Introduction to the study of tourism through cultural materialism

Abstract

With the well-being model, the economic sectors had a substantive growth in Mexico. With the change of the economic model, the services sector, mainly tourism, has consolidated as an activity that homogenizes and functionalizes the landscape in order to facilitate the appropriation of the natural and cultural resources of rural communities for the expansion of the economy of free market, with the objective that the way of production and reproduction tied to its financing endures, with which contradicts the sustainability of the activity. For the analysis of this situation and its implications, the use of cultural materialistic strategy (Harris, 1982) is suggested, as general theoretical-methodological base, improved by the proposals of Sauer (1925) for the knowledge of the natural and cultural landscape, and of Cordero (2004) for the knowledge of the forms of appropriation of nature and culture that uses the capitalist expansion. With this proposal, helping in the identification of the appropriation process, homogeneization and functionalization, tied to  tourism, is expected.