‘From the Inside to the Inside’: A New Development Model in Tourism Environments

Abstract

Abstract A scheme to assist both researchers in understanding culture in tourism contexts and policy-makers for tourism development is presented: an ethnology-friendly perspective centred around ‘culture’ as the compound of social practices, contexts, realities and facts that gives sense to the process of life in society. The argument starts with the transformation of culture into a metonymic metacultural product labelled ‘cultural heritage’ and with the destination community as reference point. The model distinguishes between the tourism development measures designed and thought from the outside (by tourist agents, capital or tourism experts) and addressed to the outside, and those designed from the inside to the inside (by and for the people of the community). It is not a question of empowerment but a theoretical scheme to analyse the social and cultural processes in tourism contexts: the conversion of the place through the meaningful mediation of tourism space. Consequently, new types of actions and measures for the social development of tourist destinations thought from the inside and addressed to the inside might be designed. The paper vindicates the regenerative power of culture.