Nature and Culture: encounters and disagreements

An analysis of the Camí de cavalls and emerging forms of tourism on the island of Menorca

Abstract

This paper analyses the dynamism inherent in the representations that people attribute to nature and its appropriation and exaltation by the tourism industry and the institutions that promote it. The analysis reveals, on the one hand, the objectification of these new representations in the emergence of alternative forms of tourism and, on the other, a situated worldview in which nature has become just another consumer product. The observation of an element of the Menorcan landscape, the Camí de cavalls, and the formulas for selling this culturalised nature are the starting point for questioning the epistemological and methodological validity of dichotomous categories in social research. This study focuses on the Nature/Culture duality that began to be redefined in anthropology following the hermeneutic turn in the 1970s and subsequently with the ontological turn in the last decades of the 20th century and early 21st century. The working methodology was based on data collection through online research. The empirical material resulting from content analysis, combined with prolonged participant observation and an exhaustive literature review, formed the theoretical basis of this study.