Adventure Tourism: Meanings, experience and learning (original) (raw)
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2020
Tourism affects the lives of an increasing number of people across the world and has been growing and diversifying immensely since the turn of the 21st century. Anthropological approaches to tourism have also expanded from the early contributions of the 1970s, which tended to focus on the nature of tourism and its “impact” on peripheral host communities. These first interventions see anthropologists theorizing tourism as a “secular ritual,” studying its workings as a process of “acculturation,” and countering macroeconomic views of tourism’s potential for the economic development of peripheral societies by underscoring instead its neocolonial and imperialist features. Tourism is linked to the exacerbation of center-periphery dependencies, seen as an agent of cultural commoditization and responsible for the promotion and dissemination of stereotypical images of people and places. Moving beyond the impact paradigm, which has the disadvantage of portraying tourism as an external, disembedded, and imposed force on a passive population, constructivist approaches highlight its creative appropriations and integral role in the reinvention of culture and traditions. Anthropologists pay attention to the varied range of actors and agencies involved in tourism, accounting for the multi-scalar dimensions of this phenomenon and the uneven circulation of images, discourses, and resources it engenders. Tourism exerts a powerful global influence on how alterity and difference are framed and understood in the contemporary world and contributes to the valorization and dissemination of particular views of culture, identity, and heritage. Tourism is increasingly intertwined with processes of heritage-making, whose study helps advance anthropological reflections on cultural property, material culture, and the memorialization of the past. A key source of livelihood for a growing number of people worldwide, tourism is also becoming more and more associated with development projects in which applied anthropologists are also enrolled as experts and consultants. The study of the tourism-development nexus continues to be a key area of theoretical innovation and has helped advance anthropological debates on North–South relations, dominant responses to poverty and inequality, and their entanglements with neoliberal forms of governance. Given its diffuse and distributed character, tourism and touristification have been approached as forms of ordering that affect and restructure an ever-growing range of entities, and whose effects are increasingly difficult to tease out from concomitant societal processes. The ubiquitous implementations of tourism policies and projects, the influx of tourists, and the debates, reactions, and resistances these generate underscore, however, the importance of uncovering the ways tourism and its effects are being concretely identified, invoked, acted upon, and confronted by its various protagonists. Research on tourism has the potential to contribute to disciplinary debates on many key areas and notions of concern for anthropology. Culture, ethnicity, identity, alterity, heritage, mobility, labor, commerce, hospitality, intimacy, development, and the environment are among the notions and domains increasingly affected and transformed by tourism. The study of tourism helps understand how such transformations occur, uncovering their features and orientations, while also shedding light on the societal struggles that are at stake in them. The analysis of past and current research shows the scope of the theoretical and methodological debates and of the realms of intervention to which anthropological scholarship on tourism can contribute.
Native Peoples and Tourism: An Introduction
Ethnohistory, 2003
This special issue of Ethnohistory reflects current scholarly work on how issues of indigenous representation and identity are worked out in the context of different kinds of tourism. Each article examines the ways in which local peoples engage with imported Western institutions in the service of local agendas. These institutions include public sites, such as fairs, tribal museums, cultural villages, and specialized sites for cultural performance, and, also, casinos. The first three modalities of representation have long histories in Europe and the United States. The last is a recently emergent nexus that foregrounds the relationships among education, commerce, and entertainment, which are somewhat backgrounded by the first three. Frederic Gleach's article on the Jamestown Tercentennial, held in , reveals a period that is the furthest in time from our own and examines the ways in which images of the local Indians were deployed by agents of the dominant society to legitimize the successor state and nation; it also discusses how the contemporaneous Powhatan people's representation of the non-Indian version of their own past came to be the sign of their own ethnic distinction. Following on the conventions established at the world fairs in Paris in and Chicago in , we see a historical phase in the lives of indigenous people wherein they faced the challenge of deploying the dominant culture's appropriations in the service of their own local agendas. Larry Nesper's essay effectively follows on this theme as it documents the ways in which local Anishinabeg identity at Lac du Flambeau in Wisconsin during the ethnically homogenizing s was articulated by cultural performances that both confirmed non-Indian cultural stereotypes of Indians and offered a Flambeau-centric history of the relationship between