Community tourism experiences from brazilian, chilenas and costa rican

Abstract

CT is a strategy for traditional populations to lead their own lifestyles, independently of their degree of deculturalization in the face of the industrial urban societies hegemony and, therefore, it consists in an alternative to the consumer-materialistic lifestyle. Based on Latin American experiences, the objective of this article is to refine, or, even better, to justify the concept CT. Populations involved in these experiences, especially traditional ones, have a context of historical disadvantages. These experiences are not resumed to a new heterodox tourism alternative although they allow one to think about a new economy, the ecosocioeconomy, through a new rationality, which has been happening in domiciles, productive groups and communities, where problems and solutions occur and rarely are properly qualified. It is concluded that CT is a theory conceived from the experiences, the everyday complexities, the contradictions inherent to the pragmatic change pursued in the face of the economic utilitarianism limitations, although its implementation, many times, does not happen at the desired pace. The challenge is to preserve the communitarian logic of these experiences, without, at the same time, losing the communities' own dynamics as these get inserted into the market.