Constructing Cultural Identities: Venezia, Venezia Nativa, Venissa

Abstract

The article examines the social and cultural co-production of representations of a place addressing the role of tourism in this process. Conceiving narratives as sets of imageries and related performing practices, I aim at exploring the case of Venice, focusing on Burano/Mazzorbo context. This focus becomes central to understanding tourism as an everyday dimension of the locality, showing the interplay between different narratives constantly produced by a wide range of social actors involved in creating place identities. In this process each subject I consider, i.e. the hospitality company Venissa and other local actors, negotiates multiple senses of place and the related practices by which the place is experienced. In a first stage the article presents a discourse analysis of narratives produced by Venissa, the wine resort set in Mazzorbo, a small island connected by a bridge to the better-known island of Burano in the Venice Lagoon. Starting from the core meanings of the company’s identity, I consider some of the touristic imageries strategically employed or simply evoked by the firm. In a second stage, the perspective was extended to the residents’ perceptions and experiences of tourism in the broader sense. Exploring their senses of place and the ongoing, selective, multi-situated process of identity making, tourism emerges as a central and critical dimension for their identity/alterity issues. The focus on the residents reveals multiple processes of sensing tourism and making sense of it, and highlights the power of touristic rhetoric, embedded and negotiated by the residents themselves. Finally, the articles concludes by suggesting how a dialectical analysis of the different processes which develop between contextual metanarratives produced around a place could offer insights into the cultural production of identities, of the related meanings, and of the ways by which a place is experienced.

Keywords: Venice, tourism, discourse analysis, identity, anthropology.

JEL Classification: Z13, O35, M14, M31, R3