Tourism Ecosystem of Aruba

Experience Narratives on Deterritorialization, Autopoiesis, and Learning

Abstract

This article brings a reflection on Latin American characteristics within experiences of linguistic interaction in tourism ecosystems, based on travel experience narratives from an English language immersion in Aruba, a Caribbean island located north of the South American coast. It seeks to understand how processes of deterritorialization, autopoiesis, and learning emerge through the participants’ experiences. The approach is theoretically grounded in ecosystemic complexity and in studies on studies involving Tourism, Communication, Language, and Subjectivity. Methodologically, it is guided by the strategies the Cartography of Knowledge and Rhizomatic Matrices, with an operational emphasis on bibliographic cartography and experience narratives as procedures. The travel experience is marked by micro-events, treated here as schizoanalytic folds, which reveal subjective transformations, especially through encounters with the Other, uncertainties and cultural and linguistic interactions. The immersion also highlights processes in which individuals mobilize different communicational strategies in order to make themselves understood, a phenomenon called here as “debabelization.” The immersion experience in Aruba fostered movements and encounters, encouraging processes of reinvention of the subjects while expanding linguistic, cultural, and existential learning. Clear Latin American characteristics emerge, which may become indicators for strengthening tourism ecosystems and linguistic-communicational ecosystems marked by lovingness and an openness toward encounters and coexistence.