João Carlos Vicente Sarmento

A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde

The construction of memory in landscapes is a complex process which is embedded in webs of political and economic power. Often history is twisted and bended to better serve the current interests of the hegemonic forces at play. In this paper I attempt to explore how memory is at work in three different sites in Santiago Island, Cape Verde: an old fort and a historical town; a concentration camp; and a global resort. The three sites participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory in different ways, forging new forms of collective identity, which are embedded in local as well as global forces and processes. Through an analysis of the changes taking place on these sites, this paper suggests that while the country lives on foreign aid and attempts to embrace neo-liberal practices, it fails not only to provide basic services to the population but to engage critically with its history and geography.

Fort Jesus: Guiding the Past and Contesting the Present in Kenya

Abstract This paper focuses on the interpretation of Fort Jesus, Kenya, a late sixteenth century Portuguese-built fort, and attempts to discuss its significance in the region and in the country, and its role within the context of recent tourism development in Kenya. By exploring the ways in which a sample of local tourist guides engage with tourists and with the heritage and memory that Fort Jesus represents in this coastal region, some of the challenges facing tourism development in post-colonial Kenya are analysed. While the study reveals that the guides are not a homogeneous group, one of the shared positions is their resentfulness towards the inability of the coastal region to control and benefit from tourism. At the same time, despite some of the guides revealing to be skilful cultural mediators, the vast majority construct their mediation upon a predominantly colonial knowledge of the Fort.

Ubiquitous sensorization for multimodal assessment of driving patterns

Sustainability issues and sustainable behaviours are becoming concerns of increasing significance in our society. In the case of transportation systems, it would be important to know the impact of a given driving behaviour over sustainability factors. This paper describes a system that integrates ubiquitous mobile sensors available on devices such as smartphones, intelligent wristbands and smartwatches, in order to determine and classify driving patterns and to assess driving efficiency and driver’s moods. It first identifies the main attributes for contextual information, with relevance to driving analysis. Next, it describes how to obtain that information from ubiquitous mobile sensors, usually carried by drivers. Finally, it addresses the multimodal assessment process which produces the analysis of driving patterns and the classification of driving moods, promoting the identification of either regular or aggressive driving patterns, and the classification of mood types between aggressive and relaxed. Such an approach enables ubiquitous sensing of personal driving patterns across different vehicles, which can be used in sustainability frameworks, driving alerts and recommendation systems.

Searching for cultural geography in Portugal

Following on previous authors of these sections (Simonsen 2003) I must stress from the start of this article that a ‘Country Report’ is a social and cultural construction, and therefore situated, embodied and partial. In that sense, I am deeply aware of the fact that I am gazing and writing from a rural area in the northwest of Portugal to what has been taking place at the centre of the discipline of Geography in Portugal (please read ‘Lisbon’), and attempting to frame it in a wider and frequently distant progress in Geography, which at times (quite often) transforms this ‘centre’ into a very peripheral location. Following Gillian Rose, situating knowledge implies positioning the self in webs of power relations that constitute the researcher and the ‘objects of research’ and acknowledging the ways in which geography, history, and identity intersect to shape the production of academic knowledge that is necessarily partial, selective, and incomplete. The aim is not to achieve a transparent understanding, but ‘to produce non-overgeneralising knowledges that learn from other kinds of knowledges’ (Rose 1997: 315). At the same time, identifying what is, and what is not (critical) ‘cultural geography’, is not a simple task, since formal definitions immediately lead to problems of closure and exclusion (Atkinson, Jackson, Sibley and Washbourne 2005). Here I share with Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift (2003) the view that Cultural Geography is an unruly affair best understood as a ‘style of thought’, characterised by the valid and urgent questions that it seeks to ask. Over the next pages I try to be cautious in this regard, and while stretching or compressing the boundaries of the sub-discipline when I draw some lines, I am aware that allowing for a certain elasticity can be easily criticised. Yet, before I proceed, I must briefly mention some aspects that I consider critical to frame the ‘State of the Art’ of cultural geography in Portugal, aspects which I have recently stressed in an editorial note of Aurora Geography Journal (Sarmento 2007a). Just as in several other European countries, academic geography in Portugal is going through convoluted times. Firstly, the Bologna Process has led to a restructuring of first-, secondand in some cases Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 5, August 2008

Spacing forgetting : the birth of the museum at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, and the legacies of the colonization of memory in Kenya

This chapter discusses public memory in Kenya through an analysis of the restoration of Fort Jesus, Mombasa, Kenya, and the contemporary role of the fort as a site of memory. Drawing on the political uses of erasure, fiction, and omission, the authors reveal continuities in the production of memory at Fort Jesus that have been politicized in colonial and postcolonial contexts. An analysis of the British and Portuguese motives in converting the fort into a museum shows how the transformation supported their imperial projects in Africa in face of growing calls for decolonization. The chapter also analyzes the resistance to the restoration led by two figures in the Kenyan anticolonial movement, Tom Mboya and Pio Gama Pinto. Although reaffirming how their resistance to the museum provides a critical alternative to the nostalgic narratives currently in vogue at the site, the authors conclude that the memory work around Fort Jesus actively neglects the colonial experience.

Tourists’ walking rhythms: ‘doing’ the Tunis Medina, Tunisia

Abstract The contemporary medina of Tunis is intimately connected to the various urban development stages of the city at large. Despite its UNESCO status and undisputable attractions, the medina is peripheral to Tunisian tourism development. Yet its maze of streets is walked on a daily basis by numerous tourists, who bring flair, choreographies and rhythms which also constitute the medina. While there are a growing number of studies focusing on tourists’ movements, using technologies that allow for accurate mapping of timespace trajectories, I argue that we have much to learn from the embodied ways in which tourists move in an unknown terrain. Inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, this paper explores tourists’ rhythms and modes of walking, including their performances, body languages, stops and advances, and gaze interactions. Drawing on a combination of mobile methodologies, interviews and online comments, I argue that tourists engage in many different walking rhythms, which shift quickly according to the situation. It is the complex manner in which tourist bodies, rhythms and urban forms intersect within the contemporary city that contributes to the construction of the city itself.

Reconfiguring the public and the private: Noc-Noc arts festival, Guimarães, Portugal

In the past decades many cities have experienced growing pressure to produce and stage cultural events of different sorts to promote themselves and improve economic development. Culture-led development often relies on significant public investment and major private-sector sponsoring. In the context of strained public finances and profound economic crisis in European peripheral countries, local community low-budget events that manage to create significant fluxes of visitors and visibility assume a particular relevance. This paper looks at the four editions (2011–2014) of Noc-Noc, an arts festival organized by a local association in the city of Guimarães, Portugal, which is based on creating transient spaces of culture by transforming numerous homes, commercial outlets and other buildings into ephemeral convivial and playful ‘public’ environments. By interviewing a sample of people who have hosted (sometimes doubling as artists) these transitory art performances and exhibitions, artists and the events’ organizers and by experiencing the four editions of the event and engaging in multiple informal conversations with the public, this paper attempts to discuss how urban citizens may disrupt the cleavages between public and private space permitting various transgressions, and unsettling the hegemonic condition of the city council as the patron of the large majority of events.

Carminda Cavaco: pioneer of tourism studies in Portugal

On a cold and misty winter morning we were warmly greeted by Carminda Cavaco on her Lisbon apartment. Serenely on her couch, lighting a cigarette at regular intervals, Carminda happily answered our endless questions and calmly (re)counted various episodes of her life. We chatted for about three hours, scribbling some notes hastily, and travelled to her youth, to her voyages and initial papers, to the development of her early career, attempting to understand the paths that brought her to become the pioneer and the most influential Portuguese academic in the field of tourism. Some weeks earlier, from the other end of the Mediterranean, Metin Kozak approached us to write her portrait, an idea to which we were immediately attracted. Both authors are part of the same research group as Carminda – TERRITUR, Centre for Geographical Studies, University of Lisbon – and while one of us (João) is a geographer with interests in tourism like herself, the other (Ana) has a background in tourism management, communication and geography, has worked with her since 1998 in various research projects and publications (Inácio & Cavaco, 2010; Inácio & Joaquim, 2008), and is one of her few former PhD students (Inácio, 2008). Despite all our enthusiasm, we quickly realised that condensing almost 50 years of intense scholarship and publications in the field of tourism into a short paper like this would not be an easy task. Yet, it is critical to write a profile for an international audience. Firstly because Carminda’s CV and academic path eludes most google endeavours. Secondly, since most of her published works are not in English (remarkable exceptions are Cavaco, 1993a, 1995b, 1995c). Thirdly, because the only publication that comprehensively reviews and analyses her life and work in detail, and perhaps the single printed document with some biographic information on Carminda Cavaco, was published in Portuguese by Luís Moreno, one of her former PhD students, on the occasion of her jubilation, ten years ago (Moreno, 2006).

The Colonial Hotel: spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

In spite of its dereliction, the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, has emerged as an iconic African building. The dissonant meanings of this site, offer multiple opportunities to investigate the intersection of space and colonialism. We focus upon the cultural and political topologies of the hotel, and of colonial hotels generally, and make the proposition that they were a particular kind of violent colonial institution. By converging a relational reading of both violence and architecture, we reconstruct through the excavation of archival and related materials, the processes present in the histories of the hotel and city at large, to unmask how they acted as spaces of slow violence. White settler’s activities and rationales were underpinned by deliberative strategies of unknowing, forgetting, disavowal which together formed a kind of cultural agnosia that insulated them from the foundational violence that supported the colonial condition. We use a dispersed concept of violence, understood as a tactical and mutable process, which moves between physical, symbolic, embodied and performative domains. We address these domains in the paper through an analysis of the ways the city of Beira was planned, its architecture shaped and represented, and in the recreational and social performances within the hotel.

How Important are Value Orientations to Environmental Concern? A Comparison of National and International Tourists in Malaysia

Environmental beliefs, intentions, and behaviors can be derived from three types of values, namely, egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric. Consequently, the understanding of tourists’ value orientations and their association with environmental concern is crucial for improving productive strategies in the management of natural resources and protected areas. This study aims to scrutinize the priorities of tripartite value orientation between national (Malaysian) and international tourists (mostly European), and to investigate the contribution of these three value orientations to tourists’ environmental concern. Results disclose that Malaysian tourists valorize egoistic values more than tourists from Europe and other developed countries and are thus less concerned about the environment compared with their international counterparts. Furthermore, egoistic values have a strong negative relationship with environmental concern, whereas altruistic and biospheric values are positively related to this variable.