Thinking Through Tourism

Description

The study of tourism has made key contributions to the study of Anthropology. This volume defines the current state of the Anthropology of Tourism, examining political, economic, ideological and symbolic themes. An extraordinarily rich collection of case studies illustrate topics as diverse as hospitality, sex and tourism, enchantment, colonial and neo-colonial consumption, the relation between tourism and gender and ethnic boundaries, as well as questions of global, economic and cultural systems, modernism and nationalism. The book also covers practical and policy issues relating to urban, rural and coastal planning and development. Thinking Through Tourism assesses the enormous potential contribution that analysis of tourism can offer to mainstream anthropological thinking. The volume opens up new avenues for enquiry and is an essential resource for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, tourism, sociology and related disciplines.

Julie Scott is Senior Research Fellow in Culture, Tourism and Development at London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan University. Tom Selwyn is Professor of the Anthropology of Tourism, London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan University.

This volume proves anthropology's engagement with tourism can lead to more than a marriage of convenience. Tourism challenges ethnographers by requiring them to deal with porous culture boundaries, multiple bodies in motion, hybridity, and complex new forms of reflexivity in "tradition," "ritual," and "identity." The reports assembled here more than meet these tests. It is a pleasure to encounter anthropology's classic concepts and methods retooled and newly relevant for understanding our changing world. * Dean MacCannell, Environmental Design & Landscape Architecture, University of California, Davis * This collection provides new insights into how tourist space is contested and controlled, how sexualised bodies are displayed in the everyday, how the tourists' national identity is constructed in tourist settings, and how anthropological interventions disrupt the purely academic. An altogether marvelous volume and an important addition to tourism studies. * Edward M. Bruner, author of Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, 2005 * Thinking Through Tourism is a smart and important collection, as even the double entendre of the title suggests. It shows that there are still original contributions to make on the subject of tourism, and it invites us once more to think anthropologically, which means to think holistically and relativistically. * Anthropology Review Database * ... this volume offers a very good starting point for people wanting to know more about how contemporary anthropologists are studying a complex phenomenon the discipline in general has ignored for all too long. * Anthropological Forum: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology *