Change within the change: pregnancy,liminality and adventure tourism in Mexico

Abstract

Despite the growing number of pregnant women engaging in outdoor adventure activities, very few studies have explored pregnancy or the specific needs and challenges of pregnant women in tourism research. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine the participation of pregnant women in adventure tourism through the theoretical lens of liminality. Conceptualising pregnancy as a liminal stage in which women are ‘suspended’ between two statuses, opens diverse possibilities to delve into women’s experiences of embodiment, bodily image and control. In this sense, pregnancy is understood as an ‘internal change’, which adds specific challenges to women’s practice of adventure tourism, including bodily changes and different perceptions of risk-taking. Similarly, the context of adventure tourism provides an ideal space to reflect on liminal transitions and the ‘outside changes’ that pregnant women go through in the predominantly masculinised spaces that characterise this tourism segment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 Mexican women who actively pursue adventure tourism and who had engaged in these activities during at least one pregnancy. The analysis indicates the importance of norms and social expectations experienced by pregnant women when doing adventure tourism. The concept of the ‘rhizomatic body’ proved to be a valuable tool when looking at the social taboos, prohibitions and rules that apply to pregnant women in specific sociocultural contexts (in this case, Mexico). By reframing and reconceptualising pregnant women and their practice of adventure activities, the social construction of pregnancy is elucidated. Finally, the study contributes to the understanding of alternative models and experiences of being a woman in gendered spaces, while shedding light on relevant behavioural patterns among pregnant tourists and the sociocultural impacts of these patterns.     

MEGA‐IRRIGATION AND NEOLIBERALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL STATES: EVOLUTION AND CRISIS IN THE GHARB PLAIN,MOROCCO

This article explores the development, evolution and impacts of large‐scale irrigation schemes in the formation of the postcolonial state of Morocco and in more recent neoliberal decades. In particular, the article focuses on the Gharb Plain in the Sebou River basin, which was targeted by huge investments to become the core region for national development. In this area, three stages of development – colonial, early independent, and the aggressive politique des grandes barrages post‐1970 – have created two clearly different and successive landscapes. The traditional landscape has been overlain, and largely obliterated, by colonial and postcolonial governmental landscapes, reflected through different spatial, economic, cultural, and political patterns over time. In the present, a fourth stage of neoliberal development is occurring in the landscape, in which diffused poverty and ecosystem collapse coincide with greater concentrated wealth and the building of technological infrastructures. The article aims to complement critical studies on neoliberal environments, by focusing in particular on the manipulation, dispossession and commodification of water and land resources in irrigated agriculture in Morocco. These emerging rationalities are closely related to the changing policies of the contemporary Moroccan state.     

Priestley in Germany

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on the reception of Priestley in Germany, which is remarkable for the huge and assiduous interest it raised in different philosophical milieus. Priestley’s dynamical conception of matter, his explanation of the functioning of the brain, and of the production of material ideas are at the basis of the new form of materialism that develops in Germany in the late 1770s, and which differs completely from the model of mechanical materialism Germany was used to in earlier decades. Indeed, the German reception of Priestley’s ideas begins surprisingly early, just one year after the publication of his edition of Hartley’s Observations on Man (1775), and traverses the two final decades of the eighteenth century with a considerable number of reviews and references in the main philosophical journals and works of the time. In 1778, his introduction to the Observations was translated into German and presented in the form of a manifesto of a new materialistic philosophy compatible with the claims of morals and religion. Within a few years, Priestley became the unavoidable reference point for the most relevant theological and philosophical discussions concerning the nature of matter and spirits, the place of God, the possibility of human freedom, and the legitimacy of free thinking.