Rural Communities in Ecuador: Relationships between Culture, Nature, Disasters, Tourism, and Cultural Heritage (Phase 5)

This qualitative research project, developed since 2018 and focused on the provinces of Esmeraldas and Manabí, aims to understand the struggles of meaning in coastal rural populations regarding their practices and visions concerning culture, cultural heritage, community tourism, and their relationship with nature. The current phase integrates northern Esmeraldas (San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro cantons) for a comparative study with previous work in Muisne (Bolívar parish). The project addresses the limited access of rural populations to public policies on culture, heritage, and tourism, and the contrast between official tourism promotion and the outcomes for the communities. Anthropology is used as the theoretical and methodological framework, employing ethnography (dense description) to interpret social dynamics and normative changes, especially following disasters like the 2016 earthquake. Objectives include discovering local discourses on tourism and nature, analyzing confrontations surrounding these topics, and interpreting whether territorial changes constitute processes of rural gentrification. Expected outcomes include the publication of an indexed article (Scielo/Redalyc) and the dissemination of findings back to the communities and academia.<br/><br/><b>Goal</b>: <br/>To discover, from an anthropological perspective, the struggles of meaning generated around existing practices and visions in rural communities concerning tourism, nature, and culture, in the Bolívar parish (Muisne canton) and the San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro cantons in the province of Esmeraldas.<br/><br/><b>Research lines</b>: <br/>Anthropological studies