KITCHEN BANALITIES INTO TOURIST MAGIC Tourism Cosmology and Tour Guide Mediation in La Réunion

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, the article explores how tour guides transform the banalities of local everyday life into deeply moving tourist stories, and by that means position themselves as social characters within a wider tourism cosmology. At times they become actual extensions of the projected magical qualities of the destinations, at times enlightened mediators of a post-traditional condition in which a common global humanity melts into a perpetual movement of creolisation.