Landscape, from attraction to fetish. An essay on visual consumption and tourism.

The evolution of contemporary tourism, understood as an economic activity and social practice with political sense and cultural value, presents an extraordinary variety of situations that force us to reevaluate the traditional relationships between attractions, landscape and visual consumption. It is necessary to recover perspectives that focus on landscape as an ideological and historical construct linked to the emergence of modernity and capitalism. And then relate them to critical analyses of tourism as a value strategy and a state intervention tool. In this essay, different positions are reviewed mostly from the geographical stance with the objective of analysing the relations between landscape and tourism, presenting Argentinian and Latin American examples. Finally, as a research hypothesis, it is proposed that recourse is made to the idea of fetish to understand the current phenomena of production and consumption of tourism landscapes, going beyond the traditional concept of attraction.