Turisme per despossessió: el treball col·lectiu del patrimoni cultural com a comú denominador urbà

Abstract

Most of the literature in the anthropo-logy  of  tourism  either  looks  at  the  com-modification  of  culture  or  focuses  on  its  authenticity.  Few  are  the  authors  that  explore  the  production  of  tourism  and  when they do so they prime the expansive forces of capitalism, including the organi-sation  of  labour.  However,  what  there  is  seldom lacking is the study of the labour that falls out of the wage format and that is key to producing the spaces that attract capital in the form of tourist arrivals and real estate initiatives. Therefore, this arti-cle  aims  to  examine  the  living  and  dead  labour that are necessary for the produc-tion of cultural heritage. I maintain that the  tourist  industry  needs  to  transform  into commodities both the spaces labou-red in the past and the collective use valu-es of the present. I therefore put emphasis on  the  absorption  by  capitalism  of  both  the external and the internal peripheries.
After illustrating this argument with seve-ral ethnographic sketches drawn from my research in the Historic Centre of Ciutat de Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain), I re-ach the conclusion that the relation living labour  maintains  with  dead  labour,  and  out  of  which  heritage  is  made,  is  flawed  given  the  differential  access  people  have  to the product of their collective labour.