Turismo: ¿Una mirada al Otro?

Abstract

Within the occidental reading of reality, where a very dominant and exclusive discourse prevails, there is no place for the Other’s language. Then, through the hermeneutic method, this investigation intends to lay dawn a theoretical proposal that approaches to the possibility of having the tourism to lead the tourist to be aware about the Other. In the globalization context, tourism represents an opportunity of getting physically nearer to the Other, of acknowledging his existence and becoming aware of his presence; and an opportunity, without understanding him, of re-creating and confirming ourselves in the face of the negation that the Other represents. Nonetheless, it is not possible to talk about this opportunity without talking about tourism socio cultural range, where there are found diffused extremes oscillating between the alterity imposition and the recovery of the human contact which individuals have lost inside of virtual spaces. So, tourism is proposed as the human act where a person (tourist) temporally moves himself through space for getting out of his cotidianity and getting in the cotidianity of the Other. Yet, tourism also represents the existence of barriers that do not allow the contact with the Other. Some of them have been deliberately established, maybe with the aim of not disturbing the tourist’s idea of oneness; building standardized, insane spaces, out of both the tourist’s and the Other’s reality. Nevertheless, physical barriers are not the only ones: there also exist the unavoidable epistemic barriers that emerge in the tourist at the presence of the one who questions the certainty of everything known. Then, who is it possible for the tourist to be a little nearer of seeing the other? The answer may be found in the prime purpose of tourism: the leisure experience. Finally, the result is a first attempt for tourism theorizing through philosophy, a point where philosophers, turismologists, sociologists and anthropologist, among others, could reflect and that leaves an open invitation to future investigations.