Tourist Studies recent issues

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.

The habit of holidays

Blichfeldt, B. S. — 2008-10-13

Generally, people's decision-making processes leading to their going on holiday are defined as complex processes characterized by high degrees of uncertainty and risk; substantial expenditure; and elaborate pre-purchase information search. However, the series of qualitative interviews which this article reports suggest that it is too simplistic to define up-front holiday decision-making processes as extensive problem-solving. The interviews reveal three patterns of holiday decision-making among the Danish informants. For those informants who view holidays away from home as central to their lives, decision-making processes are `habitualized'. Those informants for whom holidays are of lesser importance rely on ad-hoc, low involvement, decision-making. Only the final group of informants, who have recently started to go on new types of holidays, engage in extensive problem-solving. Drawing on Berger and Luckman's discussion on institutionalization, this article explores why extensive problem-solving is only one of the different decision-making processes that people rely on when planning their holidays.

Depathologizing the tourist syndrome: Tourism as social capital production

Heimtun, B. — 2008-10-13

The intention of this article is to discuss and contrast two central aspects of a published interview with Zygmunt Bauman addressing the nature of `the tourist syndrome' (Franklin, 2003). First, the tourist syndrome is a metaphor for contemporary living in liquid modernity and second, tourism is referred to as `a substitute satisfaction of a genuine need' (Franklin, 2003: 214). The interview presents a critical and somewhat sceptical perspective on tourism and social life, in which the tourist syndrome is labelled a `peg community' and the tourism industry characterized as an insatiable seducer. Based on the experiences of Norwegian midlife single women, a more positive notion is suggested. Although most of the midlife single women do not seek difference as tourists, the meaning of tourism is not superficial and/or contrived. It is rather a space for bonding with significant others and about social integration in everyday life.

Violence in independent travel to India: Unpacking patriarchy and neo-colonialism

Lozanski, K. — 2008-10-13

While western women travelers to India are frequently sexually harassed by Indian men, such men are sometimes subjected to retaliatory violence. Through analyses of the sexual harassment of women travelers and the violent acts committed against Indian men by western travelers, I draw connections between the ways in which individual travelers make sense of sexual harassment and the broader discourses of patriarchy and (neo-)colonialism. Moving beyond the western women and Indian men who figure prominently in constructions of sexual harassment, I argue that both of these forms of violence reproduce a patriarchal colonialism that privileges western men through control of women travelers' mobilities and the emasculation of Indian men.

Selling New Orleans to New Orleans: Tourism authenticity and the construction of community identity

Gotham, K. F. — 2008-10-13

This article examines the process of tourism authenticity using a case study of the rise of tourism in New Orleans during the first half of the 20th century. Tourism authenticity is a process by which tourist modes of staging, visualization, and experience shape and `frame' meanings and assertions of local culture and heritage. Empirically, I examine the place promotion efforts of the New Orleans Association of Commerce to `sell New Orleans to New Orleans', to convince local people that tourism was not only a lucrative economic development strategy but constitutive of civic life and urban culture. I analyze minutes of meetings, reports, and analyses from the Association of Commerce to illustrate how elite conceptions of urban reality were woven into discourses about New Orleans community and authenticity. Theoretically, I show that the study of interplay of place promotion and authenticity construction is a useful strategy for deepening our understanding of the complex intersections of local actions and global processes in the emergence of modern tourism in the United States.

book review: Toxic tourism: rhetorics of pollution, travel and environmental justice by Phaedra Pezzullo. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press: 2007. 320 pp. US$47.50. ISBN-13: 978--0--8173--1550--4

Mroczek, K. — 2008-10-13

When sex work isn't `work': Hospitality, gay life, and the production of desiring labor

Collins, D. — 2007-11-06

This interview-based research explores the lived experiences of gay hosts who `work' in a gentrifying urban tourist district in the City of Manila, the Philippines. My analysis complicates research on sex work by highlighting the changing forms of sexual labor in a transnational and `gay' urban neighborhood, which is shaped by state initiatives on sustainable tourism and international gay travel. In place of treating hospitality as `work', I draw on the concept of emotional labor to understand hospitality as an expression of `gay' and local identities and as a celebration of desire and place. I propose that studies of sexual labor in urban spaces struggling with development must contend with expressions of desire rather than treating sexuality as a commodity exchanged in global tourism.

The Beach, the gaze and film tourism

Law, L., Bunnell, T., Ong, C.-E. — 2007-11-06

Based on the book by Alex Garland, Twentieth Century Fox's movie, The Beach, proffers critical views on the effects of traveller tourism in Thailand. Yet the movie is itself bound up with tourist practices in a variety of ways. In this article, we are concerned with how such intertwining extends beyond `film tourism', conventionally conceived. In particular, we seek to elaborate the modification of the Maya Bay set(ting) for The Beach as part a broader process whereby `tropical environments' are staged in line with the `tourist gaze'. In this way, film viewing itself may be understood as a form of tourism — a kind of tropical flânerie which both reflects and constitutes a range of tourist practices in Thailand. Yet these practices extend beyond the western film viewer or would-be tourist, and include Thai environmental activists, Japanese Di Caprio fans and researchers such as ourselves. Including these groups helps us displace normative constructions of the gaze, and situates The Beach within an interpretive field that considers networks of influence rather than unidirectional representation.

Repackaging Orientalism: Discourses on Egypt and Turkey in British outbound tourism

Bryce, D. — 2007-11-06

This article analyses representations of Egypt and Turkey in brochures produced by tour operators for the British outbound packaged tourism market. It suggests that two specific `phases' of Orientalist discourse are deployed in promotional materials on the two destinations. Turkey reiterates the discursive division of western `reason and modernity' from eastern `stasis and passivity' while Egypt re-enacts the material intervention of Europeans to generate and articulate particular kinds of knowledge about the Orient. It suggests that it is not simply the material existence of the destinations, but the occupation of specific historically contingent positions of `sovereign subjectivity' from which to `know' them that is offered to tourists.

Can developing women produce primitive art?: And other questions of value, meaning and identity in the circulation of Janakpur art

Davis, C. V. — 2007-11-06

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal — objects collectors have called `Janakpur Art'. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art — shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s — occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women's lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at a `women's development project' seeking to empower its participants. And yet, the project's very successes threaten to displace the producers (and what they produce) from their perceived qualities/identities as `traditional' and `primitive,' thereby bringing into question the authenticity of the `art' they produce. The conundrum begs this question: can developing women produce primitive art?

Anthropology and ecotourism in European wetlands: Bubbles, babies and bathwater

Russell, A. — 2007-11-06

Recent literature, particularly in social anthropology, has focused on `bursting the bubble' of ecotourism, arguing that it has become a meaningless umbrella term for too many practices that are essentially `irresponsible' in their nature. This article proposes that, although scepticism is entirely appropriate, such arguments cannot be allowed to negate the value of ecotourism entirely. Based on research conducted in three European wetlands of marginal economic status in Greece, Lithuania and Romania, this article proposes a typology of models — of ecotourism, sustainable tourism, and responsible tourism — that helps to differentiate `practice' from `good practice'. The research highlights the importance of local people's discourse on ecotourism, which in this case was seen not only as an economic activity but as an aspirational moral virtue concerned with tidiness and maintaining the beauty of nature. Anthropology for ecotourism, which takes local people's views and opinions into account in the search for appropriate forms of tourism development that can transform people's lives and environments for the better, is as important as the anthropology of ecotourism.

A sense of tourism: new media and the dialectic of encapsulation/decapsulation

Jansson, A. — 2007-07-19

The efficiency and lightness of new media problematize the experiential division between being at home and going away. This article presents an approach for studying these conditions. The dialectic of encapsulation/decapsulation is introduced as a framework for understanding how the liminal (encapsulated) sense of tourism is always haunted by its double (decapsulation). It is also shown that the mediatized threat of decapsulation in itself generates certain ritual attitudes among tourists, as well as new strategies among travel organizers, for maintaining the sense of tourism. The article explores how technological potentials are either rejected or integrated among touristic practices as cultural forms.

More authentic than thou: Authenticity and othering in Fiji tourism discourse

White, C. M. — 2007-07-19

This article explores the ways that othering and differentiation in Fiji tourism discourse cater to international tourists' presumed quest for authenticity. In addition to tapping into western discursive practices differentiating Polynesian and Melanesian `primitivity', Fiji tourism promoters market their destination as a site to experience the `genuine friendliness' of indigenous Fijians as the native, `authentic other'. `Genuine', is about `real' friendliness which, as a qualifier, also becomes a subtle reference to what other `others' that are also the focus of a western tourist gaze are relatively not. This process of differentiating indigenous Fijians from alternative others occurs internationally as an implicit albeit significant theme in Fiji tourism. Yet, differentiation also occurs domestically as indigenous Fijians become specificated as the group more `touristically marked' in Fiji, particularly in relation to Fiji Indians, whose erasure from tourism imagery is consistent with the prevailing themes of Fiji tourism discourse.

`What a wonderful world!': On the `touristic ways of seeing', the knowledge and the politics of the `culture industries of otherness'

Favero, P. — 2007-07-19

Focusing on three ethnographic events (an Italian charter tour to Pakistan, a shopping event in a village replica in New Delhi and a festival of culture and travel in Italy) this article looks into the contemporary `culture industries of otherness' that is, those commercial events promoting knowledge about the world in its diversity. Criss-crossing visual anthropology, tourism anthropology and scholarly work on the politics of multi-culturalism the article will introduce the notion of the `touristic ways of seeing'. As modalities for contemplating cultural difference in the contemporary globalized habitats of the world such ways of seeing are connected to wider representational practices linked to the consumption of films, television and advertisement. Through their `form', they present us a world knowable by seeing and enjoying it. Yet, as I will discuss at the end of the article, this knowledge hides questions of production, power and politics and thus appears counterproductive to the creation of dialogue across cultural borders.

Stalking the cannibals: photographic behaviour on the Sepik River

Palmer, C., Lester, J.-A. — 2007-07-19

Outwardly Dennis O'Rourke's film, Cannibal Tours, is just another travel documentary, but to categorize it thus is to misunderstand its significance. `Straight' readings of the film present it as an example of the negative impacts of tourism or as a commentary on touristic encounters with the exotic. We part company from such readings because they largely ignore the filmmaker's art, the role of O'Rourke in constructing the film's narrative. O'Rourke employs the ubiquitous camera to present his critique of a western mindset that continues to be fascinated by the primitive Other. Our discussion focuses on both the filmmaker's art and the lure of the primitive as an oneiric exercise for western tourists. Specifically, we explore the role of the camera in constructing the relationship between modernity and the pre-modern Other. Overall, then, this discussion represents a journey through the mind of O'Rourke, a journey into his framing of tourism.