To Postpone the End of the World:

Epistemological Textures of Tourism and its Crossroads

Abstract

 The paper aims to discuss an ecosystemic process for apprehending Tourism as a transdisciplinary field, which allows that, in the fabric of territory and culture merges a social epistemology, whose object and method need new perspectives. To weave the complexity of this self-eco-organizing process, the operative categories <territory>, <region>, <monopoly income>, and <symbolic power> were operationalized, which structure the cultural, anthropological, spatial, and economic field of the built ecosystem. The intertwining between Bourdieu's Theory of Fields, Morin's Complexity Theory, and David Harvey's operative category <monopoly rent> occasioned the epistemological rupture in the morphological standpoint adopted for reconstructing an <explanatory model>, evolving towards a reconstruction as an ecosystemic process of Tourism. The search for historical concreteness to the rebuilt theoretical-methodological model process was structured in the socio-historical relations of a specific territory, the Região dos Vinhedos [Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil], because it is a socioeconomic practice in a cooperation network, a demand that pictures the organicity proposed by the tourism ecosystem of Beni and Moesch (2015), starting point of deconstruction-reconstruction of the object of investigation. The translation of the experience [the doing-knowing] to the level of the object to be known [theory of action] was made by the operative categories <field>, <habitus>, and <symbolic power>, according to Bourdieu. This investigation showed a delimitation of space (region) woven by a socioeconomic cooperation network, localist, and consequently social, that allowed the resumption and the establishment of a transposition of the cultural field, where symbolic power relations are expressed by way of being, understood as Italianness, and the valorization of the land, either in the Denomination of Origin [DO] form for the Vale dos Vinhedos viniculture, or, in entrepreneurship that expresses the value of the work of their ancestors, in the symbolic brand of these small businesses, from the creative drive of the actors of new socioeconomic processes established in territories embedded with affective memories and reconstructed identities, which on the part of its actors resist the seduction of easy profit in the molds of neoliberalism.