The unsustainable lightness of tourism

Between February and March 2020 discussing of the issue of sustainability in tourism became more complex than usual. In Bergamo it became more complex than everywhere. The paper goes across the escalating phases of the pandemic emergency as the MA course in Complex Societies and Tourism Governance unfolds online. We assist to a reshuffling and tentatively reorganizing of the course priorities, as the reality around us overturns the relevance and the urgency of our research and teaching topics. Paradoxically we keep firm the complexity framework, unstable by definition, acknowledging how many complexity keywords appear the most suitable to describe the elusive present. Feedback, recursivity, multiplicity, nonlinearity, all emerge as guidelines more necessary than ever. How these concepts can be helpful to tourism to face and manage the arriving crisis is a matter of choices, of radical and deep changes. In the complexity framework, the compelling conditions driving to immediate change are considered opportunities, they are sudden jumps and leaps not requiring any time for the transition to a totally new scenario. Anthropology is a slow discipline, and it doesn’t produce instant shots, but it works in real time, as events unfold, and it produces diaries, draws hypotheses, pinpoints potential, walks in daydreaming and sketches the future. This is what the paper does.