Culture Dynamics across the World Today: Tourism and the Palette of Imagination

Abstract

In general,this manuscript critiques the contemporary dynamisms of the formation/deformation of the cultural sphere under the increased mobilisations of globalization.In particular,it inspects the symphysis [SYMPHYSIS] between 'tourism' and 'culture',where the latter stands as an immense portmanteau phenomenon embracing many different things (under the vicissitudes of globalisation/glocalisation) across the protean realms of race, gender, entertainment, consumerism, meaning-making, et cetera.Critiquing Jamal and Robinson's recent attempt at panoramic coverage of the geography of tourism/tourism studies), it argues that tourism is regularly implicated in cultural practices relating to power-exercises in/across society. Then, in synthesising Bauman’s vision of contemporary society as that moving from seemingly well-ordered stabilities to a geographic realm where change is the-only-permanence and uncertainty the-onlycertainty, the manuscript generates five lead propositions calling for 'plural knowability',viz.,for a deeper/richer palette-of-imagination on the teeming multiplicities and throbbing provisionalities of culture as it emerges/unfolds or otherwise gets recast under the destabilising 'nomadic logics' of our time. In viewing culture as a vehicle of both 'impermanence' and 'seduction nowadays, the paper notes how in so many places and spaces, individuals are less inclined to be engaged locally/regionally/nationally as culture —partly through the volatile iterability of travel/tourism — has become an ever-widening polylogue.