Ensaio sobre epistemologia marxista no turismo: uma leitura althusseriana

Abstract

This theoretical essay starts with the observation of contradictory aspects of tourism, regarding its ethics and the negative effects it causes in its production and reproduction in the context of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, it questions the responsibility of the academic field of tourism in the production and reproduction of these dissonances. Seeking to problematize knowledge production in the field, it discusses its epistemology, observing the epistemological syncretism that constitutes it and the use of theories and methods despite epistemological knowledge about what is produced. Amid the inconsistencies of the observed scenario and considering personal and academic trajectories, it takes a position with the readings produced on this debate from a materialist epistemological basis. After, through a literature review of works referenced to materialism in national journals specialized in tourism and by recognizing the constitutive heterogeneity of Marxist readings of Karl Marx's work, notes that even the Marxist production in the field of tourism elaborates their reading, predominantly, from a philosophical and theoretical basis linked to Hegelian Marxism. Therefore, to present another reading for the constitution of a materialist episteme of tourism, it proposes to establish an internal critique of the production of knowledge produced by Hegelian Marxism, based on the propositions of Louis Althusser about the specificity of the theoretical practice of materialist dialectics, pointing out the relativity and limits of validity of this knowledge. Thus, it analyzes theses produced in postgraduate programs in tourism about historical materialism and dialectical materialism, establishing an epistemological reading of these works based on the Althusserian theoretical basis. Through the analysis, it was possible to observe in the works an interpretation of tourism from historical materialism and dialectical materialism determined by elements that conform to the model of capitalist rationality, without assuming the necessary position of rupture with illuminist, idealist, and empiricist referents, reaching a saturation point concerning the critique of the field in the context of the capitalist mode of production. In the end, in contrast to the analyzed theoretical production, it signals propositions for the constitution of a materialist epistemology of tourism referenced to Louis Althusser: the epistemological rupture between the thought of Karl Marx and Georg Hegel; the recognition of the materialist principle of the difference between the real and its knowledge; the recognition of the determined objective reality that implies to the subject of theoretical practice a place and a function in knowledge production; the principle of overdetermination of Marxist contradiction; the concept of totality as the unit of a complex structured whole, always already given as dominant; the incompatibility of historical materialism and dialectical materialism with the model of the rationality of Hegelian and humanist Marxism. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]