Tourism Mobilities and Public Health

Historical analysis from a Brazilian perspective

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing tourism and public health from a mobilities perspective. We analyze tourism not just as corporeal movement, but as a socio-spatial phenomenon that combines material and immaterial elements. For the purposes of this analysis, we take a historical approach on disease outbreaks in Brazil by reviewing press coverage on the poliomyelitis epidemic in the context of political, social, cultural, and economic transformations of the 1950s, with particular interest in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Though this disease did not influence tourism directly – which, in fact, was very incipient in the country at that time – this analysis highlights early travel and tourism imaginaries in relation to public health protocols and concerns. As a main contribution, this study explores different dimensions of (im)mobilities (from pathogens to tourists, from idyllic images to sick bodies), which have the potential to grasp tourism in a more relational way in the so-called post-Covid19 pandemic world.