries for CBC Radio One’s program Ideas, which premiered in 1965 under the title The Best Ideas You’ll Hear Tonight. In 1966, at the age of twenty, Cayley joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960’s to promote international development. Two years later, back in Canada, he began to associate with a group of returned volunteers whose experiences had made them, like himself, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development. In 1968 in Chicago, he heard a lecture given by Ivan Illich and in 1970 he and others brought Illich to Toronto for a teach-in called “Crisis in Development.” This was the beginning of their long relationship: eighteen years later Cayley invited Illich to do a series of interviews for CBC Radio’s Ideas. Cayley is the author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (2022), Ideas on the Nature of Science (2009), The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (2004), Puppet Uprising (2003),The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (1998), George Grant in Conversation (1995), Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992), Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and The Age of Ecology (1990).Show Notes:The Early Years with Ivan IllichThe Good Samaritan StoryFalling out of a HomeworldThe Corruption of the Best is the Worst (Corruptio Optimi Pessima)How Hospitality Becomes HostilityHow to Live in ContradictionRediscovering the FutureThe Pilgrimage of SurpriseFriendship with the OtherHomework:Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State Press) - Paperback Now Available!David Cayley’s WebsiteThe Rivers North of the Future (House of Anansi Press)Ivan Illich | The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima (2000)Charles Taylor: A Secular AgeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, David, to the End of Tourism Podcast. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. David: Likewise. Thank you. Chris: I'm very grateful to have you joining me today. And I'm curious if you could offer our listeners a little glimpse into where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you through the lenses of David Cayley.David: Gray and wet. In Toronto, we've had a mild winter so far, although we did just have some real winter for a couple of weeks. So, I'm at my desk in my house in downtown Toronto. Hmm. Chris: Hmm. Thank you so much for joining us, David. You know, I came to your work quite long ago.First through the book, The Rivers North of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich. And then through your long standing tenure as the host of CBC Ideas in Canada. I've also just finished reading your newest book, Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. For me, which has been a clear and comprehensive homage [00:01:00] to that man's work.And so, from what I understand from the reading, you were a friend of Illich's as well as the late Gustavo Esteva, a mutual friend of ours, who I interviewed for the podcast shortly before his death in 2021. Now, since friendship is one of the themes I'd like to approach with you today, I'm wondering if you could tell us about how you met these men and what led you to writing a biography of the former, of Ivan.David: Well, let me answer about Ivan first. I met him as a very young man. I had spent two years living in northern Borneo, eastern Malaysia, the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As part of an organization called the Canadian University Service Overseas, which many people recognize only when it's identified with the Peace Corps. It was a similar initiative or the VSO, very much of the time.And When I returned to [00:02:00] Toronto in 1968, one of the first things I saw was an essay of Ivan's. It usually circulates under the name he never gave it, which is, "To Hell With Good Intentions." A talk he had given in Chicago to some young volunteers in a Catholic organization bound for Mexico.And it made sense to me in a radical and surprising way. So, I would say it began there. I went to CDOC the following year. The year after that we brought Ivan to Toronto for a teach in, in the fashion of the time, and he was then an immense celebrity, so we turned people away from a 600 seat theater that night when he lectured in Toronto.I kept in touch subsequently through reading mainly and we didn't meet again until the later 1980s when he came to Toronto.[00:03:00] He was then working on, in the history of literacy, had just published a book called ABC: the Alphabetization of the Western Mind. And that's where we became more closely connected. I went later that year to State College, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at Penn State, and recorded a long interview, radically long.And made a five-hour Ideas series, but by a happy chance, I had not thought of this, his friend Lee Hoinacki asked for the raw tapes, transcribed them, and eventually that became a published book. And marked an epoch in Ivan's reception, as well as in my life because a lot of people responded to the spoken or transcribed Illich in a way that they didn't seem to be able to respond to his writing, which was scholastically condensed, let's [00:04:00] say.I always found it extremely congenial and I would even say witty in the deep sense of wit. But I think a lot of people, you know, found it hard and so the spoken Illich... people came to him, even old friends and said, you know, "we understand you better now." So, the following year he came to Toronto and stayed with us and, you know, a friendship blossomed and also a funny relationship where I kept trying to get him to express himself more on the theme of the book you mentioned, The Rivers North of the Future, which is his feeling that modernity, in the big sense of modernity can be best understood as perversionism. A word that he used, because he liked strong words, but it can be a frightening word."Corruption" also has its difficulties, [00:05:00] but sometimes he said "a turning inside out," which I like very much, or "a turning upside down" of the gospel. So, when the world has its way with the life, death and resurrection and teaching of Jesus Christ which inevitably becomes an institution when the world has its way with that.The way leads to where we are. That was his radical thought. And a novel thought, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, who was kind enough to write a preface to that book when it was published, and I think very much aided its reception, because people knew who Charles Taylor was, and by then, they had kind of forgotten who Ivan Illich was.To give an example of that, when he died, the New York [00:06:00] Times obituary was headlined "Priest turned philosopher appealed to baby boomers in the 60s." This is yesterday's man, in other words, right? This is somebody who used to be important. So, I just kept at him about it, and eventually it became clear he was never going to write that book for a whole variety of reasons, which I won't go into now.But he did allow me to come to Cuernavaca, where he was living, and to do another very long set of interviews, which produced that book, The Rivers North of the Future. So that's the history in brief. The very last part of that story is that The Rivers North of the Future and the radio series that it was based on identifies themes that I find to be quite explosive. And so, in a certain way, the book you mentioned, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, [00:07:00] was destined from the moment that I recorded those conversations. Chris: Hmm, yeah, thank you, David. So much of what you said right there ends up being the basis for most of my questions today, especially around the corruption or the perversion what perhaps iatrogenesis also termed as iatrogenesis But much of what I've also come to ask today, stems and revolves around Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan story, so I'd like to start there, if that's alright.And you know, for our listeners who aren't familiar either with the story or Illich's take on it, I've gathered some small excerpts from An Intellectual Journey so that they might be on the same page, so to speak. So, from Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey:"jesus tells the story after he has been asked how to, quote, 'inherit eternal life,' end quote, and has replied that one must love God and one's neighbor, [00:08:00] quote, 'as oneself,' but, quote, who is my neighbor? His interlocutor wants to know. Jesus answers with his tale of a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, who is beset by robbers, beaten, and left, quote, 'half dead' by the side of the road.Two men happen along, but, quote, 'pass by on the other side.' One is a priest and the other a Levite, a group that assisted the priests at the Great Temple, which, at that time, dominated the landscape of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. Then, a Samaritan comes along. The Samaritans belonged to the estranged northern kingdom of Israel, and did not worship at the Temple.Tension between the Samaritans and the Judeans in the Second Temple period gives the name a significance somewhere between 'foreigner' and 'enemy.' [00:09:00] In contemporary terms, he was, as Illich liked to say, 'a Palestinian.' The Samaritan has, quote, 'compassion' on the wounded one. He stops, binds his wounds, takes him to an inn where he can convalesce and promises the innkeeper that he will return to pay the bill.'And so Jesus concludes by asking, 'Which of the three passers by was the neighbor?'Illich claimed that this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act. He had surveyed sermons from the 3rd through 19th centuries, he said, 'and found a broad consensus that what was being proposed was a, quote, rule of conduct.' But this interpretation was, in fact, quote, 'the opposite of what Jesus wante

On this episode, my guest is Craig Slee, a disabled writer, consultant and theorist dealing with mythology, folklore, magic and culture, exploring life through the lens of landscape, disability and fugitive embodiments.He has contributed essays and poetry focusing on the numinous and disability to various anthologies including The Dark Mountain Journal. Craig has also co-facilitated multiple seminar series at the Dresden Academy for Fine Arts, regarding ableism in the arts, as well as how ableism affects our relationship to space. In 2023 he was one of the speakers at the World Futures Studies Federation 50th Anniversary Conference, introducing the concept of (Dis)abling Futures. Craig resides in the northwest of England.Show NotesCornwall and the Seasons Who Gets to Decide What it Means to Know a Place?The Folding in of Identity to TourismA Question of Productive vs Generative AbilityAbleism and AttentionFinger Bending and the Freedom of MovementRedefining and Remembering Other Forms of MovementWhat is Stillness?The Dance of MountainsObeying LimitsHomeworkCold Albion (Craig’s Blog)Goetic Atavisms (Hadean Press)Craig’s Blue Sky Page | Facebook PageTranscriptChris: Welcome to the End of Tourism, Craig. Craig: Thank you for having me. Chris: Yes, it's great to be able to speak with you today. I've been ruminating for a couple of years now as to the themes that we might speak of. And I was introduced to you via a mutual friend and have come closer to your work via the Emergence Network's online gathering, We Will Dance With Mountains, in the last quarter of 2023.And so, to begin, I'd like to ask you first where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you, where you are. Craig: Where I find myself today is by the canal in my flat, looking out the window, just as evenings coming in, in the northwest of England, in Lancaster, and it's chilly here which is actually a good thing, I guess, these days.Chris: Perhaps I could ask you to elaborate a little bit on what Lancaster looks like, but I know that, you know, from our conversations previous that you grew up [00:01:00] in Cornwall, a place that was previously, a town, an area devoted to fishing and mining, and from what you've told me, it's also become a massive tourist trap that you know, from the little that I've seen online, that the area receives around 5 million visitors a year, and tourism makes up about a quarter of the local economy.So I'm curious what you've seen change there and what do you think has happened to Cornwall and its people as a result and maybe there's something in there as well regarding Lancaster. Craig: Yeah, so I should emphasize this. I was born in Cornwall. My family has been lived down there for many many generations anyway and my father's side of the family actually, at various points, worked in the tourist trade as well before they went on to other things.And, [00:02:00] yeah, I mean, I left because, frankly, there was no jobs that weren't tourism. I came to Lancaster to study because one, I have a physical disability which means that Cornwall is a very rural area, so you need to drive everywhere, and that's fine, I drove at that point, but for good or ill, a more urban center was better for me later in life as I left.But the way that it shifted, even in the years when I was growing up, was that, you know, essentially was a rural area where nothing really happened socially or culturally that much until the summer seasons. So, you were very, very aware of the seasons in terms of, you'd have visitors [00:03:00] starting, and that was when the town would wake up, and then it was kind of dead for the rest of the year, so it was very much one of those things where the tourist trade has actually made me more aware of human rhythms in the natural world than perhaps I would have been, because it's so based on seasonal stuff.And just looking at the way the infrastructure because a lot of the towns and areas, they boomed a little bit well, quite a lot in certain areas with the tin mining of the 19th century. But a lot of the architecture and things like that was 19th century. So you had small villages and slightly larger towns, and they have very, well, I guess some people, if they were tourists, would call "quaint, narrow streets."And when you have that many visitors, in the summer, you can't get down the streets. [00:04:00] You can't drive it because it's full of people walking. You know, there's an interesting anecdote I'd like to recount of when my father, he was a vicar, he was a priest, moved to a new area he would go to the local pub and all the locals would greet him as the priest and be like, very polite.And then when it would come out that my dad was actually a local, that he was born down there and part of the family, everybody would relax. And there was this real sort of strange thing where people came and stayed because it was a lovely area, but there was still that whole issue with second homes and certainly keeping an eye on things from a distance here during the pandemic when people left cities during the pandemic, they went down there amongst places in Britain.And that meant that, [00:05:00] literally, there were no houses for newly starting teachers, you know, teachers who had got jobs and were moving down there, couldn't find places to live because during the 2020 and sort of 2022 period, everything was just opening up either as Airbnb because there was this influx from the cities to the more rural areas because it was supposedly safer.You know, and I feel like that's a reflex that is really interesting because most people think of it as, oh, "a tourist area," people go there for leisure, they go there to relax and get away from their lives, which is true, but under a stressful situation like a pandemic, people also flee to beautiful quotes isolated areas, so there's that real sense of pressure, I think and this idea that we weren't entirely sure, growing up, [00:06:00] whether we would have a place to live because a lot of the housing was taken up by people with second homes. And plenty of people I went to school with because it's a surfing area took the knowledge that they learned in the tourism trade, and actually left and went to Australia. And they live on the Gold Coast now. So it's this self perpetuating thing, you know? Chris: Well, that leads me to my next question, which kind of centers around belonging and being rooted and learning to root, maybe even becoming a neighbor or some might say a citizen of a place.And with tourism or a touristic worldview, we seem to be largely stunted in our ability to know a place, to become part of that place in any significant or enduring sense of the word. And so, I'm curious what your thoughts are on what it means to know a place, [00:07:00] and perhaps on the often mad rush to say I know a place for the sake of social capital, you know, given the context of the kind of relative difficulties that one might incur, or in a place like Cornwall, and the relative degree of exile that forces people out.What do you think it means to know a place in the context of all of these economic pressures denying us that possibility, or at least making it really, really difficult. Craig: I think we have a real problem in modernity with the idea of knowing as a sense of capture, right? So if I know you, I have this boundary of this shape, this outline of Chris, right, that I can hold, that I can grasp. And I think sometimes when we say, "oh, I know a place," or, "oh, I know a person" there's no concept of the [00:08:00] ongoing relationality. You know, you capture the image and then you keep it. And it's a whole construct of extractive knowledge that really, I think, comes down to the idea that the humans are the ones who get to decide what a place is, right?So. I could say in the standard sense, "Oh, I know Cornwall because I, you know, I grew up there for nearly 20 years." My family has been there since about the 1500s. You know, "I know a place, it's in my bones." Yada yada yada. All the metaphors you want to use. But the fact of the matter is, the place itself influences me more than I influence it. So there's this strange sense of belonging in which modernity [00:09:00] says "I belong" or "it belongs to me" rather than perhaps the place has extended hospitality to me and allowed me to grow and I could live/work in a place for 30 years and never know it because we're not comfortable as a culture with the idea of going, "I don't know this place."And it's a variety. It's always changing. And I think about all the times I used to watch the sea and talk to folks whose parents were fishermen or lifeboatmen, and they'd be like, "Yeah, we know the waters, but the waters can change. We know roughly what they do under certain conditions, but we don't know them completely, because they can always surprise us."And So, when somebody says, "oh, you're from Cornwall, you're a Cornishman," and all that sense of identity, [00:10:00] I'm like, "yeah, but that's, that's both really fluid for me, because, you know, there's a lot of history." Is it the tourist world of the 20th and 21st century, or is it the farming and the mining that goes back to the Neolithic?How we relate to a place purely in a modern sense isn't, to my mind anyway, the only way to conceive of belonging because, even though I'm now 300 miles away from there, I have its isotopes, its minerals from drinking the water in my teeth, you know. So, on some level, the idea that you have to be in a place also to belong to a place is something that I'm curious about because, there's this whole notion, [00:11:00] "you're only in the place and you've been in a place for this long and that means you know it and you're local." Whereas growing up, there was this sort of weird thing where it was like, "yeah, you might have been here 30 years and everybody knows you, but you're not a local." Right? You still belong, but there was this other ca

On this episode, my guests are Jesse Mann (editor-director) and Tyson Sadler (director), the brains behind the documentary The Last Tourist. Jesse is both a picture editor and director whose professional work has spanned commercial, tv and film projects. The Last Tourist is her second feature film as editor. Her first film, as both editor and director, Material Success, screened internationally and won the Audience Choice at the Canadian Film Festival and Best Film at the Canadian Film Festival (2012). Most recently, she both directed and edited the online horror mini-series “The Confinement” (2021). She is a member of the Directors Guild of Canada and an associate member of the Canadian Cinema Editors. Jesse has an B.F.A. from Ryerson University's School of Image Arts.Tyson Sadler is an explorer, traveller and award-winning filmmaker. He has directed video content and documentaries for The New York Times, Associated Press, and The Huffington Post. His films have been screened at festivals around the world including Tribeca Film Festival, South by Southwest, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. An early pioneer i virtual reality documentary, he has worked tirelessly to use cutting edge technology to tell stories that build empathy around causes such as climate change, forced migration, and human rights.Show Notes:The Film’s InceptionIndustry PolarityRegulating TravelAddressing the Root ProblemsGreenwashing Animal and Child Welfare TourismHow the Wealth Gap Increased During COVIDWhat was Left on the Cutting Room FloorHomework:WATCH THE FILM HEREThe Last Tourist Film Website | Instagram | FacebookThe Last Tourist TrailerJesse Mann's Website | InstagramTyson Sadler’s Website | InstagramTranscript:Chris: Welcome Jesse and Tyson to the End of Tourism Podcast. Jesse: Thanks Chris for having us. Tyson: Thanks for having us. Chris: Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your documentary film, The Last Tourist. So, it was released in 2022 to great reception.And as you might imagine, many of my listeners have pointed me in its direction. And after watching the film, I found myself really grateful that people finally approached these themes in the medium of documentary filmmaking and with what seemed to be a budget to do justice to what those themes confront. And so first I'd like to ask you two how The Last Tourist got started and what the inspiration behind the film's creation was and how did you decide to write a treatment for it? Tyson: Ultimately, you know, I think the inspiration for The Last Tourist came from a combination of personal shared experience and a shared passion for travel and particularly responsible travel.You know, in early 2018, I was approached [00:01:00] by the executive producers to write a treatment, for a short film around responsible tourism in the country of Peru. And through, you know, some follow up conversations, we sort of quickly realized that we had an opportunity because, a large scale documentary, on the subject of responsible tourism just didn't exist yet. I mean, we have wonderful films out there which challenge our conversations with our relationship with climate change and our relationship with our food source like An Inconvenient Truth or like Food Inc., but we didn't at that time yet have a documentary which really challenged our perceptions of the global impact of the travel and tourism industry and so over conversations with with our team and the producers we quickly realized that we had a unique opportunity to make "An Inconvenient Truth" for the travel industry and in early 2018, we seized on that opportunity to explore the positive and negative impacts of tourism on destinations.Jesse: And I think just to add to what Tyson was saying, I think originally [00:02:00] it started off as a short project and yourself and the executive producers who brought us together kind of pushed for it to become the large scale project that had ended up being filmed in 15 different countries or 16 with 400 hours of footage.So, sometimes you don't know, especially myself as a co-writer and editor, when you come on to a project, in the initial stages, you think, "Oh, you know, this is wonderful. It sounds like a great project." I had been an avid traveler, lived in a few different countries over 20 years and I thought, yeah, this is a story that needs to be told, but I will say in no way in the beginning, did I ever think it was going to be, and I think Tyson didn't either, was it going to be such a huge project. And you comment, Chris, on the expansiveness of the subject and the different kind of facets of the tourism [00:03:00] industry we were able to look at.And really I have to say that I'm happy that we got to touch on all those points and to the chagrin of my personal sleep and Tyson's as well, but it started off small, I have to say that, and it grew into something tremendous that I think we're very proud of.Tyson: It really was a natural progression of our desire to raise awareness about responsible tourism and its consequences. We had our world premiere, honestly, I think it was about two years ago now at the Vancouver International Film Festival, two years ago. And a little over two years ago, a little over two years ago.And the film is still doing a festival run. Just last weekend, Jesse was at the the Innsbruck Film Festival and it's still been getting a wonderful response, great conversations around it. And we're streaming on platforms around the world, you know, Crave in Canada, Hulu in the U.S., Amazon Prime in other countries. I was just in French Polynesia and was able to find our film on Amazon Prime, which was really delightful [00:04:00] to see that. Jesse: Yeah, it makes us happy as filmmakers to know that the story that we spent a lot of time trying to create in a way that we thought would connect with audiences worldwide is actually getting out there. And so it's really nice to be speaking to you on your podcast as well and kind of extend that out to potentially more people who haven't seen the film or some who just want to talk more about the topics. Chris: And I wanted to ask you two, given the fact that the film was released, you know, still very much in a pandemic during the, the COVID 19 times what the reactions were given the fact that tourism had ground to a halt in that time you know, I received a lot of Mail regarding your film, like, ah, you have to check this out.You have to watch this, right? And so a lot of people really excited about the project, about the film. But then I guess I'm also curious about[00:05:00] if there was much of an industry backlash in regards to the degree of sincerity perhaps around which the film exhibited these kind of deep and sometimes dire consequences that visit themselves on places and people in the name of tourism.Tyson: Yeah. I think the reactions to the film have been in my experience, almost entirely positive. But people don't come to me with criticism, they come to me with congratulations, but I think there's a lot of individuals in the tourism industry and sponsors that have really welcomed our film, The Last Tourist, as a necessary and eye opening piece of work.It sparked a lot of interesting conversations and prompted the industry to, in many ways, I think, reevaluate some of their practices. You Jesse: If we back it up to when we were just when we were meeting with all of the different professionals that we interviewed across the different facets of the tourism industry, I mean, when you and I were writing the story, there were so [00:06:00] many different conflicting opinions on how to solve one issue that we still come across that sometimes when we meet those industry experts outside of, let's say, film audiences.Because When we were writing it, we had to kind of decide which side of the coin we were going to follow through our story with, and whether it's a topic of let's say regulation, that was a topic that Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about when we were making the film because the industry in itself is kind of very polarized in terms of regulation.There's some strong proponents within the tourism industry who want regulation. And then there's some who are very against it. And Tyson and I had a lot of conversations about that. And I think we still do when we meet certain industry professionals out there and I think that's a really important topic as well.[00:07:00] Now that you are bringing up, post covid and the pandemic where we saw kind of what happens when things are shut down. You know, we see both the positive and the negative. I mean we mentioned it in the film, but almost every single person that we interviewed in our film lost their means of income during that time. Gone.And at the same time, the world experienced kind of you know, a refuge from, you know, airplane emissions and damage to destinations. And, you know, these were calculable things like we could see that this was a definite impact. So, I think there's these kind of topics and these conversations are where we see a lot of polarity.And I think that we tried our best to focus on the people and the developing nations in our story. But, there are a lot [00:08:00] of stories that were left on the cutting room floor and so it is good to discuss them after in a podcast like this. I know that's kind of a long winded interjection, but I do believe that we do have some polarity for sure Tyson and I have come across, but just not in terms of what Tyson is talking about, in terms of not not so much with the audiences It is more a bit in the industry. Tyson: I'll share an observation. During the process of creating this film, we interviewed literally dozens of travel experts, you know from academics to tour operators across the industry.It's universally recognized that responsible tourism and sustainable tourism is a good thing. But then when we dive a little bit deeper I found a very fractured

On this episode, my guest is Sean P. Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Much of his research has focused on the relationship between social media and tourism, and how colonial histories shape today’s ideologies and visual cultures of travel. The inequalities that result from many forms of tourism development, he argues, are intimately linked with how tourists create content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and the ways tourists frame themselves in landscapes and alongside local residents often replay colonial hierarchies.Show Notes: Why Study Instagram?The Pre-tour Narrative (Edward Bruner, Raul Salazar)The Habitus of Tourism (or How We Got Here)The Promontory Witness (or that photo)The Logic of InfluenceEmptying the Landscape (John Urry)The Techno-Generational DivideMedia EcologyOther Horizons in OmanHomework:Sean P. Smith - Tilburg UniversitySean P. Smith: Twitter / X | Instagram | Google Scholar (Articles)Transcript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Sean, to the pod. Thank you so much for being willing to join us to speak about your work. Sean: Thanks very much for having me. Chris: My pleasure. I'm curious, Sean where you're speaking from today and, and how the world is, how the world might be housing you there. Sean: Well, it's very rainy and dark. I'm in the Southern Netherlands, an area called North Brebant, where I just moved less than a month ago.So, in many places of moving around, if so, getting used to this one. Chris: Sean, I found out about your work from one of the pod's listeners who sent in a link to one of your academic articles entitled, Instagram Abroad, Performance, Consumption, and Colonial Narrative in Tourism. Now, I've been ruminating on the effect that social media has on tourism, spectacle, surveillance, and cultures of disposability for a long time now.So I'm really excited to speak with you today. And [00:01:00] likewise parts of the podcast are shared via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, so there's always this sense of kind of feeding the machine. unaware and perhaps more aware each time. And so first then, I'm curious why focus on Instagram in the context of critical tourism studies? What makes it different from say Facebook or Twitter?Sean: Yeah, that's a really good question Chris. I think with Instagram, in many contexts around the world, certainly not universally, but it's the social media platform that is most readily identified with not just tourism, but the way that people represent themselves engaging in tourism. It's very image driven.Of course, people do write captions, they do engage in other forms of storytelling, but nowadays it's mostly pictures and especially reels, arguably in the last few years. And for a long time, this [00:02:00] has been could almost say the dream work of tourism going back 200, maybe longer years. So even though today, I think you can find forms of tourism well represented TikTok to varying degrees on Facebook.Instagram, at least in many of the places where I've conducted research, is the place that one goes to both learn about places to travel and also to show how oneself travels.Chris: And I'm kind of imagining that we're more or less in the same age range, but I'm curious if on your travels, you mentioned just briefly that you had also spent time backpacking as a younger person and I'm curious if Instagram existed at the time and also if this dream work was evident to you in your travels.Sean: It was. I think I was relatively young when I got my first [00:03:00] smartphone, but certainly not as young as people nowadays. I must have been maybe 22 or 23. So I did have some years of traveling before I think Instagram really reshaped the way that tourism is done, not just for people that actually use this app, but regardless of whether or not anyone's ever downloaded it on their phone, I think Instagram has had a significant impact on the way that tourism is done. So when I first got a smartphone, I was in a period of my life where I was able to travel quite frequently and that was something that I was really pursuing at the time. And Instagram was a way that I was able to engage in a long running interest in photography, but also kind of a diary of where I had been, but certainly one that was legible and sort of visible to other people.And it was through that, you could say "performance" of travel that began to think a bit more critically about this app and other social media [00:04:00] platforms as well. And the way that it was reshaping tourism destinations. Chris: Mm. Mm. Yeah, you mention in your work this notion of the pre tour narrative.And I'm wondering if we could unpack that a little bit for our listeners and what part Instagram plays in this pre tour narrative. Sean: Yeah, I'm very happy to point that out, because I think this is, this is an important way to think about tourism, and that particular phrase I'm drawing on the work of Edward Bruner, who was an American anthropologist.And that's also been picked up in other realms to be identified as what other people have called tourism imaginaries, such as in the work of Raúl Salazar. So what this concept of the pre-tour narrative describes is that before people travel to a particular destination, they are exposed to [00:05:00] various forms of representation.And oftentimes this is very image based or narrative based. So we would see this maybe thinking back in the era before social media, images encountered in magazines and films, perhaps novels, other forms of storytelling, such as just talking with people who have been to places that one wants to travel.However, in social media, as it's become more integral to the way that people conduct their everyday lives, let alone traveling. It's become the dominant engine for the way that the pre tour narrative is formed. Many people who use Instagram as a space to learn about places to travel, they will encounter images of these of these places on this app or and not just sort of the way that it's portrayed, but what people do in these spaces, the people that live [00:06:00] in the places they're going to visit. So, this process of the formation of a pre tour narrative has really always been a part of tourism. But I think it perhaps it's if not accelerated, then certainly taken a bit of a different form with the advent of social media.Chris: So on some level, it's not just the question of what you're going to go see, but also how you're going to see it, how you're going to stand in front of that tower or restaurant and see, experience, what's there. Sean: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Chris: And I know it's a little early in the interview, but I'd like to jump into the heart of the matter and your critiques, if we can. You know, you wrote this incredible article Landscapes for Likes, capitalizing on travel with Instagram. And, in that article, you wrote that, deep breath, "Instagram's networked architecture and affordances produce three [00:07:00] outcomes that circulate and magnify utterances about travel to a degree impossible in pre-networked media.One, a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms. Two, the scalability of embodied performances entrench the motif's narrative underpinnings. And three, the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self." Now that's a beautiful mouthful. And so I'm wondering, if you might be willing and able to flesh out these three outcomes for our listeners. Sean: No, that's brilliant. And it's nice to talk about these things, perhaps when they're written that can be quite a bit denser.So maybe we can start with the first idea, this mediated travel habitus. And with the word habitus, I'm trying on the work of [00:08:00] the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes he's talking about class and culture and ways that people display their belonging within a particular class.And the reason that I'm looking to Bordeaux here is tourism and travel, really, it's important to look at this as a practice that has been connected to what Bordeaux might call the pursuit of distinction, to the search for an acquisition of cultural goods. You know, we might think of cultural goods as being a painting or a taste and a particular kind of music, clothes, certain way of speaking even. And when one amasses certain, certain cultural goods, and they're recognized as being part of the upper classes, being marks of somebody who is [00:09:00] sophisticated, somebody who is typically from a fairly privileged financial background, these cultural goods are desirable.So, this background I think is important because tourism from its modern beginnings in the 18th century has been obtaining these experiences and often physical artifacts that can be a way of claiming a certain social status. So, maybe you've discussed this in other podcasts already, but, when the Grand Tour began in the 1600s, but really took off in the 1700s there was this process in which the aristocratic men, young men, were sent on a tour around Europe, and they would go to capitals like Paris, later Vienna, and then especially places like Rome, and, where they could encounter the remnants of the Roman Empire and classical learning. [00:10:00] And this was meant to do a few things in the first sense. It was meant to introduce them other parts of the world, to certain historical understandings. They could refine their Latin. They could get better at French and then they could go home and be recognized as a sophisticated member of the aristocracy. And this practice really became quite popular up until about the turn of the 19th century, when it stopped briefly because of wars on the European continent, and then after the Napoleonic Wars ended, it basically exploded. So when we think about over tourism now in 2023, this was, you know, 1815, 1820s, and this was a period where all of a sudden there were more tourists than ev

On this episode, my guest is Manish Jain, a man deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems, cultural imaginations and inter-cultural dialogue. Inspired by MK Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore,  Ivan Illich, his illiterate village grandmother, his unschooled daughter, indigenous communities and Jain spiritual philosophy, he is one of the leading planetary voices for deschooling our lives and reimagining education. He has served for the past 25 years as Chief Beaver (ecosystems builder) of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of some of the most innovative educational experiments in the world - the Swaraj University, the Jail University, Complexity University, Tribal Farmversity, the Creativity Adda, the Learning Societies Unconference, the Walkouts-Walk-on network, Udaipur as a Learning City, the Families Learning Together network, Berkana Exchange.  He co-launched the global Ecoversities Alliance with 500+ members in 50 countries. Show Notes:Kidnapped by the American DreamGrandma’s UniversityReclaiming our Cultural ImaginationCultural Imagination for the Culturally HomelessThe Radical and Exponential Power of TrustUnlearning Cultural Appropriation in the Oral TraditionJugard, or “playful improvisation”Being Reclaimed by AncestorsSwaraj University - Money, Love, and DeathAlivelihoods and DeadlihoodsTraditions of Hospitality in RajasthanEcoversitiesHomework:Swaraj University WebsiteEcoversities WebsiteJugaad (Wikipedia)Transcript:[00:00:00] Welcome, Manish, to the End of Tourism podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Chris. Great to be here. Great to be with you. Speaking of here, I was wondering if you could share with our listeners where you find yourself today and maybe what the world looks like for you where you are. Yes, I live in a very magical place called Udaipur.It's in Rajasthan, India. I have been here for the last 25 years. Before that I was moving cities every year. I was living in the U. S. and Europe. And my village is about two hours from where I live, from the city. And I have lots of relatives here, lots of ancestors around. And this happens to be one of the major tourist destinations of India.So it's an interesting combination of very [00:01:00] cosmopolitan kind of global jet set coming in, but also lots of traditional culture, local knowledge, still alive. We were lucky to be called backwards and underdeveloped. And so many things have remained but again under, under continuous threat by kind of urbanization and global economy.But yeah, it's a very beautiful place, lots of palaces, lakes all kinds of animals on the street. On a good day you'll see an elephant walking down the street or a camel just in our neighborhoods and yeah, I love it here. So it's, I mean, it's found a place in my heart for sure. Hmm. What a gift. What a gift to, to live in a place that you love and, you know, it seems to be that question at the heart of the themes of the podcast and in that regard, I wanted to begin by asking you a little bit about your journey, Manish. So[00:02:00] from what I've read, from what I've heard, a lot of your work centers around de schooling and unlearning, specifically with Swaraj University and other educational endeavors, Ecoversities being one of them.And I'd like to return to those themes and projects in a little bit and start by asking you, among other things, about your earlier accolades as a Harvard graduate and someone with a degree from Brown University. One of your bios says that you worked for, among others the American multinational investment bank, Morgan Stanley, as well as UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, and USAID in South Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.And so I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share what led to your initial involvement in these rather prominent institutions, and then subsequently, what led to leaving them behind thereafter? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, hearing that [00:03:00] always gives me the shivers a little bit. It's like such a long time ago now. But so I kind of actually grew up with a deep sense of wanting to serve, serve the world. And when I was growing up I actually, I tell people I was kidnapped when I was three years old, born in India, but then taken to the U. S. Kidnapped by the American dream, which I over time realized was a nightmare for most of the planet. So this deep sense of service has always been, been with me, maybe from my mother, from my father, from my grandparents, many, many sources from, inspired by also Gandhi and, and Tagore and many other Indian freedom fighters.But I kind of grew up with this narrative, if you want to serve, you should go to the big places, the places of big power, those institutions, that's where you can influence, that's where you can make the most impact. And so that kind of was a trajectory that I, I kind of [00:04:00] got put on I kind of was very good.I never liked being in these institutions, but I was very good at faking it I faked it through school all the way to Harvard and, and so I was pretty good at faking it and eventually it caught up with me and I started feeling like I was becoming a fake. So, but going to those places I thought there were, you know, those were the centers of power and that when I got there, I started feeling that these places, each of these places, one by one, I started realizing that they were actually quite powerless in many ways, surrounded by a sense of scarcity and fear and very limited imagination.And so one by one, I became disillusioned with each of each of those places. I was expecting that, you know, these would be the places which could help serve humanity, but I realized that they were built on, you know, this continuous model of extraction and colonization and exploitation of [00:05:00] life.And so even with education, I felt like, okay education will be the solution and I started realizing that education was a huge part of the problem. And so that's what led me started me on the de schooling path to try to see how we can find other ways besides relying on these institutions and the logic of capitalism and commodification to solve our problems. You know, over time I started really developing a severe mistrust of experts.I was one of them, like, although I'm fake and so are the rest of these guys. So by the time I was 28, I hit the wall. And I was like I don't have anywhere else to go, I've been to all these big places, and I don't really see, see any hope from them. I don't think they can be repaired either or that they can actually take the kinds of initiatives that are needed to change the game.So that's what led me back to India then[00:06:00] to be with my illiterate village grandmother. And I thought I'll take care of her. And then I, my wife and I realized that we had inadvertently become part of our grandmother's university and she was our unlearning guru. To both Get beyond I would say a lot of our own fears and anxieties, get beyond a lot of the, let's say Western liberal do gooder frameworks, get beyond our attachment to institutions just to solve things for us and start to understand and remember, I think remembering is a word that I have discussed many times with old common friend of ours, Gustavo Esteva, but start to remember that we have much more richness and wealth and creativity, possibility within us and our, and within our communities. So that's been a little bit of the journey to re remember and reclaim and reimagine things.I [00:07:00] remember seeing in one of your talks that you said that your work or to you, what you understood your work to be is, is a way of reclaiming our cultural imagination. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that. Yeah, I think basically I think the deepest form of colonization has happened is to our imaginations.And there is a phrase from the eighties from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher called TINA. "There Is No Alternative." So, as there was an uprising that started happening around the world questioning the dominant development paradigm, the global economy, it was quickly suppressed, repressed by this phrase, TINA.This is the best system that we have, and you know, there's, there's nothing beyond it, so you should just try to improve what's there. And so I think what then [00:08:00] people are forced into is to try to fix or let's say work with what is the existing frameworks and definitions that we have been fed about things like progress or development or success or happiness and then we are all in a very deep endless losing race to try to catch up with something.And we're not even sure what happens when you win. Maybe that's where it hit me. You know, there's a saying, if you, if you beat them at their own game, you lose everything. And so I kind of started realizing that personally, and also when I was looking at the development paradigm more different more closely.So I think, you know, what else is possible first of beyond the kind of logic of the rational mind, what's possible beyond the anthropocentric perspectives that we have on life, what's possible beyond global corporations and institutions deciding what's best for us, what's [00:09:00] possible beyond markets and technologies as the solutions for all of the planet's woes.I think that's what we're trying to explore when I talk about cultural imagination. And I, I think that the first step is to open up the definitions again. This is another thing I think many of my elders, Gustavo, and, Ivan Illich and a person here in India who was a friend of Gustavo's, Claude Alvarez, many were urging us that we need to open up the definitions of things.So that's what usually I think in a lot of the decolonial movements, what didn't happen that we accepted their definitions of development of the good life, all of those things. And then we started pursuing that, but actually it's a very exciting time that we can actually crack

Show NotesJohn Urry’s The Tourist GazePhotographyThe SensesSurveillance and Artificial Intelligence (AI)SpectacleHomeworkTranscriptWelcome friends to Season Zero of the End of Tourism podcast. In these mini-episodes, you'll hear short transmissions speaking to the principles of the pod. We'll introduce you, our listeners, to the themes and questions that will be woven into our conversations, a kind of primer on our politics. This episode is entitled "Spectacle, the Senses and Surveillance." [00:00:31] So we can't talk about tourism without talking about the senses without talking about spectacle and without talking about surveillance. How do people come to perceive new worlds, sensually? How do we smell, taste, touch, hear, and see in foreign lands? And how did tourism become such a spectacle, driven incessantly by cameras, vision, and consumption? How is it that our movements feed surveillance states and surveillance societies? [00:01:09] The English sociologist, John Urry coined the phrase, "the tourist gaze." His work dove into the worlds and ways in which tourists see in foreign lands, the way they look, observe, and watch local people, the way they watch local places themselves, and even each other.[00:01:32]Modern people move with their eyes. We have become intensely visual beings. Some would even say that we are hypnotized by the eyes. On average, the other senses amount for a combined 15% of our perception. But not every culture carries this sensorial imbalance like we do. In other words, this way of perceiving the world is not natural, but cultural.[00:02:03]This is not only what tourists bring to other worlds, but how they arrive in them, how they understand or more often misunderstand other cultures, people and places, through this hypnosis. Western worldviews reflect the images that Western people have their travels. None of this is new. Since the Renaissance, travel writing, manufactured the image of the world for those back home. Before photography, travel writing was the only way to explain to the masses how far off lands appeared.[00:02:43] Each traveling author, each trip reflected the histories and power dynamics and prejudices of the time. Today, the same thing happens with photography and with social media. On the podcast, we will look deeply into the stereoscope of media, both past and present to understand these unseen consequences. [00:03:08] Today, it seems that Urry's "tourist gaze" is intimately hitched to the camera and to photography. Photography has been a part of travel and tourism since the first cameras in the mid-19th century. Today, however, with the inundation of smartphones and wifi worldwide, the amount of photos taken is astronomical. The total number of photos ever taken has doubled in the span of just a few years. [00:03:36] Of course, this has its consequence in the world and especially in the places, tourists, visit. The smartphone with the capacity to connect to the internet almost anywhere is the most dangerous and effective Trojan horse of globalization. If there was ever a way to attack or subvert traditional culture and culture itself, the smartphone, the handset of modernity, is it. It bypasses barriers that might otherwise shield people from the consequences of foreign entitlement. As soon as it has a foothold, it converts local people faster than any missionary would.[00:04:19]The relationships that exist in could exist between our human sensing and the natural or more-than-human world is a kind of birthright. We might even call it a birth-responsibility, but today they are often ignored and neglected in favor of technology. The senses themselves are dulled to the point where we require more technology simply in order to get by in our day-to-day lives. [00:04:47] As the senses whither, so does the wonder and wisdom and the kinship with the local world that our ancestors apprenticed and entrusted to us. In turn, our senses are outsourced to higher resolutions and more megapixels. They are outsourced to the cloud. We must ask, then, what are the consequences for having neglected those relationships, for having forgotten that wisdom? What happens to the more-than-human worlds in our midst as a result?[00:05:23] What do they imagine us to be doing as we abandon them and the ancestors among us who might've honored, such senses, such sensing, deepening our ancient inheritance. [00:05:35]You see, this is what tourism does. Sometimes, people travel only to take photos that have already been taken millions of times. Tourists desire to carve out the meaningless notches on their belt, drawing more and more attention to the slow destruction of the very thing they photograph, now reduced to nothing more than a photo or a photo op.[00:06:03]Each photo, each location, each reaction, like, in commentary is recorded and funneled into an artificial intelligence underground, where it is converted into ways of both reducing and controlling our attention. This is what sends thousands, if not millions of people to foreign destinations as hunters of experience and pseudo-status.[00:06:30]The attention economy feeds tourism and tourism undoes everything that makes a place itself. Overtouristed cities are already implementing Machiavellian panopticons, the all seeing eyes of local governments. They are using over tourism itself as a pretext to install surveillance programs that track every movement in and out of these places. Entire cities and entire populations. This is already well underway in places like Venice, Italy. [00:07:07] Likewise, governments and industry are already launching digital travel passports that will not only contain all government-related documents, but act as "surveillance by design" tracking devices. The data can then be evaluated in order to privilege certain travelers over others, not unlike what is being done in China right now with the social credit and rating system there. In every way, shape, and form tourism feeds the dream-slash-nightmare of a totalitarian world. [00:07:43] It seems to me that in the west almost no one is not a tourist. Let me say that again. It seems to me that in the west, almost everyone is a tourist. Almost everyone is a tourist, which is to say that we have become amateurs and strangers in our own neighborhoods, in part, because the spectacle of modern life and its media has ennobled a way of being in the world and in the neighborhood that is both temporary and seemingly inconsequential.[00:08:17] The way we see in foreign lands comes from the way we see at home. We don't arrive in destinations as tourists. We leave home as tourists. This comes from home being understood and known, in our time, as an option, as a feeling, and even as a photo op. When home is no longer a place, when home becomes a choice or a potential "base," the responsibility of place is left in the hands of governments, usually to be sold off to the highest bidder. [00:08:58] Home is hit with a wave of consequences, not unlike the places tourists go to visit and often for the same reasons. For our listeners, this might sound dreary, lamentable, and even over the top, but consider that if this arises for you in these ways, it might do so as a result of these things arriving mostly unconsidered. [00:09:25] These are dangerous times and to be properly in them to find ourselves as faithful witnesses to the times, will likely ask more than we're willing and to give. That's okay too, and probably expected.[00:09:40] This is both strange and mandatory because the times we're living in have been abandoned by a touristic mindset. For many, the old, week-long vacation has now become a lifelong lifestyle choice. Wanderlust, in other words. Not just escape, but socially legislated abandonment. [00:10:03]Spectacle that conceals the wilting of the senses. Spectacle that conceals the rise of surveillance societies. Spectacle, that we will approach these conversations in a way that, all willing, subverts spectacle. Finding worthy resistance strategies, staying home and standing in solidarity with touristed places and peoples so that we may find a worthy way to bury spectacle. Welcome to the end of tourism. Get full access to Chris Christou at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode, my guests are Martin Lena and Linda Poppe of Survival International. They join me to discuss “fortress conservation” in the Congo, the issues facing Kahuzi-Biega National Park, and the recent victories of Survival International there. Linda is a political scientist and director of the Berlin office of Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous peoples' rights. She is also part of Survival’s campaign to Decolonize Conservation, which supports Indigenous peoples, who continue to suffer land theft and human rights abuses in the name of conservation.Martin is an advocacy officer for Survival International. He primarily works on Survival’s campaign to Decolonize Conservation and has collected testimonies directly from communities facing violations of their rights in the name of conservation. Show Notes:What Conservation Looks like in the Democratic Republic of the CongoThe Evictions of the BatwaSafari Tourism in DRC ConflictThe Militarization of Conservation in Kahuzi-Biega National ParkLand Guards vs Land GuardiansOrganizing Victory! Scrapping French Involvement in Kahuze-BiegaThe German Government Continues to Fund the ParkSolidarity: How to Respond / Act in ConcertHomework:Survival International: French government scraps funding plan for Kahuzi-Biega National Park, citing human rights concernsSurvival International Decolonize Conservation CampaignBalancing Act: The Imperative of Social and Ecological Justice in Kahuzi-BiegaTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism Podcast, Martin and Linda. I'd love it if I could start by asking you two to explain to our listeners where you two find yourselves today and what the world looks like there for you. Linda: Well, hi everyone. My name is Linda. I work for Survival International and I'm in Berlin. I'm at home, actually, and I look forward to talking to you and chatting with you.It's dark outside already, but, well, that's, I guess, the time of the year. Martin: And I'm based in Paris, also at home, but I work at Survival's French office. And how does the world feel right now? It feels a bit too warm for October, but other than that. Chris: Well, thank you both for for joining me today. I'd like to begin by reminiscing on the season three interview that I had with your colleague Fiore Longo, entitled "Decolonizing Conservation in Africa and Beyond."And in that interview, we discussed the history [00:01:00] of conservation as colonization in the context of Tanzania and the national parks that were built there and the indigenous lands that were stolen in order to do so. I'm curious if you two could offer a bit of background for our listeners in terms of the history of conservation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and especially in regards to the Batwa people and the Kahuzi Biega National Park.Linda: We were quite you know, astonished of the colonial history that, we find in the park where we're here to discuss today. Well, the Congo, obviously, you know, was a colony. And I think in this context, we also need to look at the conservation that is happening in the DRC today.And a lot of the things that you have discussed with our colleague, feel very true for the DRC as well. And the, the park that we're going to look at today, I think it's probably [00:02:00] also the best example to start to explain a little bit what conservation looks like in DRC. It's an older park, so it was created a longer time ago, and it was always regarded as something that is there to protect precious nature for people to look at and not for people to go and live in.And this is exactly what the problem is today, which we see continues, that the people that used to live on this land are being pushed outside violently, separated from the land which they call home, which is everything for them, the supermarket, the church, the school, just in the name of conserving supposed nature.And unfortunately, this is something that we see all over the DRC and different protected areas that exist there, that we still follow this colonial idea of mostly European [00:03:00] conservationists in history and also currently that claim that they're protecting nature, often in tandem with international conservation NGOs.In the park we look at today, it's the Wildlife Conservation Society, and they're, yeah, trying to get rid of the original inhabitants that have guarded these spaces for such a long time. Martin: To build on that, in our campaign to decolonize conservation and survival, we often say that fortress conservation has deep colonial roots and you can definitely see that with the the actual history of the of Kahuzi Biega National Park because it started as a reserve that was created by the Belgian colonial government in 1937 and It was transformed into a national park after independence.So in the 70s, but it was still designated as such following the lobbying of a Belgian conservationist. So it's really the continuation the Western and the European will to keep controlling the, [00:04:00] the independent territories. And that in Africa oftentimes was done through conservation.Linda: And it also has this idea of, I think a lot of the conservation projects that we see, Martin just said it, there was also this post independence push on creating national parks, which was obviously related to the idea that Europeans might lose hold of control in certain areas, so they were pushing for the creation of national parks like the Kahuzi Biega National Park.And that is the setting that we're talking about, basically, something that has very colonial roots and has been pushed into the post colonial era, but in a way which is actually very colonial. Chris: Thank you both for that brief, brief history and introduction into what we'll be speaking about today, Linda, you mentioned that so many of the circumstances around the creation of these national parks includes the exclusion and [00:05:00] displacement of the original inhabitants.And in this case, among others, this includes the Batwa people. And so I'd like to just give our listeners a little bit of a context for what's happened to the Batwa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And so the statistics tell us that "over 90 percent of the 87, 000 indigenous Batwa people in the park have lost legal access to their native territory, turned into conservation areas, and who are desperately poor," according to a 2009 United Nations report.Now, in a recent Reuters article, it's written that, quote, "Local human rights and environmental experts say that the authorities failure to fulfill promises to the Batwa has undermined efforts to protect the forest and its endangered species, including some of the last populations of eastern lowland gorilla.Some of the Batwa around the [00:06:00] park participate in the illegal poaching, mining, and logging that are destroying the gorilla's globally significant habitat. As a result, the conservation outlook for the park is critical, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature." The article goes further and says that "the Batwa have no choice because they are poverty stricken, according to Josue Aruna, president of the province's environmental civil society group, who does community outreach for the Batwa." It seems in this way that the land rights and traditional lifestyles of the Batwa are intimately tied to the health and survival of the ecosystems within the national park, which they've been excluded from, and that their poverty is a consequence of their displacement. Do you think that the issue is as simple as that? Martin: It's always interesting to read these reports from the conservationists, whether it's the IUCN or the NGOs, because the problem is always "the local people. So they are poor and they [00:07:00] have no choice. They participate in poaching." and it's always their fault.Like you were saying, if they end up being poor it's because they were evicted from the land. And as Linda was saying earlier, the forest and the land more generally is everything to them or was everything to them. So it's not only the place where they get food, it's also the whole basis of their identity and their way of life.So once they lose that, they end up in our world, capitalist system, but at the lowest possible level. So, that's why they end up in poverty. But it's a problem that was created by the conservationists themselves. And even when you read Their discourse or their position about trying to improve the situation for the Batwa, it's always about generating revenue ,lifting them out of poverty, developing alternative livelihoods. But what we are campaigning for is not some alternative to the loss of their rights. It's Their land rights themselves. And to go to your other question [00:08:00] about the fact that the loss of their land rights has led to a degrading in the health of the ecosystem.I think, yes, for sure. That has been the case, and it's what we're seeing all around the world in these protected areas that are supposed to protect nature. But actually, once you evict the best conservationists and the people that were taking care of the land for decades, then there is room for all kinds of exploitation whether it be mass tourism or luxury safaris or even mining and logging concessions.So it's not a coincidence if 80 percent of the biodiversity on the planet is located in indigenous territories. It's because they have lived in the land. It's not wild nature. They have lived there for generations. They have protected it and they have shaped it through their practices. So, to us, the best way to protect this ecosystem is to ensure that their land rights are respected and blaming them for poaching or putting that on the fact that they are poor, it's just [00:09:00] dishonest and ignoring the basis of the problem.Linda: Yeah. I agree. And when you just read out these sentences, I noted down like the way it was formulated, as a result, the park is threatened.

On this episode, my guest is Christos Galanis, a friend and scholar who recently completed his PhD in Cultural Geography from The University of Edinburgh where his research centered on themes of displacement and memorial walking practices in the Highlands of Scotland. A child of Greek political refugees on both sides of his family, Christos' work looks at ways in which ceremony and ritual might afford us the capacity to integrate disconnection from place and ancestry. Further, his research into pre-modern Gaelic Highland culture reveals animistic relationship with mountains which disrupt easy definitions of colonialism and indigeneity.Show Notes:Summoning and Summiting a DoctorateThe British Empire & EverestThe Three Roots of FreedomHillwalkers and HomecomingThe Consequences of Staying and LeavingThe Romans Make a Desert and Call it PeaceFarming EmptinessLandscapes as MediumsRitualized Acts of WalkingHomework:Christos Galanis’ Official WebsiteTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Christos, to the End of Tourism podcast. Christos: Thank you, Chris. Chris: Thank you for joining me today. Would you be willing to let us know where you're dialing in from today? Christos: Yeah, I'm calling in from home, which at the moment is Santa Fe, New Mexico in the United States. Yeah, I moved out here for my master's in 2010 and fell in love with it, and and then returned two years ago.So it's actually a place that does remind me of the Mediterranean and Greece, even though there's no water, but the kind of mountain desert. So there's a familiarity somehow in my body. Chris: Sounds beautiful. Well I'm delighted to speak with you today about your PhD dissertation entitled "A Mountain Threnody: Hill Walking and Homecoming in the Scottish Highlands." And I know you're working on the finishing touches of the dissertation, but I'd like to pronounce a dear congratulations on that huge feat. I imagine after a decade of research and [00:01:00] writing, that you can finally share this gift, at least for now, in this manner, in terms of our conversation together.Christos: Thank you. It was probably the hardest thing I've done in my life in terms of a project. Yeah. Nine years.Chris: And so, you and I met at Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School many years ago. But beyond that from what I understand that you were born and raised in Toronto and Scarborough to Greek immigrants, traveled often to see family in Greece and also traveled widely yourself, and of course now living in New Mexico for some time. I'm curious why focus on Scotland for your thesis? Christos: It was the last place I thought I would be going to. Didn't have a connection there. So I did my master's down here in Albuquerque at UNM and was actually doing a lot of work on the border with Mexico and kind of Southwest Spanish history.I actually thought I was going to go to UC San Diego, partly because of the weather and had some connections [00:02:00] there. And two things happened. One was that you have to write your GRE, whatever the standardized test is you need to do for grad school here in the US, you don't have to do in the UK. So that appealed to me.And it's also, there's no coursework in the UK. So you just, from day one, you're just doing your own research project. And then I wanted to actually work with what Was and probably still is my favorite academic writer is Tim Ingold, who was based in Aberdeen up in the north of Scotland and is kind of that thing where I was like, "well if I'm gonna do a PhD What if I just literally worked with like the most amazing academic I can imagine working with" and so I contacted him. He was open to meeting and possibly working together and so I was gonna fly to Scotland.I was actually spending the winter in Thailand at the time, so I was like, if I'm gonna go all the way to Scotland, maybe I should check out a couple more universities. So, I looked at St. Andrews, which is a little bit north of Edinburgh, and then Edinburgh, then visited all [00:03:00] three schools, and actually just really fell in love with Edinburgh, and then in the end got full funding from them. And that took me to Scotland. And I didn't know what was in store for me. I didn't even follow through on my original research project, which had nothing to do with Scotland. The sites that I was actually proposed to work with was on the Dine reservation out here in Arizona. There's a tradition, long tradition of sheep herding and there's a lot of, some friends of mine have a volunteer program where volunteers go and help the Diné elders and herd their sheep for them and what's happening is they're trying to hold on to their land and Peabody Coal, a coal mining company, has been trying to take the land forever and so by keeping on herding sheep, it allows them to stay there.So I was actually kind of looking at walking as forms of resistance and at that time, most undocumented migrants trying to enter Europe were walking from Turkey through Macedonia. So I was actually going to go there. And yeah, once I kind of hit the ground, I realized that that's way too ambitious.And I [00:04:00] decided to focus on this really strange phenomenon called Monroe Bagging in the Highlands of Scotland, where people work all week in their office, Monday to Friday, and then spend their weekends checking off a task list of 282 mountains that they summit. There's 282 of them and they're categorized that way because they're all over 3, 000 feet, which for us in North America, isn't that high, but for the Scottish Highlands, because they're very ancient, ancient, worn down mountains is pretty high.And also the weather and the climate and the terrain make it pretty treacherous out there. So it's, it's not an easy thing. Yeah. And I just thought this is a really weird, strange way to relate to mountains and to land. And it seems like a very British thing to do. And I kind of just got curious to figure out what was going on and why people would actually do this.And it came from a very, actually, critical perspective, to begin with. As things unfolded, that changed a fair amount in terms of getting to know people. But, yeah, that was Scotland. And, I think looking back, I think [00:05:00] I was called there by the mountains. I can give the bigger context maybe later on, but essentially one of the main mountain called Ben Cruachan, in Argyle that I ended up most working with and kind of going in and doing ceremony for, and with. I ended up later meeting my what would become my wife and married into her family and on one side of her family, they are literally the Macintyres who are from that mountain. So yeah ended up kind of going there and marrying into a lineage of a mountain that was the center of my my dissertation.So in the end I think I was called there. I think I was called to apprentice those mountains. And then I feel like my time ended. And I think this dissertation is kind of the story of that relationship with that courtship.Chris: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for that beautifully winding answer and introduction. So, you know, a lot of your dissertation speaks to kind of different notions of mountain climbing, summiting, hiking but you also write about [00:06:00] how our cultural or collective understandings of mountains have defined our ability to undertake these activities.And I'm curious, based on your research and personal experience, how do you think mountains are understood within the dominant paradigm of people who undertake these practices. Christos: Yeah, good question. I would say, I know I don't like to speak in universals, but I could say that one universal is that, as far as I can tell, all cultures around the world tend to not only revere mountains, but tend to relate to mountain peaks as sacred.And so in most cultures, at least pre modern culture, you will always find a taboo around ever actually climbing to the top of a mountain, especially a significant mountain. So ways that you might worship a sacred mountain, for example, you know, in Tibet is to circumnavigate. So hiking, walking around a mountain three times or walking the perimeter of a mountain, kind of circling [00:07:00] around and around the summit.But it would be absolutely abhorrent to actually ever climb to the top. So one thing I was interested in is what happened, what shifted, where in the past people would never think of climbing a mountain summit to that becoming almost the only thing that people were focused on. And I didn't know this, but out of all countries, the country that most intensely kind of pursued that practice was, was England, was Britain, actually.So it's really fascinating. There's this period, the Victorian era, where basically Britain is invading other countries such as Nepal, India, into China, into Kenya, parts of Africa, South America certainly here in North America and the Americas and of course mountain ranges serve as pretty natural and intense frontiers and barriers, especially back then before. You know, industrial machinery and airplanes and things [00:08:00] like that, you're going over land. And so to be able to get through a mountain range was a pretty intense thing. Really only became possible with kind of Victorian era technology and because they were able to penetrate these places that people really couldn't have before it was a way of kind of proving modern supremacy or the supremacy of kind of modern secularism.Because even in places like Sutherland and the Alps, the indigenous Swiss also considered like the Alps sacred, the mountain peaks and wouldn't climb them. And so as the British kind of came up into these mountain ranges. They had the idea of proving that essentially there were no gods on these mountaintops.There was nothing sacred about them. It's just a pile of rock and anybody can climb up and nothing's going to happen to them. And so they really started setting out to start summiting these mountains. And it was mostly military engineers. There's a

My guest on this episode is Healani Sonoda-Pale, a Kanaka Maoli Human Rights advocate for Self-Determination and a Water Protector who has been organizing at the intersection of the indigenous struggle for liberation and environmental protection in Hawai'i. She is a member of the Red Hill Community Representation Initiative and the spokesperson of the Ka Lahui Hawaii Political Action Committee. Healani was born and raised on the island of O'ahu where she resides with her family.Show Notes:The Beauty of the Pandemic Shutdown in Hawai’iThe Fallout of the Lahaina Fires in West MauiNo ControlsManufacturing the AuthenticReopening for Tourism in the Midst of CatastropheLocal Schism: Those in Favour and Those AgainstThe Tourism at the Heart of the Housing CrisisKa Lahui Hawai'i Political Action CommitteeThe Water Crisis in OahuDecolonizing Tourism is an OxymoronSolidarity with Kanaka MaoliHomework:Healani Sonoda-Pale InstagramKa Lahui Hawai’i | TwitterOahu Water Protectors | Red Hill Community Representation InitiativeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] In the first season of the podcast I spoke to Hokulani Aikau and Vernadette Gonzalez about the attempts to decolonize tourism in the Hawaiian islands. And following that Kaleo Patterson. Who offered a deeper historical and cultural background into the ongoing us occupation of Hawaii. The military industrial tourism complex, and some of the traditional forms of hospitality that Hawaiians have engaged in. Since then, and especially because of the wildfires that spread through west Maui this past summer. Listeners have asked again and again, to return to the islands, to host the voices of those. They're now struggling with another catastrophe. Who are offering resilience and resistance. In the face of these enduring consequences. And as such, I welcome.Healani Sonoda-Pale to the pod. Thank you for joining me today, Healani.Healani: It's my pleasure to be joining this podcast and to help [00:01:00] spread the message about tourism in Hawai'i. Chris: Healani, could you do us the favor of elaborating a bit on where you're speaking from today and how the world looks like for you?Healani: Okay. So I'm a Kanaka Maoli woman, born and raised in Hawai'i on the island of O'ahu. I have been in the Hawaiian movement for liberation and self determination for nearly 30 years. I am a student of Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask, and I am on the front lines of many, many issues. The issues that we face today are, many of them are a consequence of tourism.The desecration of cultural sites. The degradation of our beautiful beaches pollution, traffic, overcrowding, the high cost of living in Hawai'i, the extremely high cost of housing in Hawai'i. These are all because of tourism. This is happening to Hawai'i. [00:02:00] As a result, direct result of the tourist industry, which Hawaii relies on.And in Hawaii, we have two businesses. We have the military industrial complex and the tourist industry. Those are the two worst industries to rely on, number one. And they are the most exploitive and extractive industries to have. They do not enhance our way of life here on, on these islands in Hawaii.They do the opposite. They have brought many of us to the brink where we are now, most of us living paycheck to paycheck. The average cost of a house in Hawaii is a million dollars.I believe Honolulu is the number one or at least the top three most expensive cities in the United States to live in. So tourism is a plague in Hawaii. It is a plague upon this place and it has caused us to [00:03:00] struggle on a daily basis, not just financially and not just socially, mentally as well. Having to deal with tourists on a daily basis in Hawaii is frustrating, so that's kind of like the space I'm coming from. I am involved with the water issue, protecting our water, which is now something that is a huge issue. I'm very much involved in the Red Hill issue. I'm involved with protecting Iwi Kūpuna, which is our traditional Hawaiian burials. I'm involved with the repatriation of our land. Again, another big issue. It never ends because the, the economic, social pressure to take and take and take until there's nothing left is relentless. So that's the space we're coming from. So you talked about COVID, right? You started this podcast in the beginning of COVID and COVID was an eye opener for a lot of people in Hawai'i. When COVID happened, [00:04:00] the state of Hawai'i shut down and tourists weren't allowed here during our shutdown.I believe it was like a year and a half. It was beautiful. Even though we were living in the middle of a pandemic, our beaches were empty. There were no lines at the stores. There was no traffic. Even the air we breathed seemed cleaner. The water we swam in, in the ocean, didn't have this sliminess on it, from tourists with suntan lotion swimming in it all day, right?So the fish came back. Even the plants and the land was happy. I mean, it was a beautiful time. Even though it was sad because we were living through a pandemic, it was a beautiful time for us as Kanaka because we got to see Hawai'i without tourists. And that really opened the eyes for people who usually are not as [00:05:00] critical of tourism, as many of us have been so more people in Hawaii started saying, especially Kanaka Mali, well, how do we move forward without tourism?But when the state opened up again, tourism came back and it came back with a vengeance.When you look at what was happening on social media and, you know, what people were posting and across all the islands, we saw some frustration. We saw people posting about interactions they were having with tourists at sacred sites and beaches. People were more aware that tourists were there after COVID because we were able to enjoy our beaches, enjoy our islands without them.And then when they came back, it was not only dangerous because we live 2, 000 miles away from the nearest continent. So, they were bringing in the COVID. I mean, from the time of [00:06:00] Captain Cook, tourists, visitors, explorers, missionaries, they have been bringing in diseases when, when Captain Coke arrived in 1778. We didn't have any immunity to these diseases, and so now, I think for a lot of residents here in Hawai'i, our eyes have been opened on what we have to give up for tourism.We have to sacrifice not only our beautiful island life, but a way forward that doesn't include commodifying who we are as a people, our culture, everything. The state's been talking about diversifying the industry here in Hawai'i, right? They wanted to look into agriculture was one. They've never seriously taken that up. And they always fall back on tourism.Chris: And why do you think that is? Because it's just so easy.Healani: Because they've invested. It's a multi billion dollar business. There's hotels. Waikiki [00:07:00] is loaded with hotels. It's business interests. It's those that have been in control of the tourist industry, wanting to keep control of that and wanting to keep their financial interests protected and keep going.So that is, that has been a problem. And of course we have strong lobbyists here in Hawai'i for the tourist industry. It is an industry that is supported by taxpayer dollars. It's one of the few industries we give millions of dollars of our money. It's a private industry supported by taxpayer dollars.So it's a private industry that we support that exploits not just our resources, our culture, but they have really degraded our way of life here. They've made everything so expensive that most of our people, most of the indigenous people of Hawai'i have moved away because they can't afford to live here.Chris: And you know, I'm curious [00:08:00] in this regard, to what extent do you think that this Government money and government decisions played a part in these wildfires that passed through West Maui in August, you know, like reading and researching for this interview and seeing what's been shared online and social media, the term management and mismanagement continues to arise in and among social movement activists.And I'm curious to what extent you think that either government action or inaction or the tourism industry had a part to play in what happened this past summer.Healani: The Lahaina Fires. was so tragic and the tragedy continues months after. The suicide rates are on the rise in Lahaina. Families are still displaced, thousands of them. They were just [00:09:00] a few days ago, I had posted about it. They were just given again, eviction letters. The last time I was in Maui was there.The first set of eviction letters that went out. So they're being housed in hotels, 7,00-8,000 of them; families that have lost everything, in hotels. And now they're being told to leave to make way for tourism, to make way for tourists. That's the enormity of the pressure that tourists, tourism brings with it. The pressure to a piece and to serve and to put tourism first.Just going back to my childhood in school. We were basically brainwashed into thinking we need tourism. Without tourism, we wouldn't have jobs. There would be no money, you know? So it's been kind of ingrained in us. And that's why I think COVID was super important because it was an eye opener for a lot of us.Because they saw really [00:10:00] what was possible, a world without tourism. And so the pressure to support, to push tourism, to... "they always say, we want to support small businesses," but it's really not about small businesses. It's about those huge, multinational corporations that have invested millions.into this industry and have supported and lobbied for their industry, for the tourist industry. That's what it's really about, to a point where they really don't care about the people, the residents of Lahaina. They're literally traumatizing these families again and pushing them around to make room for an industry that we all pay to support.And the Lahaina fires is a result of corporations, land grabbing by corporations of [

On this episode, my guests are ClementineMorrigan.com and Jay Lesoleil of the F*****g Cancelled Podcast.Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the F*****g Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.Jay is a writer, artist and designer from Montreal and is the author of the Substack jaylesoleil.com and the zine series What Else Is There to Live For. Jay is also the co-host of F*****g Cancelled.Show Notes:Clementine & Jay’s TravelsThe NexusIdentitarianism and Identity PoliticsGentrification & SolidarityHow Nationalism Leaks into the LeftThe Contradictions of IdentitarianismFreedom, Limits and GuesthoodBorders and BiomesThe Quest for Offline CommunitiesRadical & Reciprocal HospitalityAuthenticityHomework:Clementine’s SubstackJay’s Substack (including Dumplings & Domination)Clementine’s ShopJay’s StoreF*****g Cancelled ShopF*****g Cancelled PodcastTranscriptChris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the pod, Clementine and Jay. It's an honor to have you both here today. Each of your work both individually and together has been a great influence on mine and definitely eye-opening and if I can say so much needed in our time. So thank you for joining me. Jay: Thank you, man. Thanks for having us.Clementine: Thanks for having us.Chris: So, I'd like to start, if we can, by asking you both where you find yourselves today and what the world looks like for you through each of your eyes.Jay: Well, we both find ourselves in Montreal which is where we live. I was working in homeless shelters for years and then I got let go cause I tried to unionize the one I was working at. Actually I succeeded in unionizing the one I was working at. And they mysteriously did not have any money to renew my contract after that.And yeah, so I'm writing and I just launched a new solo podcast about like world history outside of the West. And so I've been working on that. It's called [00:01:00] dumplings and domination, which are two things that human beings love. And Yeah, so that's, that's what I'm up to. Clementine: Yeah, so I'm also, yeah, I find myself in Montreal, in the snow, and I guess, relevant to the topics of this podcast one of the things I'm grappling with now is my perpetual existence as a unilingual anglophone in the city of Montreal, which is a bilingual city, but it's a French city, like.Actually. And I'm planning on having a child and I'm planning to have this child here. And so I'm facing the dilemma of being like an English speaker whose child is not going to just be an English speaker. And so I really need to learn French, basically. So this is my struggle, because being 37 and only speaking one language my entire life, it's like super hard to learn another language.And I've really, really struggled. A couple times I've made an attempt to learn French, and it's like really [00:02:00] frustrating, but that is one of the things I'm grappling with. I feel like it's relevant to the podcast, because in many ways, even though I've lived in Montreal for like almost seven years, there's a way in which I still am kind of like a tourist here, because I haven't learned the language.So, will I complete my transition into becoming Quebecois? Chris: Yeah, maybe so. Jay: Only time will tell. Chris: I was just reading this biography of Ivan Illich, who's like was an Austrian philosopher and he said that like trying to learn a new language, especially if you're immersed in the place is the greatest measure or degree of poverty that one can undertake because of the degree of dependence that they have on other people and not just dependence, but like dependence on their hospitality, assuming it exists in order to, you know, be able to understand what you're saying and communicate in that way. Clementine: Like Montreal is interesting because at least in the neighborhood that I live and in many places in [00:03:00] Montreal, it's functionally bilingual. So it's not like learning in an immersive environment as if you went somewhere and everybody's speaking that language.So you kind of just have to or you won't be able to communicate. Like you have to learn here. You know, when I'm fumbling around trying to speak French, people just start speaking English to me because even if they're a francophone, like, at least in the neighborhoods where I live, most people are bilingual, and they speak better English than I do French, so they will accommodate me, which is polite of them, and also, It does not help me learn, you know?Jay: Whereas the government of Quebec will not accommodate you. Clementine: No, the government will not accommodate you at all. And so, like, it's only in circumstances where, like, I desperately need to understand where, like, there's no, there's absolutely no accommodation. So. Chris: And that kind of touches on my next question, which is, you know, in terms of the travels that you two have.Has there been that degree of poverty elsewhere? I mean, I imagine you might have traveled to other places maybe in Canada, maybe elsewhere. [00:04:00] What have your travels taught you each, if anything, about the world, about your lives, about culture? Jay: Yeah. I had kind of an unusual relationship with travel.Because as a kid, I moved to a different country every like three or four years cause of my parents work. And so, yeah, I grew up like in Asia and not just like dipping into a place and then like leaving right away but spending years of my life in each country. Right. And like learning the languages and stuff.And so, yeah, I think that was a quite an unusual way to kind of experience travel as a kid. And I think that it did definitely have a lot of impact on me. Because I think that travel in general, I think is a wonderful and amazing thing, you know, which is why people like to do it. And it can be really profound for your mind and your understanding of the world and of other people, you know but obviously there's travel and then there's [00:05:00] travel.I feel really grateful that I was able to see so much of the world by living there, you know and I think that it was really important for me in my kind of embodied understanding that other people and other parts of the world are, you know, just as real and just as important and just as embedded in history as I am and as like the people are in my passport country, which happens to be Canada, you know?Clementine: Yeah. I've traveled a little bit, but I think for me, like, When I was young, I was too crazy to travel, you know, and I truly mean that, like I have complex PTSD and like as much as my life was so chaotic and like really, like, you know, on F*****g Cancelled, Jay and I talk about how we're both alcoholics in recovery, like, When I was drinking, I always wanted to be someone who traveled, and my life was very, like, chaotic and full of violence and danger and all those types of things, but the PTSD made it really hard to do [00:06:00] anything because I was always scared, you know and being a woman traveling... like, in recovery, I've wanted to try to travel more, but the combination of one being a woman traveling alone, it does come with certain risks to it.You're more vulnerable in certain ways and then add that to the PTSD. It's like... it's super anxiety producing, you know, so it's something that I've done a little bit but not as much as I would have liked to and I guess we'll see like what the future holds with that. One thing is is that like I learned to drive pretty late.I learned to drive in my 30s and once I learned to drive going on road trips was actually a way that really opened up travel for me because having my car with me gave me this sense of like safety, basically, that I could leave a situation like I was there with my car. So I had like the independence to like not be dependent on like strangers because I was afraid of them basically.But we went on a podcast tour last [00:07:00] year and drove like all across the United States in like a month and like drove down to like Arizona and like back up the West coast. And like, that was really, really cool. Chris: Beautiful. Thank you both. And so, you know, it might seem a little strange for you two to be invited on a podcast about tourism, migration, hospitality given that, you know, perhaps on the surface of things, your work doesn't appear to center around such things, but I've asked you both to speak with me today, in part, because I see a lot of parallels between what you've both referred to as the nexus in your work and what I refer to as the, a touristic worldview. And so to start, I'm wondering if you two could explain for our listeners, what the nexus is and its three main pillars.Clementine: So, in shorthand, or in, like, common language, you might call it social justice culture. There's a lot of different ways that this culture has been talked about but it's a particular [00:08:00] way of doing politics on the left, or left of center. And. Like, Jay and I come from inside this culture, so we are coming from inside social justice culture, being, like, leftists and being queer people and having existed in, like, progressive social justicey spaces for our entire adult lives, basically.And basically, we're noticing that there wasn't really language to talk about some of the phenomenons that were happening inside social justice culture or even, you know, social justice culture itself doesn't really give itself a name. Like we can call it

On this episode, my guest is David Bacon, a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (COLEF / UC Press, 2017) includes over 300 photographs and 12 oral histories of farm workers. Other books include The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People, which discuss alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. Communities Without Borders includes over 100 photographs and 50 narraatives about transnational migrant communities and The Children of NAFTA is an account of worker resistance on the US/Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA.Show Notes:David’s Early YearsLearning about Immigration through UnionsThe Meaning of Being UndocumentedNAFTA and Mexican MigrationThe Source of Corn / MaizeBinational Front of Indigenous Organizations / Frente Indigena de Organizacaions BinacionalesThe Right to Stay HomeAndres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) CampaignThe Face & History of Immigration in the USAImmigration Reform and AmnestyThe Violence of Fortuna Silver Mines in OaxacaSolidarity, Change and OptimismHomework:The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican MigrationIn the Fields of the North / En los campos del norteIllegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes ImmigrantsCommunities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of MigrationThe Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico BorderDavid’s Twitter AccountDavid’s Official WebsiteTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism podcast, David. It's an honor to have you on the pod. To begin, I'd like to ask you where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you there. David: Well, I live in Berkeley, here in California, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen having just what I've been up to today before talking with you. Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your work. Perhaps I could ask you what drew you to the issues of labor and migration.David: Sure. Well, I come from a kind of left wing union family, so I knew about unions and workers and strikes and things like that from probably since before I can remember. And so I was kind of an activist when I was in high school, got involved in the [00:01:00] student movement in the 1960s at the University of California, got involved in the free speech movement, got tossed out by the university, actually, and wound up going to work after that, really, because I got married, had a daughter, and I got married, had a daughter, and, I needed to get a job and, you know, worked for quite a while as a a printer in the same trade that my father was, had been in went back to night school to learn more of the, of the trade, how to do different parts of it, how to run presses and so forth and then got involved, this is, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s got involved in the movement to support farm workers, really, and I was one of those people, you know, if you're my age, you remember this, if you're younger, you probably don't, but we used to picket supermarkets to try to get them [00:02:00] to stop selling the grapes and the wine and the lettuce that was on strike, and we would stand out in front of Safeway and other supermarkets with our red flags with the black eagle on them, And ask customers, you know, not to go into the store, not to buy the products that farmworkers were on strike against.And I got really interested in. I'm curious about the workers that we were supporting. You know, I grew up in Oakland and so I didn't know anything about farm workers, really. I didn't know anything about rural California, rural areas, didn't speak Spanish didn't know much about Chicano, Latinos.Oakland's a pretty diverse city, but in the area of Oakland where I grew up in you know, in our high school, you know, the students were African American or they were white, and that was a big racial question in, in school when I was in high school. So I grew up not knowing any of these things.[00:03:00] And Because I was involved in, you know, standing out in front of these stores and supporting workers, I, you know, began wondering, who are these workers that we're supporting? And eventually, I went to work for the union. I asked a lawyer friend of mine who was in their legal department if they needed any help, and of course he said yes.I went down to, Oxnard and de Santamaria began working for the union, originally taking statements from workers who had been fired because of their union activity. I didn't know much Spanish, so I had to learn Spanish on the job. Fortunately, you know, the workers were very patient with me and would help me learn, help me correct my still bad pronunciation and bad grammar.And, and I began to learn. And that process has been going on ever since, really. That was a, that was a formative time in my life. It taught me a lot of [00:04:00] things. It taught me about, you know, the culture of. farm workers who were mostly Mexican in those years, but there were still a good number of Filipino workers working in the fields.That eventually led me to the woman I eventually married, my wife, who was the daughter of of immigrants from the Philippines from a farm worker family. So I learned about that culture and I began learning about immigration, which I hadn't really known anything about growing up. Why people come to the U.S., what happens to people here. I, I saw my first immigration raid. When I was an organizer, I later became an organizer for the union as my Spanish got better. And I remember going to talk to a group of workers that I had met with the previous night, who were worked up in palm trees picking dates.And I went down to the date grove, this was in the Coachella Valley, and there was this big green van, and there were the [00:05:00] workers who I'd been talking to the previous night being loaded into the van. I was just You know, really shocked. The van took off. I followed the van all the way down to the Imperial Valley, to El Centro, where the detention center was.Stood outside the center trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to these people? And that was sort of an introduction to the meaning of being undocumented, what it meant to people, what could happen. And that made me an immigrant rights activist, which I've also been ever since, too.But also, over time, I got interested in the reasons why people were coming to the U. S. to begin with. You know, what people were finding here when people got here was very, very difficult work, low pay, immigration raids, police harassment, at least, and sometimes worse than that, poverty. You know, Why leave Mexico if this is what you're going to find?[00:06:00] And it also made me curious about the border. And so that also began something that has continued on in all those years since. I eventually went to the border, went to Mexico, began getting interested and involved in Mexican labor politics, supporting unions and workers in Mexico, you know, doing work on the border itself.After the Farm Workers Union, I worked for other unions for A number of years and they were generally reunions where the workers who were trying to join and we were trying to help were immigrants. So the government workers union, the women in the sweatshops sewing clothes or union for factory workers.And so my job was basically to help workers organize and. Organizing a union in the United States is like well, you know, people throw around this word, you know, this phrase class war and class warfare pretty freely, but it is like a war. You know, when [00:07:00] workers get together and they decide they want to change conditions and they want to you know, get the company to, speak to them and to deal with them in an organized way.They really do have to kind of go, go to war or be willing to, for the company to go to war with them. You know, really what people are asking for sometimes is pretty minimal, you know, wage raises or fair treatment at work or a voice at work. You know, you think, you know, what's wrong with that. But generally speaking when employers get faced with workers who want to do that they do everything possible to try and stop them.Including firing people and harassing people, calling them to meetings, threatening people, scaring people. You know, there's a whole industry in this country that consists of union consultants who do nothing but, you know, advise big companies about how to stop workers when they, when they try to organize.So that's what I did for about 20 years. Was help workers to get organized, form a union, get their bus to sit down and talk [00:08:00] to them, go out on strike, do all those kinds of things. And eventually I decided that I wanted to do something else. And I, I was already involved in, you know, starting to take photographs.I would carry a camera and I would take pictures of what we were doing as workers. We would joke about it, kind of. I would tell workers, well, you know, we're going to take some pictures here and you can take them home to your family and show them, you know, that you're really doing what's right here and 20 years from now you'll show your grandkids that, you know, when the time came, you stood up and you did what was right and people would joke with each other about it.And I discovered also that you could use them to get support for what we were doing. You know, we could get an article published in a newspaper somewhere. Some labor newspaper might run an article about us. You might get some money and some help or some food or something. But after a while, you know, I began [00:09:00] realizing that these photographs, they had a value beyond that.And that was that they were documenting this social movement that was taking place among immigrants

On this episode of The End of Tourism Podcast, my guest is Macià Blázquez-Salom, a professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, who specializes in the Geography of Tourism, Territorial Planning, Sustainability and Degrowth. He utilizes his teaching and research activity in the environmental movement (and vice versa), and through his activism in the Grupo Balear de Ornitología y Defensa de la Naturaleza (GOB) and Alba Sud.Show NotesMacia’s Journey in the BalearicsThe Beginning of Mass Tourism through Currency DevaluationContradictions in MallorcaCocoon Tourism in SpainYou Want to Work in the Balearics, You Have to Sleep in a TentBoosterism and Green BoosterismDegrowth Definitions and ContradictionsImagining Other Modes of TravelImagining Other Modes of ResistanceHomeworkGoogle Scholar: Macia BlasquezOrcid: Connecting Researchers with ResearchersMacia Blasquez’s UIB SiteTranscript[00:00:00] Chris: Welcome Macia, to the podcast. From what I've been able to dig up around your life and work that you've been studying, tourism and its contradictions for a very long time. Now, I'd like to ask you what drove you towards a career as a professor and critic of the tourism industry?[00:00:24] Macia: Well, in fact, even before finishing my degree, I was involved in social movements here in the Balearics, in Mallorca, particularly. I was member of the committee of the volunteers collaborating with the GOB, which is the biggest ecologist group. Then by the eighties and perhaps influenced by this collaboration, I decided to study geography and to analyze the relation in between tourism and natural conservation, because by then we had promotion after the tourism boom in the sixties and seventies.The eighties Spain became member of the European Union and some of our politicians, they decided and they were promoting the Balearics as second residents destination for north European people, and this means that investment in the real estate market even increased with foreign people buying second residencies and promoting as well the promotion of more urban development for this purpose.And that was written in the natural areas due to what we call "green" or "gray-grabbing" with new facilitation of land here in the Balearics. And this was the main aim I had to develop my research on this topic, with special planning and natural conservation in the Balearics.Afterwards we had what we called the real estate bubble that began in the nineties and burst in 2008. And that was a period when I was more involved, particularly in the social movements. In fact I feel more related with activism than with academia. After the crisis with my age, I took the decision of giving support to younger people in the social movements and devote more time to the academia with colleagues Ivan Murray or Ernest Canada or Robert Fletcher or Nora Muller, other people who are working in this research group in the University of the Balearics Islands. But I still working with the NGOs Alba Sud, particularly the GOB, and other social movements in this region in the Western Mediterranean region particularly. [00:03:03] Chris: I have some questions regarding these social movements that I think maybe we'll get to in just a bit.But, I'd like to try to offer a bit of context for our listeners in part because before I heard of your name and before I interviewed our mutual friend Ivan, for the first episode of the podcast, I don't think I had ever heard of Palma or Mallorca before, even as someone who had traveled through Europe and many other parts of the Mediterranean.And so I'm curious if you could give us a bit of background on how Palma came to be over touristed, or at the very least, what you've seen come to pass in your time there. I mean, I know it's, it is also historically has a lot of deep importance for the Spanish state and Mediterranean history culture.[00:03:55] Macia: I'm sure you have heard about the dictatorship of Franco in the forties, fifties. Mm-hmm. Fifties. He was given support to the Luther in the second World War. And after the defeat, the technical support he had was coming from Opus Dei, was introducing tourism and real estate business as a way to have foreign direct investment.And as a result, Spain had a very important development of, of real estate business in this new areas particularly related with sun and sea tourist resorts. Perhaps you have heard about Costa Del Sol, Benidorm in Costa Blanca, or Costa Brava in Catalonia. And the same for the Balearic Islands. During that period, in the case of of M we had a huge amount of new hotels being double developed.And they were financed partly by people coming from North Europe, particularly from Germany. There was a novel accumulation of capital in that, in those regions that have had industrial development and investors realized that tourism could be a good business, introducing this way of consuming savings, consuming income for working class people in the UK, in Germany, and this is how in the Balearics we had the development of what we call the tourist boom in the sixties with hundreds of hotel being built up every month really in Mallorca, in Ibiza. Perhaps you have heard about Ibiza, right? [00:05:52] Chris: And this is just to be clear, this is in the first decade of international mass tourism post-war, correct?[00:06:01] Macia: In the Sixties, because the two first decades after the war, our regime, the dictatorship of Franco was defeated. I mean, they were given support to Hitler and Mussolini and Spain was set aside. And the model they were following was self-sufficiency. We became members of the UN United Nations by the end of the Fifties when Franco decided to take this option of promoting foreign investment, making the change of currency with the foreign currencies possible.And it was through devaluation of the peseta, this means that investing from the UK, Germany, or even the United States, or for tourists coming to Spain, visiting our country, was so cheap due to this devaluation of the currency. And this way we had that mass tourism development and mass foreign investment, foreign investment and flows of people coming here for holidays and enterprises developing their activities for profit.This was the beginning and the result were that after all those years, we now have eight hundred thousand tourist beds in the B alearics and we had 16.5 million tourists last year in the Balearics, 2022. And this is a huge amount of tourists for an archipelago that just has. 5,000 square kilometers, 1.1 million inhabitants.Most of our tourists are coming from the UK. Let's say 25%. Germany, another 25%. This means 8 million tourists coming from Germany. Then we have 13% coming from mainland to Spain. And then we have people from Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden Denmark, the Netherlands. They come here looking for sun warm weather conditions during the summertime, particularly during the high season.This is July, August, September. This is when we are having more over crowded beaches, traffic jams in the roads and the touristification of every single place in our islands. Because by the beginning, tourists were going particularly to the tourist resorts. But nowadays the countryside, natural areas, villages and, and even the historical center of the cities is being touristified.You can find boutiques, you can find terraces of bars and restaurants, all of them changing very quickly, the landscape and the way of life of our places. [00:09:17] Chris: At what point in your life did you arrive in the Balearics, in Mallorca, or are you from there?[00:09:23] Macia: I'm from the Balearics. The mother of my father Fr was from Palma. And the parents of my mother were from M and I was grown here. It's quite common in places like Balearics to have roots, to have grown people is not moving that much. Right. I attended my degree and I finished my PhD thesis, and now I have my job here and this is common. We're not moving that much. [00:09:54] Chris: Well, it's a bit of a blessing to hear that there are people in the world still who live in the same place they were born, which is more and more rare. I guess I'm curious, you know, over the course of your life then, in Palma, is there one thing that you might be able to single out as perhaps the most startling or biggest or devastating change that you've seen there?[00:10:19] Macia: Yeah. Well in fact it has to do with my political position during that moment because we had a right wing go government from 2003 to 2007 with Lots of cases of corruption related with mega pr This means projects with a budget higher to 1000 million euros. They were projects to promote highways, to promote big infrastructure, transport infrastructure, a new harbors, enlarging the airport equipment.Instead of refurbishing the hospital, they decided to build a new hospital. And this is nice, but at the same time, they were meeting and we have collected information about those meetings to arrange, Communicating in between big entrepreneurs and politicians. Where and how was that development going to be?And they were changing this information to give advantage to the investors in a way which is nowadays considered as corruption. Many of those politicians are even nowadays in jail because of those cases. And during that period I was involved as a representative, as a volunteer giving support to the campaigns for the right to the island, demanding the politicians and the public institutions and the entrepreneurs not to follow with that promotion which was jeopardizing our land promoting socio-spatial segregation destroying natural habitats. That was the peak of the real estate bubble. Just before 2008 when I was involved. We were preparing something which is called a popular initiative to the parliament.I was myself defending the initiative in the regional parliament which was in fact making a proposal not to allow more enlargement of the transport infrastructure, enlargement of the urban