One of the things I always found interesting about Bourdieu’s theories has to do with the ways in which fields, as social action spheres, tend to establish the limits of what’s thinkable. That is, to define what things is it reasonable to think about at determined moments and spaces.

In the case of the tourism field, these restrictions operate in a very particular way: they tend to sanction as useless any thougth about travel and tourism that doesn’t have as its objective any kind of sustainable commercial enterprise. Since I rather come from journalism and an academic context, fields where the analysis of any other kind of portion of reality shouldn’t necesarily be based on its commercial use, I always found quite problematic the reduction of “everything important should give money”.

In a way, this scheme establishes a clear limit of what’s thinkable: no critic reflection about the field itself is stimulated, since such reflections are understood as completely useless. According to this point of view, we should generate myths of place as business opportunities; but the evaluation of such imaginaries -that is, to take account of its production conditions from politics and economics- are not important.

This blog is part of a different bet: to analyze the different representations associated to the touristic field not as business opportunities but as social and political constructions. It’s a bet with no place in the touristic field, and for this reason its anchored in the academic, journalistic and literature side. In the same way the best travel stories are not written by travel journalists but those who come from sections more linked to politics -that’s the case of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Robert Kaplan- the best analysis of the tourism market will not come from the field itself, because this one refuses, systematically, to analyze any idea that is not comercially profitable.