A Fez of the Heart

a. Choose one passage from the reading that you found particularly interesting.  Why was this interesting?

"The bikini signs had been taken down, and the locals had come up with a new message in tidy English, which they relaunched on postcards as the slogan of a radically reinvented society, one that claimed to have gone from stonings to toplessness in twenty years."

I found this particular passage interesting because I really feel that it encompasses the change that the author described the society to go through. The fact that the culture can go from completely barring the behavior of wearing as little clothes as a bikini to being completely acceptable of nude beaches is quite the drastic change. It amazes me that an force could cause people to radically change their ideas so much in a time period such as this.


b. Use examples from this reading to illustrate the interaction between economics and culture.

The fact that the culture was able to change so quickly in just twenty years can be attributed to the economy. The author makes it seem that it was really the tourism, and most likely the money brought in by this business, that was the driving force of the change. An example of this would be the farmers son who gave up his farming in order to manage a hotel. This man gave up what was previously his life and the history of his father in order to uptake a new trade that would be economically more feasible.

c. Beyond the specific example of this town in Turkey, what connections or conflicts do you see between tourism and economics or tourism and culture?

In the world today tourism and culture has a huge impact on many places. In places such as Dubai, tourism is the life that keeps the culture thriving. For some place to build an outlet shaped like a tree shows just how much tourism and the money it brings has been able to influence some societies. The downside of this though is that it inevitably changes the culture that the tourists most likely first sought out. Although tourism is a great thing for people as they get to experience a new culture and it helps the economy of the place they visit, it can have drastic effects on the culture that is visited.