Routine before Paradise: Narratives on the History of a Potiguar Tourism Destination

Abstract

This article intends to accomplish a
brief analysis of the changes in the daily life of the
community of the beach of Pipa–RN, which were
directly caused by the advent of tourism – part of
the local landscape. Based on data collected in eth-
nographic research, in which the older residents of
the district played an essential role in the construc-
tion and record of their oral history, we have sou-
ght to question the ordinary representation tourism
destinations as pure, authentic, and naive, being
this harmony threatened by the intense flow of out-
siders. Therefore, this work tries to evidence how
tourism can change the local networks of sociability
while the host community creates mechanisms of
symbolic reformulation to face these changes., In
other words, even when they are induced by exter-
nal factors, they are conducted in a native way, what
becomes clear through the observation of changes
in gender relations.