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Ecotourism Experiences in Visitors’ Books of a Greek Reserve: a Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective
Author(s) -
Stamou Anastasia G.,
Paraskevopoulos Stephanos
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
sociologia ruralis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.005
H-Index - 84
eISSN - 1467-9523
pISSN - 0038-0199
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9523.00228
Subject(s) - visitor pattern , perspective (graphical) , tourism , nature reserve , ecotourism , sociology , distribution (mathematics) , destinations , critical discourse analysis , environmental ethics , geography , political science , ideology , law , archaeology , computer science , philosophy , mathematical analysis , mathematics , artificial intelligence , programming language , politics
This article explores the way visitors to a Greek reserve experience the protected area through visitors’ books, namely, via the distribution of the tourism and environmentalist image of the reserve in their texts. Although it has been often claimed that the economic aspect of eco–tourism has overridden the environmentalist one, the problem has not been adequately addressed in terms of visitors, and has produced conflicting findings. This article sheds some light on the unexplored genre of visitors’ books and raises methodological issues by employing a Content Analysis framework from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. Although visitors’ books do not always represent a major source of feedback for site organisers, visitors’ representations of the reserve do emerge. Despite the equal distribution of the tourism and environmentalist images of the reserve, in quantitative terms, the former overrides the latter in qualitative terms. Finally, ecotourism experiences are found to be homogeneous within and across texts, while any differences observed are more due to the nature of social practice in which texts are generated than to the type of visitor.