Tourism as a Moment of Being

Tourism-related research, despite the great number of books and studies, seems to face one of its worst epistemological crises. At some extent, scholars have serious difficulties to define what tourism means. Though anthropology was the discipline more prone to tourism, as it is, a rite of passage, the current state of indiscipline claimed by Tribe, de Escalona and Korstanje as well as the autonomy of an international academy is more oriented to marketing than to science, are some of the problems tourism research faces today (Tribe, 1997, 2010; Korstanje, 2010; de Escalona, 2015). In this difficult context, Nogues Pedregal provides readers with a masterful ethnography which serves to interpret, understand and decipher the shifts over territory once tourism is adapted as a main activity. Though a lot has been written on the effects of tourism, this seminal book describes with accuracy how these transformations are gradually happening.

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.

2017

abstract This paper reconsiders the role of tourism imaginaries which have emerged as a dominant paradigm in the study of tourism in recent years. The work examines the way in which they are seen as structuring devices for the enactment of touristic practices and argues that such an approach continues to facilitate the schism which erupted between the imagination and the world of the real wrought by the Enlightenment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork involving periods of participant observation on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, the paper demonstrates that not all of tourists' experiences can be pre-imagined and, drawing on phenomenological and existential perspectives in anthropology, goes on to argue that understandings of touristic practices emerge in the doing and being of tourism.

Tourism is a social phenomenon that encompasses, invades, and connects all 13 spheres of social life, creating a specific narrative that gives meaning to the prac- 14 tices of what ‘‘being tourist’’ signifies. If mobilities and migrations are interpreted 15 as universal vehicles for emancipation that historically transcended the boundaries 16 of nations, there is no reason to think tourism is less important. For that reason, 17 the study of tourism merits inter-disciplinary endeavors with the end of under- 18 standing to what extent agency and structure connects. Throughout this work, 19 Margarita Barreto introduces readers to an all-encompassing framework of the 20 potentials, risks, and limitations in viewing tourism as a scientific discipline. This 21 edited book consists of six well-written chapters by different authors (Alejandro 22 Otamendi, Marcela Paz-Herrera, German Pinque, Ana Marı´a Costa-Beber, Raque 23 Lunardi, Patricia Torres-Fernandez, and Fabian Flores). The project was inspired 24 after the IX Argentine Conference of Social Anthropology (CAAS) held in 2008 25 at the National University of Misiones, Argentina. The main topic of this event 26 has been the epistemological boundaries of anthropology and tourism. What is 27 remarkable in the high-quality of this book is the fact no financial support was gi- 28 ven to Barreto and her collaborators. To be more precise, the experience of this 29 event left more than expected, and the different selected manuscripts were com- 30 piled into a coherent work thanks to individual efforts of authors.

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.

Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2012

To consume tourism is to consume experiences. An understanding of the ways in which tourists experience the places and people they visit is therefore fundamental to the study of the consumption of tourism. Consequently, it is not surprising that attention has long been paid in the tourism literature to particular perspectives on the tourist experience, including demand factors, tourist motivation, typologies of tourists and issues related to authenticity, commodification, image and perception. However, as tourism has continued to expand in both scale and scope, and as tourists’ needs and expectations have become more diverse and complex in response to transformations in the dynamic socio-cultural world of tourism, so too have tourist experiences.Tourist Experience provides a focused analysis into tourist experiences that reflect their ever-increasing diversity and complexity, and their significance and meaning to tourists themselves. Written by leading international scholars, it offers new insights into emergent behaviours, motivations and sought meanings on the part of tourists based on five contemporary themes determined by current research activity in tourism experience: dark tourism experiences, experiencing poor places, sport tourism experiences, writing the tourist experience and researching tourist experiences: methodological approaches.The book critically explores these experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives and includes case studies from a wide range of geographical regions. By analyzing these contemporary tourist experiences, the book will provide further understanding of the consumption of tourism. FULL TEXT - http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/phmz4up3Pvb2YSxJYDkM/full

2017

Much of the existing literature seeks to make sense of tourism based on singular approaches such as visuality, identity, mobility, performance and globalised consumption. What is missing, however, is an overarching framework within which these valuable approaches can be located. This book offers one such framework using the concept of dwelling taken from Heidegger and Ingold as the starting point from which to consider the interrelatedness of being, dwelling and tourism. The anthropological focus at the core of the book is infused with multidisciplinary perspectives that draw on a variety of subjects including philosophy, material cultural studies and cultural geography. The main themes include sensuous, material, architectural and earthly dwelling and each chapter features a discussion of the unifying theoretical framework for each theme, followed by an illustrative focus on specific aspects of tourism. This theoretically substantive book will be of interest to anyone involved with tourism research from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, leisure studies and tourist studies.

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’.