Enchantment and solidarity

Abstract

This article studies the mechanisms of `enchantment' at work in the provision of tourist services, especially in one of its more modern forms: `fair' tourism, linked more broadly to the imaginative world and practices of fair trade. The French associations that promote and put into practice this type of tourism construct a context for meeting the `other' by presenting the consumption of this service as an act of solidarity. This shaping of the relation helps to create states of `enchantment' of tourists, an enchantment that draws power from the participation in a collective project to change the world (related to fair trade) and from the connection with a small producer of the South. However, the creation of this enchantment constitutes a fragile balance between what is hidden and what is revealed, and also depends on the protagonists of the encounter in situ. Here, we study the representations and reactions of tourists through a case study from Burkina Faso. Situations of disenchantment show that the double mechanism of de-fetishization and re-fetishization at the heart of ethical tourism does not always work.

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