Anatolia An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research ISSN: 1303-2917 (Print) 2156-6909 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rana20 Mario Carlos Beni – first tourism professor in Brazil Alexandre Panosso Netto To cite this article: Alexandre Panosso Netto (2018) Mario Carlos Beni – first tourism professor in Brazil, Anatolia, 29:2, 303-310 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2018.1478540 Published online: 17 Jul 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rana20 ANATOLIA 2018, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 303–310 https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2018.1478540 Mario Carlos Beni – first tourism professor in Brazil Alexandre Panosso Netto School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Introduction It was in the year 2000 that I personally met Mario Carlos Beni at a conference of tourism in Brazil. It caught my eye the fact that wherever he would go to, a group of young students would follow him asking questions, dialoguing and taking his best-known book entitled “Análise Estrutural do Turismo” [Structural Analysis of Tourism] to be autographed. Sometime later, I witnessed that at these events he would not only autograph books, but also notebooks, sheets of paper and even napkins for students who wanted to get a souvenir from him. Some colleagues and students call him “guru of Brazilian tourism”, and this is due to his remarkable engagement and work with tourism in Brazil, both in the academy and in public management since the beginning of the 1970s. Because of his long record of activities in the area – as well as his political and loyal relationship – he is one of the most famous personalities in Brazilian tourism, which allows him free access to multiple educational, professional and public instances in all national territory. In 2018, approaching his 80th birthday and in good health, he announced he was supervising his last master student, but would continue to take part in events and to act in various associations he has been working with. When he was younger, he participated in many tourism conferences in all continents of the globe in which he met and worked with the great names of worldwide tourism of his generation. Although he has been known by and is a contemporary of great international authors, his papers have not been widely used out of Brazil, for they have been published specially in Portuguese (43), and some in English (7), French (4) and Spanish (1). His preference for publishing specially in Portuguese besides language facilities is due to the fact that his studies have direct relation with Brazilian tourism and had as objective the formation of freethinkers of tourism in Brazil. About his life and work in Portuguese language, a chapter of book (Panosso Netto, 2005a) as well as an article on a scientific journal have been published (Borges, Laíssa, & Silva, 2016). This is the first paper to be published about his life and work in English language. Short life Mario Carlos Beni was born on 14 April 1938 in the city of Casa Branca, São Paulo, Brazil. His ancestors, back then in Italy, a country with which he has kept close connection during his entire life. He is married to Sônia Beni, have a couple of children, one grandson and one granddaughter. He is the only child of Maria Diva Beni and Mario Beni. According to CPDOC-FGV (2018), his father was an influential politician in the State of São Paulo who took office of public management in several levels and was elected to many mandates as both state and federal representative. Walking in the footsteps of his father, Beni, who was called “Marinho” by closer friends and family members, was elected state representative from São Paulo when he was 29, taking office for CONTACT Alexandre Panosso Netto [email protected] School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 304 A. P. NETTO the period of 1967–1971. However, the Military Government of Brazil that had reached power through a coup d’état closed the State Assembly and removed all its representatives (1969). Mario Carlos Beni ran for the office of federal representative in the beginning of the 1970s, but was not elected. In the decade of 1980, again he got involved with national politics. In his own words: In 1983, the country wakes up to the fight for democracy and for “direct elections now” [Brazilian Civil Movement that claimed for the right to democratic election for public offices]. I could not help but engage myself and take active part in the movement, at that time joining myself to PDT [Labour Democratic Party]. Back to political militancy, I got surprised, two years later, when I was elected its General Secretary and, again, could not run away from the polls’ appeal. I ran to the Chamber of Representatives and to the Constituent National Assembly in 1986, obtaining over seventy-thousand votes, still insufficient to lift me up to the position of São Paulo people’s interest representative. (Beni, 2018). After 1986 elections, Beni has not run for public office anymore. This interest and engagement with politics inherited from his father has marked his professional and academic performance throughout his life. Still today, he publicly expresses to friends and on his personal website the interest in taking office at the National Congress to “defend ideas researched and worked in the academy, which go from respect to citizenship to guarantee of full rights of a consolidated democracy” (Beni, 2018). Academic development According to an interview of 2005 (Panosso Netto, 2005a), Beni started his studies at university in 1958, when he was 19, in the course of Civil Engineering at Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo. When he was in the fifth year of the course, he transferred to Universidade Federal Fluminense, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated in Legal Sciences (1968). In 1968, he got into University of São Paulo, working as a teaching assistant. Then he received a scholarship from Japan International Cooperation Agency and lived in Tokyo for eight months, where he got to know the “boom in tourism” that took place in the Asian southeast in the early 1970s. He also went through a two-month internship at Instituto de Estudos Turísticos de Madrid, Spain, and after that spent one month at Aix-en-Provence, France with René Barejte (Panosso Netto, 2005a). According to his words: “There I really plunged into research in tourism. Later on, I concluded these studies at Cornell (USA) with focus on hospitality and in my return to Brazil I started to imagine a course of tourism at University of São Paulo” (Panosso Netto, 2005a, p. 860). Back to Brazil, he took over the discipline “Tourism and Development” at University of São Paulo (1971). In 1972, he was appointed by the Ministry of Education as the first professor of tourism in Brazil, with the discipline “Planning and Organization of Tourism” (Brasil, 1972). Then he was appointed to elaborate the project of the Graduation Course in Tourism at University of São Paulo. The course was approved and initiated in March of 1973, and was the first higher education course of tourism at a public teaching institution in Brazil, still in operation today (Note: the first higher education course of tourism in Brazil was open in 1971, at current Universidade Anhembi-Morumbi, in São Paulo). Combining teaching activities and university management, Beni initiated his research in tourism and defended his Master in Social Sciences (1981) by Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo with the dissertation on “characterization of the nature of flows for classification of demand for tourism”. His doctorate is in communication at University of São Paulo with the thesis on “system of tourism – construction of a theoretical referential model” (1988). His Habilitation (Professorship) was defended with the thesis on “analysis of the national system of tourism performance established in public administration”, at the University of São Paulo (1991). In 1998, through public tender, he took the office of full professor at the University of São Paulo, crowning his academic career all the more. The University of São Paulo is the reference for Beni, the place where he was one of the first and main responsible for forming professors and doctors who investigated the phenomenon of ANATOLIA 305 tourism. In 2008, by turning 70, he had to retire compulsorily of academic activities at the University of São Paulo, but continued to work officially as professor in post-graduation pro- grammes at other three Brazilian universities for another 10 years, until 2018, when he turned 80. Because of this versatility, he also became a member of the Ethics Committee of the World Tourism Organization, representing the Americas during the period 2004–2007 (UNWTO, 2007). Nowadays, he still works as Rector at the Corporate University of the National Council of the National Confederation of Tourism, CNTUR [Universidade Corporativa of Conselho Nacional da Confederação Nacional de Turismo]. Among the main professors who were an inspiration in the beginning of his career with tourism, Beni highlighted René Baretje-Keller and Piere Lainé (both from France), Alberto Sessa (Italy), who also developed systemic studies of tourism and Salah-Eldin Abdel Wahab (Egypt), (Panosso Netto, 2005a). He was also inspired by other great researchers of his generation with whom he had contact, among them Jost Krippendorf, Nobert Vanhove, Regina Schlüter, Sergio Molina Espinosa and Jafar Jafari.