Talking to others: analysing tourists’ communications on cultural heritage experiences

In the area of cultural heritage, tourists’ experiences emphasise not only the moment and its personal nature but also socio-cultural traits. These experiences when expressed (social communications) are an important gateway to knowledge about tourists’ sense-making processes. This paper reports on the mediation between tourists and heritage sites via comments on a digital platform (TripAdvisor) about two Spanish tourist destinations with opposing characteristics and four heritage sites, which are analysed. The methodology used seeks to transcend the individual and anecdotal aspects of tourists’ comments. Indeed, the results obtained show the relevance of the humanisation and the discursive weight of heritage contexts in emotional/personal stories. Tendencies observed in non-regulated contexts confirm the role of a complex negotiation at cultural heritage sites and highlight the need to explore possible exchanges of sense in tourists’ encounters with such sites.     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

Jute cultivation in the Lower Amazon, 1940–1990: an ethnographic account from Santarém, Pará, Brazil

The Amazon region has long been a place of economic booms and busts. Much attention in the historical literature on Amazonia has focused on the largest and most famous regional economic boom, the Rubber Boom, a period of sustained economic prosperity for some from 1860 to 1920. Other ‘booms’ have occurred in the region as well and this paper describes and discusses one of those others. The paper demonstrates how an export economy in a global periphery (coffee in Brazil) affected economic development in a periphery of that same country and makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating how ethnographic research can contribute to an understanding of a historical period when the paper trail is weak.Jute, a fiber crop, dominated agricultural production along the Amazon River floodplain in the reach between Manaus and Santarém, Brazil, from the late 1930s until the early 1990s. The crop was introduced to the region by Japanese immigrants in order to supply the demand for jute sacking in the south of Brazil where such sacks were used to package commodities, especially coffee. Local smallholder cultivators grew and processed jute, production being mediated initially through Japanese middlemen, later by Brazilians. Poor fiber quality, several external shocks, including the removal of tariffs on imported jute, and especially changes in commodity packaging such as bulk handling and the use of synthetic sacks instead of jute sacks for the transport of coffee beans, the Amazonian jute market collapsed in the early 1990s. Despite its collapse, the legacy of the boom is still evident in the physical and social landscapes in the region.