Abstract

VILLELA LIMA DA COSTA, Gustavo. Tourism and Social Change: The Case of Aventureiro - Ilha Grande (RJ), Brazil. Estud. perspect. tur. [online]. 2009, vol.18, n.3, pp.243-261. ISSN 1851-1732.

The Aventureiro village, at Ilha Grande, state of Rio de Janeiro, lives in a fast process of social change, since the Cândido Mendes prison at Ilha Grande was ended in 1994. This event turned the whole region into an open frontier to tourist and land capital. The adaptation of the Aventureiro village to tourism is recent and this made some questions arise: how did the people and families abandon progressively their work on livelihood agriculture and hireling fishing to become camping administrators? How did they organize these camping's? Who are the tourists that go to Aventureiro? Which is, then, the importance of the individual in this historical process of social change as they are not passive subjects in this process but active agents? This paper intends to answer these questions pointing out that some of the classifying categories, such as "traditional population" or "caiçara" shall not be used by the social scientist as analytical categories because they are, in fact, political categories that are brought into action by the social actors that are looking after their interests. In this case, these categories can't afford to understand social change processes, because they imply cultural and economic immobility to some social groups.

Keywords : Tourism; Social change; Social interaction.

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