Resumen

SACRAMENTO, Octávio. Thermic metaphors: European tourists in Northeastern Brazil narrating intimacy. Etnográfica [online]. 2019, vol.23, n.2, pp.335-357. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.6762.

Propelled by an ethnography of Euro-Brazilian intimacy configurations associated with tourism in the Ponta Negra district (Natal-RN, Northeastern Brazil), the article focuses on the representations, expectations and experiences of European tourists involved in transatlantic passionate affairs. The discourses and practices of these tourists show the desire to construct alternatives to the modes of intimate association in Europe and to find favorable circumstances to (re)affirm masculine identities that allegedly feminine emancipation and the burden of everyday obligations would have numbed. In the tourists’ discourse, binary thermic metaphors stand out in which Brazil is symbolized as triply “hot” (regarding climate, sociability and sexuality), always with reference and in contrast to the “cold” Europe. As symbolic indexing elements, these metaphors enable access to the understanding of subjectivities, identity expressions and experiences of male intimacy in the tropics, and, at the same time, to some of the purposes underlying these touristic mobilities.

Palabras clave : tourism; Euro-Brazilian intimacies; thermic metaphors; masculinity.

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