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Question: Conclusion: Contrasting Geographies of Tourism in Europe

Answer: In order to build bridges among different traditions within geographies of tourism, the contributions to this volume have the capacity of explaining to an English-speaking academic audience and scholars working from within different linguistic region what exactly it is that tourism geographers are researching in these non-Anglophone European regions/linguistic domains. In fact, academics that do not have the capacity to speak/read/understand other languages arguably miss out on the opportunity to import/use/adapt/analyze ideas, concepts, views, interpretations, and even empirical case studies produced and subsequently published in other languages, unless they happen to get translated and published in the Anglo-American domain. This is an important and relevant point in the sense that parallel academicuniverses based on the geographies of tourism have been created and are still in the process of expanding into other regions and languages. In addition, even though number of academic outputs that get published in the dominant Anglo-American circuits of knowledge dissemination is growing, many ideas, concepts, views, and interpretative frameworks that hold potential interest in terms of the development of the discipline remain on the periphery or are excluded entirely. As a consequence, these ideas tend to remain isolated with respect to other regional and linguistic traditions.

Therefore, it is entirely logical that one of the main purposes of this volume was to examine the what, why, and where of published outputs in different languages by researchers from each particular region. But how is this related to the specific geographical tradition(s), culture(s), or academic contexts (and even the underlying characteristics and trajectory of the development of tourism) in each regional linguistic domain? Furthermore, how are regional/linguistic academic traditions related to other geopolitical circumstances and power relations within established countries, such as regional or cultural alliances or regional/linguistic differences present within the borders of each country?

The cultural and political discussion on the Nordic idea as the framework for geographies of tourism, the reference to the Francophone area, the German-speaking countries or the Greek language area in the case of the three chapters devoted to France, Germany, and Greece is a case in point. Moreover, language as a geopolitical factor for explaining intraregional divergence in academic profiles among Dutch, French, or German speakers in Belgium is explained in Chapter 8. Finally, even though in principle there is a shared common academic tradition in Spain, Chapter 9 illustrates a case with linguistic diversity inherent in academic production (including publications in Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque) as well as the surprising lack of a common academic tradition in tourism geography with the large Spanish-speaking Latin American research community. Actually, this has also been observed in other branches of geography, as noted by García Palomares, Michelini, and Mínguez (2009).
The ideas, contents, and questions in this book are of general interest for geography and also for other social sciences related to tourism. For example, the 2012 Geographica Helvetica Symposium was devoted to the making of academic geographies in Europe, noting that human geography in Europe (and globally) is still shaped by so-called “national” or “language-based” traditions, such as Francophone or “deutschsprachige” geography. Even within Anglo-American geography, nuances can be detected between British and US geographies (as observed in the introduction to this volume). These various national traditions have emerged from very specific national genealogies of geography, which in turn has been shaped by specific philosophical thought traditions, backgrounds of practicing social sciences, and styles of academic writing. Furthermore, these genealogies shape the present-day praxis of both emergent and established scholars in these different academic spaces.

Within Europe, regional traditions in academia (almost always related to the distribution of languages) have tended to have their own circuits of knowledge production and exchange, including conferences, research networks, journals, and associations. Although it is entirely understandable that researchers tend to gravitate toward academic circuits in their own particular linguistic contexts, interestingly this only tends to happen where the language is very widely spoken (as is often, for example, the case with French, German, and Spanish networks). The editors of this volume agree with the viewpoint of the Geographica Helvetica Symposium organizers, with respect to the volume’s contributions, that while there is a drive toward internationalization, the richness of each tradition should be preserved, rather than buried. Furthermore, it would be desirable if researchers are empowered to export their work beyond their regional bases into the global academic arena (and not necessarily just within the Anglo-American circuits).

Without projects like the present volume, only those researchers that possess native or acquired bilingualism or multilingualism (or at least a reading-level working knowledge of another language) are able to be surprised, inspired, or attracted by developments in the discipline originating from other cultural and linguistic contexts. Indeed, only this knowledge of foreign languages allows individuals to benefit from the inherent cross-fertilization that may arise from research conducted in different regional/linguistic environments.

In this sense, this volume may be considered to be a part of the long legacy of highlighting in English-language geographies of tourism the research which is being undertaken and published in other European countries, regions, and linguistic domains. This legacy is becoming increasingly established in English-language journals such as Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Space, Place and Environment and, as stated by its editor Alan Lew, the editorial team has been “considerably hampered in our internationalization efforts by language barriers” (2002, p. 225). In this sense, some particular precedents of the chapters in this book are the reviews of “country” tourism geographies previously published on Finland (Saarinen, 2003a; 2003b), France (Barbier & Pearce, 1984; Lazzarotti, 2002), Germany (Benthien, 1984; Kreisel, 2004), Austria (Lichtenberger, 1984), Italy (Pedrini, 1984), and Spain (Anton Clavé et al., 1996a). All of these are useful for identifying significant issues or themes in the contextual regional/linguistic realities within which they were produced. This is relevant in the sense that, as Hall explains in Chapter 2, although there is little discussion from academics within the tourism geography community as to the reasons why certain topics are studied and approaches developed, this is a key issue to understanding the evolution of the subdiscipline (Coles & Hall, 2006; Equipe MIT, 2011; Hall & Page, 2009; Page, 2005; Tribe, 2009; Vera Rebollo et al., 2011; Wilson, 2012).
As explained in the introductory chapter, this volume has involved a combined effort to share the keys to understanding some of the other regional and linguistic traditions in the geography of tourism in Europe in order to identify similarities, differences, and challenges for the future development of the subdiscipline. It is reasonably clear from the volume’s contributions to allow the editors to state that there are indeed regional/linguistic schools of tourism geographies in Europe and, in consequence, it makes sense to talk about regional/linguistic traditions. There are also trajectories of theoretical and methodological internationalization in different countries that can shed new light on the global development of tourism geographies at a worldwide scale. This presents a challenge for each of these regional/linguistic traditions and for the future evolution of the whole body of knowledge on tourism geographies, with its growing circulation of concepts, themes, and epistemological approaches from regional/linguistic traditions other than the dominant Anglo-American in tourism geography today.

(Source: , 20 Aug 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/S1571-5043(2013)0000019010