Anthropology of Tourism

This Module introduces students to the field of anthropological tourism research. It gives an overview of tourism as a global phenomenon with historical dimensions, as well as illuminating the specific relationships, experiences, and identities that are fostered in tourism contexts.

This Module introduces students to the field of anthropological tourism research. It gives an overview of tourism as a global phenomenon with historical dimensions, as well as illuminating the specific relationships, experiences, and identities that are fostered in tourism contexts. The students are familiarised with critical and constructive perspectives on tourism, discussing it with regards to social inequality, cultural change, and ecological sustainability. A key concern of the course is to closely look at the encounters and identities that tourism contexts afford, as well as at the affects, imaginations, and narratives that individuals co-create and circulate through their participation in transnational tourism mobility, tourism cultures, tourism politics and economies of tourism. The course further links up tourism anthropology to other areas of anthropological interest – the ritual, kinship, home, magic, memory, place-making, post-socialism and post-colonialism. We will also consider the tourist as a key figure in post-modern thought. As part of the module we also discuss the similarities between the tourist and the ethnographer and look at methodologies of researching tourism anthropologically.

Semestral Program:

WEEKS 1-2: THE HISTORY OF TOURISM OR TOURISM HISTORIES?

i. The History of Tourism: The Western-Centric Tourism Narrative

ii. Multiple Tourisms a) Tourism in Socialist Europe

iii. Multiple Tourisms b) Egypt as Crossroads of Tourisms

WEEKS 3: CLASSIC TOURISM THEORIES AND CRITIQUES OF TOURISM:

i. The tourist as a protagonist of Western modernity and its pitfalls

ii. Zygmunt Bauman: Tourist-Vagabond

iii. Dean MacCannell: Staged Authenticity

iv. John Urry: The Tourist Gaze

WEEK 4: HOSPITALITY IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND TOURISM

i. Rethinking Hospitality as a key concept in Anthropology

ii. Tourism as an intersection of different ideas and practices of hospitality: Couch-Surfing in Morocco, Xenophilia in Greece

iii. Host and guest: How valid are these concepts as categories in tourism?

iv. Blurring the boundaries between hosts and guests: Second Home owners in the Masurian Lake District

Week 5: TOURISM, PILGRIMAGE AND THE SACRED JOURNEY

i. Social Time between Sacred and Profane: Tourism as transformative realm

ii. Structural intersections between tourism and pilgrimage, Tourism as rites-of-passage

iii. Israeli Youth Voyages to Poland, Taiwanese Pilgrimage to Japan

iv. Critiques: Tourism as a space for transformation - but for whom?

WEEK 6: PLAY, EMBODIED LEARNING AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONVIVIALITY

i. Tourism as space for embodied learning, play and conviviality

ii. Learning nature, race, tourism and localness in Belize

iii. Entangled memories, materialies and tourism mobilities: Knitting mittens

iv. Tourism conviviality with post-mining landscapes: Svalbard

v. The Anthropocene as the age of re-learning conviviality?

WEEK 7: ADAPTATIONS, RESILIENCE, RIGHTS: THE LABOUR OF TOURISM

i. Biography of a skilled tourism worker in Bulgaria

ii. TOURGUIDING?

iii. Sex Tourism in Bahia and their workers association

iv. COVID-19 and resilience of Southeast Asian tourism workers

v. Non-human labour

vi. FIELD PRACTICE: INTERVIEW

WEEK 8: CULTURAL PERFORMANCES IN TOURISM: COMMODITIZATION OF CULTURE?

i. Commodification of culture and (staged) authenticity: justified critiques?

ii. Festivals in Malta, Basque Country, and Bali

iii. Alternative perspectives on cultural performances in tourism

WEEK 9: MOVING IMAGINARIES OF OTHER (AND SELF)

i. tourism as a space of moving ideas and images about the other

ii. living under “the tourist gaze”/ consumed places

iii. Orientalism and reverse orientalism

iv. Looking back and methodological symmetry

v. TOURISTS

WEEK 10: NEGOTIATING THE TOURISM ENCOUNTER

i. Tourism and friendship in Cuba

ii. Class and domestic Tourism Encounter in Poland

iii. Colonial Encounter in Turkey: Hazel Tucker

WEEK 11-12: (IM)MOBILITIES, IMPERIALISMS, INTERSECTIONS?

i. Tourism as Imperialism

ii. (Post-)Colonialism in Tourism

iii. Understanding tourism at the intersection of (im)mobilities

iv. Anthropology and Tourists

v. Shared mobilities & Solidarity

WEEK 13: AFFECTIVE INTERSECTIONS OF TOURISM, MEMORY, (BE)LONGING

i. Place replace: Experiences in Malta

ii. Genealogical Tourism in Scotland

iii. Post-Nakba Tourism in Palestine

iv. German Heimweh-Tourism

v. Jewish Poland Revisited

WEEK 14: TOURISM AND/AS ACTIVISM AND MORAL ENDEAVOUR

i. Favela Tours

ii. Toxicity Tours

iii. Nuremberg Rally Grounds

iv. Voluntourism

v. Tibetan Refugees

WEEK 15: TOURISM FUTURES – SPECULATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE FIELD OF TOURISM

General Introductions to Tourism Anthropology:

- Abram, Simon, Jacqueline Waldren, Donald Macleod, 1997, Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places, Oxford.

- Coleman, Mike and Mike Crang, 2002, Tourism: between Place and Performance, New York.

- Graburn, Nelson and Naomi Leite, 2009, Anthropological Interventions in Tourism Studies In Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies, ed. Robinson, Mike and Tazim Jamal, p. 35-64.

- Leite, Naomi and Kathleen Adams (ed.), 2019, The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility, and Society), Oxford.

- Scott, Julie and Tom Selwyn, 2010, Thinking through Tourism, Oxford, New York.

- Smith, Valene D., 1978, Hosts and guests. The Anthropology of Tourism, Oxford.

Weekly Literature (selection subject to change by the lecturer):

- Badone, Ellen and Sharon D. Roseman (ed.), 2004 Intersecting Journeys. The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, Chicago.

- Boissevain, Jeremy, 1996 Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism, Bristol. Banaszkiewicz, Magdalena, Sabina Owsianowska and Nelson Graburn (ed.), 2016 Tourism in Post-socialist Europe, “Journal for Tourism and Cultural Change”, 15(2), Special Issue.

- Bruner, Edward, 2005, Culture on Tour. Ethnographies of Travel, Chicago.

- Hall, Michael and Tucker, Hazel (ed.), 2004 Tourism and Postcolonialism, London.

- Picard, David, and Mike Robinson, 2016 The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists, and Photography, London.

- Koenker, Diane P., 2013 Club Red. Vacation, Travel and the Soviet Dream, Ithaca, London.

- Löfgren, Orvar, 1999 On Holiday. A History of Vacationing, Berkeley.

- Picard, David and Michael Di Giovine, 2014 Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference, Bristol.

- Picard, David, and Mike Robinson, 2012, 2016, Emotion in Motion. Tourism, Affect and Transformation, Routledge.

- Picard, David, and Mike Robinson, 2006 Festivals, Tourism, and Social Change Remaking the World, Bristol.

- Salazar, Noel and Nelson Graburn, 2014 Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches, New York.

- Buchberger, Sonja, und Picard, David, 2014 Couchsurfing Cosmopolitanisms: Can Tourism Make a better World? Bielefeld.

- Skinner, Jonathan and Dimitrious Theodossopoulos, 2011 Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism, New York.

- Frenzel, Fabian, 2016 Slumming it. The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty, London.

Ethnographies (selection following student choice)

- Babb, Florence E. 2011 The Tourism Encounter. Fashioning Latin American Nations & Histories, Stanford.

- Bloch, Natalia, 2018, Bliscy nieznajomi. Turystyka i przezwyciężanie podporządkowania w postkolonialnych Indiach, Poznan. [Close Strangers. Tourism and the overcoming of subordination in postcolonial India]

- Edensor, Tim, 2008 Tourists at the Taj. Performance and Meaning at a Symbolic Site, London.

- Feldman, Jackie, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag. Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity, New York, Oxford.

- Lehrer, Erica T., 2013 Jewish Poland Revisited. Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places, Bloomington.

- Ghodsee, Kristen, 2005 The Red Riviera. Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham, London.

- Picard, David, 2011 Tourism, Magic, and Modernity. Cultivating the Human Garden, Bristol.

- Picard, Michael, 1996 Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, Bali.

- Simoni, Valerio, 2016, Tourism and Informal Encounters in Cuba, London.Speier, Amy, 2016 Fertility Holidays, IVF Tourism and the Reproduction of

- Whiteness, New York.

- Tucker, Hazel, 2003 Living With Tourism: Negotiating Identities in a Turkish Village, London.

o Will be familiar the large debates of Tourism Anthropology; ability to voice oral and written opinions within these debates and its critical, analytical and constructive strands.

o Knows the specificity of anthropological approaches to tourism in comparison to those of other social sciences and the humanities.

o Be able to choose appropriate research methods to conduct anthropological studies on tourism-related phenomena

o Understand and value tourism as an self-standing domain for generating anthropological knowledge about human ontologies and epistemologies

o Has a knowledge of a range of ethnographic field studies on tourism matters and is able to use them for making academic arguments.

o understand tourism as a historically grown field of complex transnational social, economic and political relationships; a space in which human desires, imaginations and emotions are produced; a site of cultural performances and experiences of human-and non-human conviviality; a part of the global intersection of (im)mobilities

o will be ready to knowledgeably and confidently engage in and contribute to discussions that address tourism with reference to current crises (pandemic, war) and global long-term challenges (climate emergency, global mobility inequalities, armed conflicts)

Reading diary, weekly assignments, class participation, final essay