The History of Tourism in Namibia: A Heterotopic Topology of Technology

In this interdisciplinary study, Lukas Breitwieser examines the development of tourism in Namibia using a relational concept of space. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopia, he analyzes the homogenizing effect of technology, which opens up tourist spaces in terms of infrastructure and provides security. At the same time, this leads to a symbolic-cultural differentiation that transforms specific spaces into unique tourist attractions.

Beginning with early tourism in the 1920s and continuing to the present day, Breitwieser analyzes various types of sources and demonstrates a remarkable consistency in the pattern of Namibian tourism. Successful tourism always exists within the tension between safety and adventure, nature and technology, wilderness and civilization, modernity and the past. Participating actors, such as safari companies, attempted on the one hand to present the supposedly untouched nature as a special feature, while on the other hand they highlighted landscapes that were well-developed technically. Places defined as particularly valuable by tour operators were able to combine historically nostalgic and romantically charged attributions with contrasting notions of adventure and danger. Spaces were created that were constructed not only geographically but also temporally, and which continue to function today.