An essay by Michael A. Di Giovine, posted on Anthropologies, an online collaborative project, makes the case for tourism research to be better integrated into anthropological studies of globalization and mobilites by outlining a number of methodologies for conducting global ethnographies of tourism. Tourism Research as "Global Ethnography" Michael A. Di Giovine Tourism is a topic that has
traditionally been treated with great ambivalence in anthropology,
particularly compared to related issues such mobility and globalization.
This is certainly curious considering that tourism continues to be the
largest and fastest-growing industry in the world, even in the post-9/11
environment of terrorism fears and economic recession. This may explain
why business schools, hospitality departments and management
programs—particularly those outside of the United States—have embraced
tourism studies, but it does not explain its relative neglect by, for
example, economic anthropologists and others who are concerned with
global flows of money, peoples, or information. (To be fair, tourism is
so ubiquitous that many of us cannot but deal with the topic, but often
in a tangential way). Indeed, it is even more curious
that Malcolm Crick’s seminal exposé, “Representations of International
Tourism in the Social Sciences” (Annual Review of Anthropology 18(1)
1989)—now some 20 years old—still seems relevant today: Crick pointed to
a pan-literati prejudice towards tourism, which is often perceived as a
(post-)modern bourgeois distortion of more honorable and edifying forms
of journeying such as pilgrimage and Grand Tour-era travel (see, for
example, Boorstin’s diatribe on tourism in his 1961 classic The Image: A
Guide to Pseudo-Events in America). It probably doesn’t help that
tourists (religious and secular) are often loathe to even consider
themselves tourists, and often prefer to mark themselves out as
different from the tourist masses. For example, those who walk at least
100 km along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela wear scallop shells to
denote themselves as “real” pilgrims, as opposed to the other devotees
who come by car or tour bus; and both low-end backpackers and high-end
“FITs” (free and independent travelers) often try to avoid popular
“tourist trap” destinations by visiting less prized, but presumably more
“authentic” sites. Fortunately, tourism may finally
be taking its place as a legitimate realm of anthropological inquiry,
if a recent issue of Anthropology News (November 2010) dedicated
entirely to the topic is any indication. Articles dealt with heritage
appropriation, the representation of material culture, “pro-poor,”
community-based, and volunteer tourism, and especially the tourism
industry’s growth in developing countries in Asia and Africa. But as
classically situated in a particular “field site” as many of these
articles were—the Chinese ethnic village, the African archaeological
excavation, or, in my case, the World Heritage site of Angkor—it was
evident that the field of inquiry was not local, but global. In light of this, I propose here
that anthropology can better embrace tourism’s relevance and dynamicism
when research is undertaken as a form of “global ethnography.” [Continue reading here] |