Strategie mediate da ELF per la promozione della dieta mediterranea come prodotto di lusso tra turisti e migranti

Abstract

Abstract – This chapter introduces an original cognitive-pragmatic model that integrates Experiential Linguistics and Experiential Place Marketing approaches applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism – a form of tourism aiming at advertising the tourists’ intercultural and human experience in socio-cultural situations normally perceived as problematic – such as the promotion of holiday destinations affected by migrants’ arrivals. The case study illustrated in this chapter is aimed at the exploration of different schemata regarding the socio-culturally marked food norms which come into contact and often in conflict in the course of the ELF-mediated communication between tourists and migrants who reside in the same seaside resorts. The objective of the research is to promote a Responsible Tourism that also includes eating habits aimed at the achievement of physical health and spiritual wellbeing. In an intercultural context like the one that underpins the case study, the dietary precepts existing in the various societies often account for a hybridization of specialized discourses: from the expected gastronomic discourse to the scientific-medical one, up to the religious and legal discourses. More specifically, the hybridization between the gastronomic and religious discourses is typical of many cultures tourists and migrants hosted by the seaside resorts belong to, informing their respective social and legal systems. In the case study under analysis, a sample of subjects with different linguacultural and ethnic backgrounds was selected (i.e., a male Chinese tourist, a female Israeli tourist and a male Nigerian migrant). These subjects were asked to share their food schemata, involving the Chinese cuisine and medicine as well as Jewish and Islamic dietary norms, in order to apply them to the creation of promotional slogans to advertise on a special website the Mediterranean Diet as a luxury product recommended by the restaurants of the seaside resorts that tourists and migrants were staying at. These participants were asked to read a popularized text on Nutrigenomics (i.e., the branch of genomic research affirming that the degree to which diet influences the balance between health and disease depends on an individual’s genetic makeup or ‘ethnic genotype’ determining their ‘race’). The text was also integrated with another one regarding the health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet. The goal was twofold: on the one hand, to associate a food tradition like the Mediterranean one, normally regarded as ‘humble cuisine’, to the well-known legal-religious and medical norms of other cultures and, on the other hand, to raise the prestige of the Mediterranean Diet contextualizing it in an advanced scientific domain like that of Nutrigenomics. Both goals aim at the re-evaluation of the Mediterranean diet as a luxury product to be promoted in the context of a Responsible Tourism that associates luxury with the psycho-physical wellbeing of the individual as well as that of the community as a whole. Through the ‘Think-aloud technique’, the participants’ schemata were explored as they were interpreting this text on the basis of which they were then expected to create their advertising slogans for the promotion of the Mediterranean Diet.