Tourist Gaze and Subaltern Oppositional Gaze: Theological Re-imaginations (original) (raw)
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Situating the Tourist Gaze: From Appropriation to Negotiation
For decades, scholars have emphasized the power of the Western tourist gaze to construct Third World destinations as the 'Exotic Other'. Scholars have also shown that 'Third World' tourism fuelled by media fantasies of the Other represents neocolonization in the twenty-first century. However, considering all its intentions/claims of impartiality, tourism research has generally travelled in only one direction (from the West to the East). In this study, conducted in Goa and Puducherry, focusing on the social contexts in which people are viewed and photographed, we askwhat do the 'Third World' people think of Westerners gazing at them, and their surroundings? How do Western tourists react when photographed by domestic tourists? What are the power relations within which the photographer and the photographed are located? We recognize that no simplistic analyses are possible in the postcolonial context. Directing a critical lens at the tourist gaze, this essay moves from an understanding of the gaze as appropriating to that of the gaze as negotiated.
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.
THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE A Tourist Typology
Much writing treats the tourist as a unitary type, confined to a touristic bubble. Attempts have been made to subdivide the tourist by developing various typologies. These approaches neglect the tourists' voice. By contrast, this paper's case study from Chalkidiki, Greece, indicates that different tourist types experience the same host community in different ways. Analysis of qualitative data from 86 British holidaymakers has led to the identification of five micro-types. Each is characterized by the dominant themes identified for their choice of holiday, types of activities, and views about the host community.
The Lost Paradise The Religious Nature of Tourism
Global Perspectives on Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 2018
A vast array of studies focuses on religious tourism as the promising segment of tourism growth for next decades, this is a really prominent theme concerns many scholars today. However, our chapter is on the opposite direction, tourism is an expression of religiosity enrooted in Western Culture. this chapter explores the religiosity of tourism in order to expand the current understanding we have of this complex phenomenon. Far from representing a radical critique to some scholars or some position, this chapter aims to become in a contribution to expand the current paradigms in tourism-led research.
Journal of Tourism Challenges and Trends, 2013
Nearly forty years have passed since anthropologists began linking tourism and pilgrimage, yet there still exist inter-and intra-disciplinary boundaries impeding a robust exchange of data and theory between them. Likewise, the literature by practitioners in these fields reveals an astonishing ambivalence towards the oft-critical and theoretical contributions of anthropologists. Building on the work of Bourdieu, the author asserts that such divides are contingent on historical and cultural forces within and between various groups of stakeholders that are brought together in a “field of touristic production.” Informed by divergent ideologies and research interests, tourism and pilgrimage scholars have taken different pathways towards developing their respective fields, leading to a pervasive dualism that often privileges pilgrimage and neglects tourism. Drawing on a wide breadth of scholarship from numerous disciplines to illuminate definitional, conceptual, and methodological issues related to the anthropological study of tourism and pilgrimage, the author interrogates the logic of such dualities and focuses on their shared phenomenological attribute of perspectivalism, a particular way of perceiving the value and use of a destination. Offering a new apologia for the study of tourism as a “global cultural form” produced through a “field of production,” the author advocates greater consideration of this phenomenological definition to bridge disciplinary divides, and for extending anthropological tourism research into academic and practitioner-related fields. Keywords: anthropology; tourism; pilgrimage; perspectivalism; field of touristic production
The Unsettlement of Tourism Studies: Positive Decolonization, Deep Listening, and Dethinking Today
Tourism, Culture and Communication, 2021
Recent years have witnessed the rise of many new and/or corrective approaches across the social sciences that have challenged the received assumptive frameworks through which the world is inspected and interpreted methodologically. Late decades have brought the rise of a new generation of scholars who work through "resistance politics" approaches in pursuit of, for instance, social justice causes or posthumanist convictions. The purpose of this article (and its two companion articles in later issues of Tourism, Culture & Communication) is to capture the possibilities and the tensions in the development and cultivation of such "disruptive" or "promiscuous" research acts, and to conceptually situate them within Tourism Studies—the domain that covers the "worldmaking"/"declarative power" of tourism to interpret and inscribe the peoples, places, pasts, and presents across the globe. In principally mining the neoteric and landmark text Disruptive Qualitative Inquiry (Brown, Carducci, and Kuby), an attempt is made to locate the interruptive craft of such unfolding disruptive thinking of and about tourism as rising numbers of Tourism Studies researchers themselves seek to decolonize their methodologies from the stranglehold of Western Modern Science and reverberate more positively with populations that have been subjugated or suppressed through tourism. In building up to the provision of a 30-term glossary (cumulatively provided across the said three companion articles) delineating the fresh thinking that is involved in such disruptive inquiry, this first article targets approaches that beckon forms of interpretive plural knowability, which demand the fluid acumen to map the less-fixed/fast-changeable populations of our time, and which are thereby decent yet rigorous in their critical multilogicality ; hence, this first article glossary covers terms such as "reversing the binaries," "promiscuous methodologies," and "working the hyphens." In this innovative light, the second companion article glossary identifies conceptualizations such as "guided wandering," "postqualitative research," and "survivance" in order to expand the ontology and epistemology of Tourism Studies, while the glossary in the third article offers conceptualizations such as "uncrossable methodolodies," "helicopter research," and "stuckness," which—in their different ways—speak to the transformative rhetorics of futurity for tourism and the peoples and places of the world.