Turismo e fronteira: integração cultural e tensões identitárias na divisa do Brasil com o Paraguai

Abstract

Spatial boundaries are significant contexts for the demarcation of difference and otherness between adjacent peoples and cultures. They consist of local integration and hybrids, but also are environments of conflict. Tourism, while moving large numbers of human beings in search of leisure and entertainment, provides also frequent contacts between peoples and cultures, triggering distinct contexts of intercultural dialogue and confrontation. So geographic frontier territories as well as tourism territories turn into places of symbolic boundaries, privileged contexts for investigating the nature of identities, to the extent that they foster relations of otherness and the dynamics of representations of self and “other “. This paper aims to discuss how tourism, in a territory of frontier at the twin cities of Ponta Pora (BR) and Pedro Juan Caballero (PY), has helped to establish the contexts of symbolic boundaries in Mato Grosso do Sul.

Keywords

• Frontier
• Tourism
• Cultural dialogue
• Confrontation
• Identity