Tourist Studies current issue

Engaging ethnography in tourist research: An introduction

Frohlick, S., Harrison, J. — 2008-11-04

Negotiating the public secrecy of sex in a transnational tourist town in Caribbean Costa Rica

Frohlick, S. — 2008-11-04

My social positionality as an alleged sex tourist when I arrived as an `unaccompanied' woman traveling to a town in Caribbean Costa Rica to study women's adventure tourism, initiated a shift in ethnographic focus to female tourists' heterosexual sexual relations with locals. Using methodology that relies upon immersion I situated myself within the community and participated in everyday life in and beyond touristic events. I interacted with and interviewed female tourists predominantly, but also local men, local women and resident foreigners. This methodology was productive but presented a major dilemma for me: Where sex is both talked about and kept hidden, I had to negotiate the many layers and performances of the public secrecy about sex that pervade and play out in this transnational town, including how to transform `data' into representation. I conclude that the immersion of the anthropologist in the everyday lives of tourists in touristic settings reveals insights into the complexity of global sexual tourism, and presents problems too.

Shifting positions

Harrison, J. — 2008-11-04

This article discusses the research methodologies used to gain an understanding of what the touristic/cottage experience meant to a group of Canadians who traveled internationally on a regular basis; and a sampling Ontario second home tourists, or cottagers. Spatial, temporal and cultural constraints prevented me from engaging in traditional models of participant observation with them. The article details how I selected my subjects; how I positioned myself in relation to them to find out what I needed to know; and how I gained insight into th affective dimensions of these experiences. I argue here that mobile populations suc as tourists prompt a continual shifting of the ethnographic `I', challenging any taken-for-granted notions of how ethnography is best done. I end with reflections o the tensions between single/multi-sited ethnographic positionings and my research with these two groups of tourists.

`An interplay at specific points': Traveling between California and Cape Town

Mathers, K. — 2008-11-04

Ethnographic research on the everyday lives of those who are privileged to travel as vacationers or on study abroad programs offers important insights into assumptions about global connections in the 21st century. This article tells the stories of two journeys between Cape Town and California. Through these narratives I explore the challenges and rewards of ethnographic work with travelers especially when this work takes seriously their lives when they are not tourists. Ethnographers of tourists face many challenges, some practical — tourists deliberately seek experiences that are independent of their everyday lives and ethnography is at its best focusing on the everyday. Others are due to the anthropologist's own uncertainty about her position as a tourist, making the anthropology of tourism a kind of native anthropology.

Picturing experience: A tourist-centered perspective on commemorative historical sites

Sather-Wagstaff, J. — 2008-11-04

While research on commemorative historical sites addresses the commodification of tragedy and the ethics of representing violent events for tourist consumption, the experiences of tourists who visit these sites are conspicuously absent. Because of this omission, our understanding of the individual and collective social significance of actual travel to commemorative places for a `heritage that hurts' is incomplete. As a means to address these concerns, this article presents how a visual and ethnographic methods-centered approach was utilized for engagement with tourists at the former site of the twin World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, both on-site and post-visit, during 2002—06. I focus specifically upon tourists' acts of `picturing experiences' at this site through both photographic activities during travel and also photo use for memory work in the post-tour everyday. In doing so, I discuss both the usefulness of and challenges with these methods as a means for working with highly mobile research participants such as tourists.

Doing ethnography of tourist enclaves: Boundaries, ironies, and insights

Schmid, K. A. — 2008-11-04

This article discusses the range of methodologies used to explore the making of tourism enclaves at Luxor, Egypt. Enclaving in tourism describes a process of segregating tourists from the local residents, to develop exclusive touristic spaces. This process has developed at Luxor since the beginning of elite tourism in the 19th century. It was apparent that both a historical and ethnographic approach would require the innovation of strategies to gather information about the contributions and resistance of key tourism actors (informal guides, tourists, tour operators, and government), to the production of enclaving. This article will examine the multifaceted approach used to gather information from and about these actors, including the benefits and drawbacks of integrating historical and ethnographic information. Investigating the production of exclusion also revealed ethical issues and other pitfalls to research.

Views from here: Working the field, looking at tourists, mapping touristic terrain

Stampe, J. — 2008-11-04

In this article, I consider the ethnographic study of tourists and tourism by juxtaposing the perspectives and positions of differently situated members of the tourist-receiving population at Lake Mille Lacs, in the upper midwestern USA. There, I positioned myself as worker at two sites — the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post State Historic Site and the Mille Lacs Area Tourism Council's information office. From these two locations, I conducted ethnography by engaging in a range of pursuits including participant-observation, conducting surveys and interviewing both tourists and tourist workers. In discussing this experience, I critique discourses that ascribe `mobility' and `rootedness' in ways that obscure the complex realities of daily life in tourist settings. I argue that these conceptions of the positions available in tourist settings can be usefully unsettled through the practice of ethnography.