(UN)DOING TOURISM ANTHROPOLOGY: OUTLINE OF A FIELD OF PRACTICE
(UN)DOING TOURISM ANTHROPOLOGY: OUTLINE OF A FIELD OF PRACTICE

Summary/Abstract: The idea of ‘doing’ tourism anthropology is one that prompts reflection on a number of issues, not least those that invite us to consider the merits of its negation: of ‘undoing’ some of the shibboleths that have attached themselves to the subject area. Accordingly, in this paper we argue that 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/aligns the anthropology of tourism from/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. (Un)doing tourism anthropology also entails a process of ‘undoing’ the tourist: of paying greater recognition to the ways in which tourism mobilities converge, overlap, or rub up against 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’.

• Details
• Contents