Els Paradisos oceànics d'Aurora Bertrana: de l'espai mític al turisme depredador de la Polinèsia

Abstract

A few years ago the works of Aurora Bertrana (1892–1974) were rescued from oblivion. The direct expression of the author was revalued, as well as her point of view, which was innovative and unashamed in the twenties and thirties and remains undeniable today. Ocean Paradises (1930) was the travel book that gave her fame as a writer and traveler. She said it was a book written from the innocence of a novice writer, and the critics have spoken of a text soaked in a Rousseaunian conception of Polynesian reality. This paper studies Bertrana’s work from the innovative perspective of the anthropology of tourism, and discusses whether it is appropriate to consider Aurora Bertrana’s travel prose as the point of view of an “alternative tourist,” in the terminology used by Mowforth and Munt. In Bertrana’s prose, otherness and authenticity are united in a desire to ensure the preservation of culture and ethnicity of the other.