Die Geschichte des Tourismus in Namibia

In this interdisciplinary study Lukas Breitwieser examines the development of tourism in Namibia based on a relational spatial concept. Based on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, he analyses the homogenizing effect of technology, which opens up touristic spaces infrastructurally and conveys safety. At the same time, this leads to a symbolic-cultural differentiation, which turns specific spaces into unique tourist attractions.

Starting with the early tourism in the 1920s right up to the present, Breitwieser evaluates different types of sources and proves that there is an astounding consistency in the pattern of Namibian tourism. A successfully functioning tourism is always between the poles of safety and adventure, nature and technology, wilderness and civilisation, modernity and past. On the one hand, involved parties such as safari companies tried to present the allegedly untouched nature as a special feature, on the other hand they pointed out the technically well-developed landscape. Places, which were defined as especially valuable by tour operators, were able to connect historically nostalgic and romantically charged attributions with contrasting ideas of adventure and danger. Thus, spaces were created which were not only geographically but also temporally construed and which work out to this day. (German)