Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives for the Study of Mycological Tourism: A Review

Abstract

In order to propose a theoretical methodological approach for the study of mycological tourism, a literature review was carried out that focused on the processes of productive transformation in the traditional harvesting of wild edible mushrooms, towards the integration of tourism products and services as a strategy of value aggregation and productive diversification. This review followed an inductive logic and covered the period between 2002 and 2019, considering criteria such as relevance and similarity with the research topic, the prestige of the journals and the scientific leadership of the authors. Through this search, 27 articles were found divided into three theoretical-methodological areas. It is observed that the most influential categories in the scientific approach of mycological tourism are the economic dimension of Wild Edible Mushrooms, the institutionalized mycological knowledge and the ethnomicological knowledge. However, these components have been constructed as isolated fields that must be interconnected for a more efficient understanding of the phenomenon. For this purpose, it is suggested to develop new integrating perspectives from a forward-looking logic and where tourism is proposed as an eco-innovation. It is concluded that the integral approach of the aspects that make up a complex object such as wild edible mushrooms is a precondition to generate real socio-economic transformations in the territory, beyond the imperatives of the dominant economic system.