Special issue on 'Tourism Anthropology'. From the Guest-Editor (original) (raw)

(Un)Doing Tourism Anthropology: Outline of a Field of Practice

Journal of Tourism Challenges and Trends (Vol VI (2): 13-38), 2013

The idea of ‘doing’ tourism anthropology is one that prompts reflection on a number of issues relating to this so-called sub-discipline, not least those that invites us to consider the merits of its negation: of ‘undoing’ some of the shibboleths that have attached themselves to the subject area. In this paper we argue the case for a critical re-evaluation of a discourse and state-of-the-art that is often re-drawn through recourse to the navigational tropes of ‘turn’ or ‘new directions’. While we are in no way suggesting that new analytical frameworks in the anthropological study of tourism should somehow be resisted, or that their ‘novelty’ precludes them from having intrinsic value and efficacy, couching debates in the language of ‘turns’ or ‘re-orientations’ can at times inhibit consideration of the benefits of consolidating, re-evaluating, or re-situating anthropological perspectives on tourism. Accordingly, there is a need to delineate more clearly a sense of intellectual lineage and methodological specificity, and to bring into sharper relief what it is that distinguishes (or aligns) the anthropology of tourism from (or with) perspectives developed in fields of cultural geography, for example, or business and marketing studies, disciplines that have all sought to claim purchase on ethnographic approaches to the study of tourism. The flipside of the ‘doing’ coin is the related problem of delineating what it is that constitutes the object of study itself: tourism and the tourist. (Un)doing tourism anthropology, therefore, also entails a process of ‘undoing’ the tourist: of paying greater recognition to the ways in which tourism mobilities converge, overlap, rub up against, or dissolve into the landscapes, spaces and everyday practices that anthropology more broadly has long set out to explore. Drawing on a lineage which, theoretically and ethnographically, encompasses developments in experiential and phenomenological anthropology, we argue that doing or undoing tourism anthropology is in part the practice of reinforcing the anthropos while at the same time looking critically askance at the category of ‘the tourist’.

Towards new paradigms in tourism fields: an anthropological perspective

The present notes of research centres on the problem of fragmentation, which is experienced by tourism applied research in the recent years. Echoing the original claims issued by John Tribe-followed by many others scholars-, we discuss further on the socioeconomic factors that prevented tourism its maturated and stylised form. Though we introduce a materialist viewpoint, echoing David Harvey, no less true is that the point is open to further debate-incorporating cultural viewpoints-. The impulses and bursts of interest received simultaneously from social science but also by the theory of scientifisation coined by Jafar Jafari did not suffice to gain purchase over a maturated discipline. Even if followers of Jafari envisaged that the maturation of tourism hinged on the proficiency and prolificity of published works, this obscured more than it clarified. Nowadays, the epistemology of tourism is facing a serious crisis which needs immediate attention.

Anthropologies of Tourism: What's in a Name

Antropología del turismo en países en desarrollo: Análisis crítico de las culturas, poderes e identidades generados por el turismo" [Anthropology of tourism in developing countries: A critical analysis of the cultures, powers, and identitities generated by tourism].

ANTH 316 (Anthropology of Tourism)

2020

As a mode of travel, interaction, and experience, tourism has become an integral part of all societies, eliciting poignant, complex responses. The course will go through interactions and mobilities to examine the categories and meanings by which tourism impacts people’s lives. While we are maintaining a Hawaiian, Pacific Island focus, case studies are taken from around the world in particular from Europe to explore the social, ethical, cultural, semiotic and ecological outcomes of such touristic processes, including the psycho-cultural motivations, and issues related to globalization, economic development, cross-cultural communication, ethnicity, nationalism and gender. Tourism is a uniquely situated prism through which we can examine a fascinating range of issues such as cultural representation, identity, space/place, embodiment, development, inequality, globalization and cultural and environmental change. This stacked course offers students an opportunity to critically examine these contexts primarily using theoretical frameworks from anthropology, geography, and cultural studies. ANTH 316 Highlights 1) writing-intensive; 2) weekly blogs; 3) zero-textbook-cost. In addition to theorizing tourism practice, the participation of graduate students in this stacked course will allow undergraduate students to consider these issues in relation to ethnographic fieldwork—the cornerstone of cultural geography and anthropology—and the study of touristic phenomena. Graduate students not just will act as mentors to undergraduates and facilitate discussions throughout the semester but will be presenting to the class their ethnographic research project on a topic related to their interests. ANTH 610 Highlights 1) ethnographic research; 2) critical précis; and 3) peer-reviewed academic publishing.

The trouble with tourism and travel theory?

Tourist Studies, 2001

We would like to take this chance to welcome readers to this new journal and sketch out some of its aims at what we think is an exciting and challenging time for work on tourism.The main impetus for founding a new tourism journal was that in our view and in the minds of many key contributors to the tourism field, tourism studies had become stale, tired, repetitive and lifeless. At a time when John Urry has just launched his Sociology Beyond Societies-Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (in which mobilities are argued to have 'reconstituted social life in uneven and complex ways'); when Anthony Giddens' 1999 Reith Lectures were called 'Runaway World' and when the subject of the 2000 Theory Culture & Society conference in Finland was cosmopolitanism, it seems almost impossible not to see tourist studies as one of the most exciting and relevant topics in these transnational times (Urry, 2000; Giddens, 2000).And yet, it is not. The first trouble with tourism studies, and paradoxically also one of its sources of interest, is that its research object, 'tourism' has grown very dramatically and quickly and that the tourism research community is relatively new. Indeed at times it has been unclear which was growing more rapidly-tourism or tourism research. Part of this trouble is that tourist studies has simply tried to track and record this staggering expansion, producing an enormous record of instances, case studies and variations. One reason for this is that tourist studies has been dominated by policy led and industry sponsored work so the analysis tends to internalize industry led priorities and perspectives, leaving the. .. research subject to the imperatives of policy, in the sense that one expects the researcher to assume as his own an objective of social control that will allow the tourist product to be more finely tuned to the demands of the international market.