ABSTRACT
Google ‘Tourism Salvador Bahia’ and your first hit is likely to be a link to the city government’s tourism webpage.1 Click on the link and you will be taken to an introductory page, where a series of photographs of the city will follow, in slideshow, to the rhythm of a traditional samba. ‘Jump intro’ to enter the site properly and you will be directed to the site’s home page, where a text, prefaced by the injunction ‘Know Salvador,’ begins:
The opening lines provide a most intriguing motto. Unsurprisingly, the city is first praised for its beauty and uniqueness. The rather general praise gives way to a list of more specific, singular traits, leading onto the interest the latter have sparked off among scholars. The city is said to have both ‘staged’ and ‘been’ the object of studies conducted by ‘professionals from different fields’. The idea of a stage evokes the city as a spectacle. Its association to scholarly work, to the ‘staging’ of studies, so to speak, might be said to call forth the image of a laboratory, of
carefully controlled experimentation taking place under the watchful gaze of an interested audience. Whose gaze this might be does not here seem to be of interest. Neither is the question of what, in the city, has been deemed an object of study explicitly addressed. In keeping, the text remains vague about the identity of the many professionals that have ‘conducted’ the all important studies. Yet the list of traits that preface the observation-‘history, a legacy of people from other continents, religious syncretism and its population’— provides a hint.
