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Tourism in the Fond Gens Libre Indigenous community in Saint Lucia: Examining impacts and empowerment

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... The conceptualisation of empowerment has been used in research that focuses on the issues of gender equality (Hashimoto, 2014: 223-225;Miettinen, 2007) and Indigenous issues (de Bernardi et al., 2018;Nicholas & Thapa, 2018), in the context of tourism development. It has been argued that external contacts, self-esteem, pride and confidence can have a positive influence on empowerment, whereas a lack of knowledge about tourism, a lack of self-confidence or a lack of skills might lead to disempowerment even though people are seemingly participating in tourism development (de Bernardi et al., 2018;Höckert, 2011). ...
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The purpose of this chapter is to approach inclusion by discussing the roles of hosts and guests in participatory tourism projects. Instead of drawing inspiration from the predominant understanding of host–guest relations within hospitality management, we call attention to the more ‘ancient’ idea of hospitality, where – in its simplest form – hosts have the responsibility to take care of their guests’ well-being for a limited amount of time. Moreover, in the context of ‘project society’, we are not focused on host–guest relations that take place in different kinds of physical homes, but approach projects as metaphorical homes where different kinds of moments and relations of hospitality occur.
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