Interactive Analysis about Tourists’ Valuations and Practices at Museum Egidio Feruglio (Patagonia, Argentina)

Abstract

The binomial heritage and tourism involves various social valuations and practices, depending their multiplicity and variability as soon as the social actors involved. Among the various actors, the tourists attribute different types of values, and consequently they develop multiple actions in the heritage sites that deserve a complex approach. In this sense, this article will describe the values and practices of tourists in the tour and museum visit, and their interactive interjections. In the investigation, we develop an exploratory and descriptive study with methodological triangulation, which we taken as a case study the Museo Egidio Feruglio (Trelew, Argentina). The data were collected through surveys and observations about tourists, supplemented with data obtained from the interviews applied to museum staff. The main results are focused about the motivations, perceptions and satisfaction of tourists as forms of expression of their valuations; and also about travel behavior, “attentional” behavior and spatial displacement in the museum as manifestations of their practices. The conclusions resided in the processes of interaction among different types of values on heritage, such as use values, symbolic values and aesthetic-form values. In turn, their interjections appear in practices of consumption, recreation and learning in the museum analyzed.