Современные проблемы сервиса и туризма 2016_v.10_#2 | Page 9

ЛОКАЛЬНОЕ В ГЛОБАЛЬНОМ: ФОРМУЛА ТУРИЗМА LOCAL IN GLOBAL: FORMULA FOR TOURISM UDC 572:338.48 DOI: 10.12737/19498 Maximiliano E. Korstanje University of Palermo (Buenos Aires, Argentina); University of Leeds, Centre for Ethnicity & Racism studies / CERS (Leeds, United Kingdom); PhD, Professor; e-mail: [email protected] WHAT IS TOURISM? AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC DISCUSSION Some decades ago, tourism scholars precluded that the production of knowledge would invariably lead to the maturation of discipline. Even in these years, tourism-research has grown rapidly but keeping some concerns respecting the possibilities to become in a consolidated discipline. One of the aspects that tourism research is unable to resolve is the dispersion of theories, and the lack of a shared epistemology to understand what tourism is. In this new manuscript I  explain informally the anthropocentric ground of tourism. This does not represent any attack to any scholar in particular, but a call of attention to what today is being written. Keywords: epistemology of tourism, rites of passage, mobility, escapement. Introduction. Nowadays tourism research faces a serious crisis. This is the reason why an attempt is worth of my time and efforts. Here I will synthesize likely in an informal way, my experience as author, reviewer, and editor in tourism fields. Some decades ago, Professor J. Tribe held the thesis that the growth of tourism research was not backed by a firm background. The flexibility of International Academy for the Study of Tourism respecting to what is being produced worldwide, conjoined to other factors such as the fragmentation of theories and networks in the field resulted in the lack of a shared epistemology to understand the phenomenon [78, 79, 80]. If J. Jafari [27] in his seminal text, The Scientifization of Tourism, proclaimed the rise of a knowledge based platform where any subjective valuations would set the pace to more objective scientific studies, Tribe observed that these spin-offs were based on serious discrepancies along with the meaning of tourism. As Thirkettle & Korstanje [77] put it, the struggle for emergent schools to monopolize and impose their own interpretations prompted a much deeper dispersion almost impossible to control. Instead of coordinating efforts to forge a more efficient and harmonized method, tourism-related scholars adopted transdisciplinarity as a vehicle towards scientific maturation. From its onset, appliedresearch has been influenced by a business- ce ntered paradigm in which case, tourism was naively defined as an industry in lieu of an ancient social institution. Rather than achieving the desired results, studies focused on the needs of finding new segments (demand) to satisfy the needs of suppliers. Most certainly, commercial tourism was sensitive to the demand leaving other of its aspects unchecked. Money was a crucial factor to optimize the leisure system that modern societies created after WWII [67]. Tourism management posed as a valid instrument of planning in order to organize territory in an efficient manner. Since future is unknown, and science is based on empirical facts, Van Doorn observed, the role of tourism-researchers was pointed out to forecast the trends and effects of tourism in environment [86]. The management of tourist destinations rested on the trust in the evolutionary progress of the industry. For this reason, applied-research should be tilted at measuring the dynamic of destinations from an all encompassing way [18, 22, 60]. During 90s decade, marketing and management monopolized the emerging paradigms emerging paradigms. New nascent trends such as darktourism, slum-tourism, creative-tourism, heritage-tourism and so forth, arrived to the toptier journals to set agenda in scholarship to mark the boundaries of what should be or not investigated [77]. Though this dispersion generated new businesses for investors, states 7