How Does Indonesia’s Official Tourism Promotion Account Represent Nature? A Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistic Critical Discourse Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1609.22Keywords:
nature, tourism promotion, critical discourse analysis, ecolinguisticsAbstract
Indonesia’s tourism promotion in digital media predominantly presents nature as the main attraction through narratives of beauty and tourism experiences. However, this representation has the potential to obscure a balanced human–nature relationship, as aspects of conservation and sustainability often receive limited attention. This study aims to investigate how nature is represented in Indonesia’s official tourism promotion discourse and to uncover the ecological ideologies embedded in such representations. A mixed methods approach was employed by combining qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The data consisted of captions published between 2021 and 2025 on Indonesia’s official tourism promotion account on X, @pesonaindonesia. Data were collected through documentation and note-taking techniques by selecting captions related to nature. Data analysis was conducted through corpus analysis, critical discourse analysis, ecological ideology analysis, data presentation, interpretation, and conclusion drawing. The findings show that nature is predominantly represented as the core attraction of tourism, constructed through frequent use of aesthetic and evaluative vocabulary that emphasizes beauty, uniqueness, and enjoyment. Nature is also portrayed as concrete and consumable space through repeated references to landscapes. In contrast, conservation-related vocabulary appears with relatively low frequency and functions mainly as a symbolic complement rather than a central theme. At the level of social practice, the discourse reflects an economically driven tourism orientation and an anthropocentric worldview. In conclusion, the ecological ideology underlying the discourse is ambivalent, as it simultaneously promotes nature as a tourism commodity while only marginally acknowledging environmental responsibility.
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