Author:

Claudio Milano

Abstract:

This dissertation highlights the promotion of tourism in the Parnaíba River Delta, and more specifically in Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel, Piauí state, Brazil.

The research explores the transformations experienced by the island community related to the emergence of old and new tourism practices (federal tourism promotion, real estate/investment and new tourism), as an expression of innovative types of mobility. Tourism has become one of the most booming legal industries of the past 50 years, and as a social and transnational phenomenon continues to expand and diversify thanks to globalization processes.

Since the mid-2000s, the Parnaíba River Delta has been the object of vigorous neoliberal tourism promotion and provides complex negotiations involving Federal Government public policy, private sector capital investments in tourism/real estate, the islanders themselves, and international development agencies.

Tourism promotion registered in Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel reveals macroeconomic processes and investments of tourism/real estate capital of Balearic origin operating in Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, the ethnography draws attention to how a new “product” emerges in the Parnaíba River Delta that transforms, integrates, and in some cases displaces activities such as agriculture, artisanal fisheries, livestock, and plant extraction, creating new symbolic forms of appropriation of natural resources and spaces.

With the economic conversion of productive activities, natural resources (vegetal and animal) have gone from having a social and productive role to acquiring a speculative function and other aesthetic values. Foreign investment and the wide availability of international speculative capital have intensified these restructuring processes.

The logics and dynamics of island land purchase and residential proposals for tourism/real estate projects have triggered disputes and negotiations both with environmental agencies and with the local community.

After a proper conceptualization of the island’s socioeconomic context, the doctoral research analyzes the emergence of tourism initiatives undertaken at various levels and problematizes the multiple relationships between the population of Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel and the environment in the context of tourism promotion.

Given these new initiatives, the appropriation of environmental discourse is registered as a form of resistance. Through the daily activities of fishermen, social meanings are examined, as well as the political implications of the negotiation and implementation of new forms of tourism in the Parnaíba River Delta.

The doctoral research is based on the analysis of the tourism mobilities paradigm, allowing the study of the inherent dynamics of the phenomenon in the scenario of Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel and, specifically, the relationship between controversial notions of tourism, development, and ecology.